Want to Brainstorm New Ideas? Then Limit Your Online Connections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Lohr in the New York Times: “The digitally connected life is both invaluable and inevitable.

Anyone who has the slightest doubt need only walk down the sidewalk of any city street filled with people checking their smartphones for text messages, tweets, news alerts or weather reports or any number of things. So glued to their screens, they run into people or create pedestrian traffic jams.

Just when all the connectedness is useful and when it’s not is often difficult to say. But a recent research paper, published on the Social Science Research Network, titled “Facts and Figuring,” sheds some light on that question.

The research involved customizing a Pentagon lab program for measuring collaboration and information-sharing — a whodunit game, in which the subjects sitting at computers search for clues and solutions to figure out the who, what, when and where of a hypothetical terrorist attack.

The 417 subjects, played more than 1,100 rounds of the 25-minute web-based game, and they were mostly students from the Boston area, selected from the pool of volunteers in the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory and Harvard Business School’s Computer Lab for Experimental Research.

They could share clues and solutions. But the study was designed to measure the results from different network structures — densely clustered networks and unclustered networks of communication. Problem solving, the researchers write, involves “both search for information and search for solutions.” They found that “clustering promotes exploration in information space, but decreases exploration in solution space.”

In looking for unique facts or clues, clustering helped since members of the dense communications networks effectively split up the work and redundant facts were quickly weeded out, making them five percent more efficient. But the number of unique theories or solutions was 17.5 percent higher among subjects who were not densely connected. Clustering reduced the diversity of ideas.

The research paper, said Jesse Shore, a co-author and assistant professor at the Boston University School of Management, contributes to “the growing awareness that being connected all the time has costs. And we put a number to it, in an experimental setting.”

The research, of course, also showed where the connection paid off — finding information, the vital first step in decision making. “There are huge, huge benefits to information sharing,” said Ethan Bernstein, a co-author and assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. “But the costs are harder to measure.”…

The Fundamentals of Online Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White paper by Granicus.com: “Open government is about building transparency, trust, and engagement with the public. Today, with 80% of the North American public on the Internet, it is becoming increasingly clear that building open government starts online. Transparency 2.0 not only provides public information, but also develops civic engagement, opens the decision-making process online, and takes advantage of today’s technology trends.
This paper provides principles and practices of Transparency 2.0. It also outlines 12 fundamentals of online open government that have been proven across more than 1,000 government agencies throughout North America.
Here are some of the key issues covered:

  • Defining open government’s role with technology
  • Enhancing dialog between citizen and government
  • Architectures and connectivity of public data
  • Opening the decision-making workflow”

Urban Analytics (Updated and Expanded)

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. In this edition, we explore the literature on Urban Analytics. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email [email protected].

Data and its uses for Governance

Urban Analytics places better information in the hands of citizens as well as government officials to empower people to make more informed choices. Today, we are able to gather real-time information about traffic, pollution, noise, and environmental and safety conditions by culling data from a range of tools: from the low-cost sensors in mobile phones to more robust monitoring tools installed in our environment. With data collected and combined from the built, natural and human environments, we can develop more robust predictive models and use those models to make policy smarter.

With the computing power to transmit and store the data from these sensors, and the tools to translate raw data into meaningful visualizations, we can identify problems as they happen, design new strategies for city management, and target the application of scarce resources where they are most needed.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Amini, L., E. Bouillet, F. Calabrese, L. Gasparini, and O. Verscheure. “Challenges and Results in City-scale Sensing.” In IEEE Sensors, 59–61, 2011. http://bit.ly/1doodZm.

  • This paper examines “how city requirements map to research challenges in machine learning, optimization, control, visualization, and semantic analysis.”
  • The authors raises several research challenges including how to extract accurate information when the data is noisy and sparse; how to represent findings from digital pervasive technologies; and how people interact with one another and their environment.

Batty, M., K. W. Axhausen, F. Giannotti, A. Pozdnoukhov, A. Bazzani, M. Wachowicz, G. Ouzounis, and Y. Portugali. “Smart Cities of the Future.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (November 1, 2012): 481–518. http://bit.ly/HefbjZ.

  • This paper explores the goals and research challenges involved in the development of smart cities that merge ICT with traditional infrastructures through digital technologies.
  • The authors put forth several research objectives, including: 1) to explore the notion of the city as a laboratory for innovation; 2) to develop technologies that ensure equity, fairness and realize a better quality of city life; and 3) to develop technologies that ensure informed participation and create shared knowledge for democratic city governance.
  • The paper also examines several contemporary smart city initiatives, expected paradigm shifts in the field, benefits, risks and impacts.

Budde, Paul. “Smart Cities of Tomorrow.” In Cities for Smart Environmental and Energy Futures, edited by Stamatina Th Rassia and Panos M. Pardalos, 9–20. Energy Systems. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2014. http://bit.ly/17MqPZW.

  • This paper examines the components and strategies involved in the creation of smart cities featuring “cohesive and open telecommunication and software architecture.”
  • In their study of smart cities, the authors examine smart and renewable energy; next-generation networks; smart buildings; smart transport; and smart government.
  • They conclude that for the development of smart cities, information and communication technology (ICT) is needed to build more horizontal collaborative structures, useful data must be analyzed in real time and people and/or machines must be able to make instant decisions related to social and urban life.

Cardone, G., L. Foschini, P. Bellavista, A. Corradi, C. Borcea, M. Talasila, and R. Curtmola. “Fostering Participaction in Smart Cities: a Geo-social Crowdsensing Platform.” IEEE Communications
Magazine 51, no. 6 (2013): 112–119. http://bit.ly/17iJ0vZ.

  • This article examines “how and to what extent the power of collective although imprecise intelligence can be employed in smart cities.”
  • To tackle problems of managing the crowdsensing process, this article proposes a “crowdsensing platform with three main original technical aspects: an innovative geo-social model to profile users along different variables, such as time, location, social interaction, service usage, and human activities; a matching algorithm to autonomously choose people to involve in participActions and to quantify the performance of their sensing; and a new Android-based platform to collect sensing data from smart phones, automatically or with user help, and to deliver sensing/actuation tasks to users.”

Chen, Chien-Chu. “The Trend towards ‘Smart Cities.’” International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology. June 1, 2014. http://bit.ly/1jOOaAg.

  • In this study, Chen explores the ambitions, prevalence and outcomes of a variety of smart cities, organized into five categories:
    • Transportation-focused smart cities
    • Energy-focused smart cities
    • Building-focused smart cities
    • Water-resources-focused smart cities
    • Governance-focused smart cities
  • The study finds that the “Asia Pacific region accounts for the largest share of all smart city development plans worldwide, with 51% of the global total. Smart city development plans in the Asia Pacific region tend to be energy-focused smart city initiatives, aimed at easing the pressure on energy resources that will be caused by continuing rapid urbanization in the future.”
  • North America, on the other hand is generally more geared toward energy-focused smart city development plans. “In North America, there has been a major drive to introduce smart meters and smart electric power grids, integrating the electric power sector with information and communications technology (ICT) and replacing obsolete electric power infrastructure, so as to make cities’ electric power systems more reliable (which in turn can help to boost private-sector investment, stimulate the growth of the ‘green energy’ industry, and create more job opportunities).”
  • Looking to Taiwan as an example, Chen argues that, “Cities in different parts of the world face different problems and challenges when it comes to urban development, making it necessary to utilize technology applications from different fields to solve the unique problems that each individual city has to overcome; the emphasis here is on the development of customized solutions for smart city development.”

Domingo, A., B. Bellalta, M. Palacin, M. Oliver and E. Almirall. “Public Open Sensor Data: Revolutionizing Smart Cities.” Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE 32, No. 4. Winter 2013. http://bit.ly/1iH6ekU.

  • In this article, the authors explore the “enormous amount of information collected by sensor devices” that allows for “the automation of several real-time services to improve city management by using intelligent traffic-light patterns during rush hour, reducing water consumption in parks, or efficiently routing garbage collection trucks throughout the city.”
  • They argue that, “To achieve the goal of sharing and open data to the public, some technical expertise on the part of citizens will be required. A real environment – or platform – will be needed to achieve this goal.” They go on to introduce a variety of “technical challenges and considerations involved in building an Open Sensor Data platform,” including:
    • Scalability
    • Reliability
    • Low latency
    • Standardized formats
    • Standardized connectivity
  • The authors conclude that, despite incredible advancements in urban analytics and open sensing in recent years, “Today, we can only imagine the revolution in Open Data as an introduction to a real-time world mashup with temperature, humidity, CO2 emission, transport, tourism attractions, events, water and gas consumption, politics decisions, emergencies, etc., and all of this interacting with us to help improve the future decisions we make in our public and private lives.”

Harrison, C., B. Eckman, R. Hamilton, P. Hartswick, J. Kalagnanam, J. Paraszczak, and P. Williams. “Foundations for Smarter Cities.” IBM Journal of Research and Development 54, no. 4 (2010): 1–16. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This paper describes the information technology (IT) foundation and principles for Smarter Cities.
  • The authors introduce three foundational concepts of smarter cities: instrumented, interconnected and intelligent.
  • They also describe some of the major needs of contemporary cities, and concludes that Creating the Smarter City implies capturing and accelerating flows of information both vertically and horizontally.

Hernández-Muñoz, José M., Jesús Bernat Vercher, Luis Muñoz, José A. Galache, Mirko Presser, Luis A. Hernández Gómez, and Jan Pettersson. “Smart Cities at the Forefront of the Future Internet.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 447–462. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/HhNbMX.

  • This paper explores how the “Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Services (IoS), can become building blocks to progress towards a unified urban-scale ICT platform transforming a Smart City into an open innovation platform.”
  • The authors examine the SmartSantander project to argue that, “the different stakeholders involved in the smart city business is so big that many non-technical constraints must be considered (users, public administrations, vendors, etc.).”
  • The authors also discuss the need for infrastructures at the, for instance, European level for realistic large-scale experimentally-driven research.

Hoon-Lee, Jung, Marguerite Gong Hancock, Mei-Chih Hu. “Towards an effective framework for building smart cities: Lessons from Seoul and San Francisco.” Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Ocotober 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1rzID5v.

  • In this study, the authors aim to “shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature.”
  • They propose a conceptual framework based on case studies from Seoul and San Francisco built around the following dimensions:
    • Urban openness
    • Service innovation
    • Partnerships formation
    • Urban proactiveness
    • Smart city infrastructure integration
    • Smart city governance
  • The authors conclude with a summary of research findings featuring “8 stylized facts”:
    • Movement towards more interactive services engaging citizens;
    • Open data movement facilitates open innovation;
    • Diversifying service development: exploit or explore?
    • How to accelerate adoption: top-down public driven vs. bottom-up market driven partnerships;
    • Advanced intelligent technology supports new value-added smart city services;
    • Smart city services combined with robust incentive systems empower engagement;
    • Multiple device & network accessibility can create network effects for smart city services;
    • Centralized leadership implementing a comprehensive strategy boosts smart initiatives.

Kamel Boulos, Maged N. and Najeeb M. Al-Shorbaji. “On the Internet of Things, smart cities and the WHO Healthy Cities.” International Journal of Health Geographics 13, No. 10. 2014. http://bit.ly/Tkt9GA.

  • In this article, the authors give a “brief overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) for cities, offering examples of IoT-powered 21st century smart cities, including the experience of the Spanish city of Barcelona in implementing its own IoT-driven services to improve the quality of life of its people through measures that promote an eco-friendly, sustainable environment.”
  • The authors argue that one of the central needs for harnessing the power of the IoT and urban analytics is for cities to “involve and engage its stakeholders from a very early stage (city officials at all levels, as well as citizens), and to secure their support by raising awareness and educating them about smart city technologies, the associated benefits, and the likely challenges that will need to be overcome (such as privacy issues).”
  • They conclude that, “The Internet of Things is rapidly gaining a central place as key enabler of the smarter cities of today and the future. Such cities also stand better chances of becoming healthier cities.”

Keller, Sallie Ann, Steven E. Koonin, and Stephanie Shipp. “Big Data and City Living – What Can It Do for Us?” Significance 9, no. 4 (2012): 4–7. http://bit.ly/166W3NP.

  • This article provides a short introduction to Big Data, its importance, and the ways in which it is transforming cities. After an overview of the social benefits of big data in an urban context, the article examines its challenges, such as privacy concerns and institutional barriers.
  • The authors recommend that new approaches to making data available for research are needed that do not violate the privacy of entities included in the datasets. They believe that balancing privacy and accessibility issues will require new government regulations and incentives.

Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, July 3, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aamZj2.

  • This paper focuses on “how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’ which enable real-time analysis of city life, new modes of technocratic urban governance, and a re-imagining of cities.”
  • The authors provide “a number of projects that seek to produce a real-time analysis of the city and provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism.”

Mostashari, A., F. Arnold, M. Maurer, and J. Wade. “Citizens as Sensors: The Cognitive City Paradigm.” In 2011 8th International Conference Expo on Emerging Technologies for a Smarter World (CEWIT), 1–5, 2011. http://bit.ly/1fYe9an.

  • This paper argues that. “implementing sensor networks are a necessary but not sufficient approach to improving urban living.”
  • The authors introduce the concept of the “Cognitive City” – a city that can not only operate more efficiently due to networked architecture, but can also learn to improve its service conditions, by planning, deciding and acting on perceived conditions.
  • Based on this conceptualization of a smart city as a cognitive city, the authors propose “an architectural process approach that allows city decision-makers and service providers to integrate cognition into urban processes.”

Oliver, M., M. Palacin, A. Domingo, and V. Valls. “Sensor Information Fueling Open Data.” In Computer Software and Applications Conference Workshops (COMPSACW), 2012 IEEE 36th Annual, 116–121, 2012. http://bit.ly/HjV4jS.

  • This paper introduces the concept of sensor networks as a key component in the smart cities framework, and shows how real-time data provided by different city network sensors enrich Open Data portals and require a new architecture to deal with massive amounts of continuously flowing information.
  • The authors’ main conclusion is that by providing a framework to build new applications and services using public static and dynamic data that promote innovation, a real-time open sensor network data platform can have several positive effects for citizens.

Perera, Charith, Arkady Zaslavsky, Peter Christen and Dimitrios Georgakopoulos. “Sensing as a service model for smart cities supported by Internet of Things.” Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 25, Issue 1. January 2014. http://bit.ly/1qJLDP9.

  • This paper looks into the “enormous pressure towards efficient city management” that has “triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in information and communication technologies to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues.”
  • The authors explore the parallel advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), which “envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities.”
  • The paper proposes the sensing as a service model “as a solution based on IoT infrastructure.” The sensing as a service model consists of four conceptual layers: “(i) sensors and sensor owners; (ii) sensor publishers (SPs); (iii) extended service providers (ESPs); and (iv) sensor data consumers. They go on to describe how this model would work in the areas of waste management, smart agriculture and environmental management.

Privacy, Big Data, and the Public Good: Frameworks for Engagement. Edited by Julia Lane, Victoria Stodden, Stefan Bender, and Helen Nissenbaum; Cambridge University Press, 2014. http://bit.ly/UoGRca.

  • This book focuses on the legal, practical, and statistical approaches for maximizing the use of massive datasets while minimizing information risk.
  • “Big data” is more than a straightforward change in technology.  It poses deep challenges to our traditions of notice and consent as tools for managing privacy.  Because our new tools of data science can make it all but impossible to guarantee anonymity in the future, the authors question whether it possible to truly give informed consent, when we cannot, by definition, know what the risks are from revealing personal data either for individuals or for society as a whole.
  • Based on their experience building large data collections, authors discuss some of the best practical ways to provide access while protecting confidentiality.  What have we learned about effective engineered controls?  About effective access policies?  About designing data systems that reinforce – rather than counter – access policies?  They also explore the business, legal, and technical standards necessary for a new deal on data.
  • Since the data generating process or the data collection process is not necessarily well understood for big data streams, authors discuss what statistics can tell us about how to make greatest scientific use of this data. They also explore the shortcomings of current disclosure limitation approaches and whether we can quantify the extent of privacy loss.

Schaffers, Hans, Nicos Komninos, Marc Pallot, Brigitte Trousse, Michael Nilsson, and Alvaro Oliveira. “Smart Cities and the Future Internet: Towards Cooperation Frameworks for Open Innovation.” In The Future Internet, edited by John Domingue, Alex Galis, Anastasius Gavras, Theodore Zahariadis, Dave Lambert, Frances Cleary, Petros Daras, et al., 431–446. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 6656. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2011. http://bit.ly/16ytKoT.

  • This paper “explores ‘smart cities’ as environments of open and user-driven innovation for experimenting and validating Future Internet-enabled services.”
  • The authors examine several smart city projects to illustrate the central role of users in defining smart services and the importance of participation. They argue that, “Two different layers of collaboration can be distinguished. The first layer is collaboration within the innovation process. The second layer concerns collaboration at the territorial level, driven by urban and regional development policies aiming at strengthening the urban innovation systems through creating effective conditions for sustainable innovation.”

Suciu, G., A. Vulpe, S. Halunga, O. Fratu, G. Todoran, and V. Suciu. “Smart Cities Built on Resilient Cloud Computing and Secure Internet of Things.” In 2013 19th International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS), 513–518, 2013. http://bit.ly/16wfNgv.

  • This paper proposes “a new platform for using cloud computing capacities for provision and support of ubiquitous connectivity and real-time applications and services for smart cities’ needs.”
  • The authors present a “framework for data procured from highly distributed, heterogeneous, decentralized, real and virtual devices (sensors, actuators, smart devices) that can be automatically managed, analyzed and controlled by distributed cloud-based services.”

Townsend, Anthony. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure, but how citizens use these ever-changing technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient.”

To stay current on recent writings and developments on Urban Analytics, please subscribe to the GovLab Digest.
Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to [email protected] or in the comments below.

Open Governments, Open Data: A New Lever for Transparency, Citizen Engagement, and Economic Growth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to principles that include releasing government data as open data—that is, free public data in forms that can be readily used. Hundreds of businesses are using open data to create jobs and build economic value. Up to now, however, most of this activity has taken place in developed countries, with the United States and United Kingdom in the lead. The use of open data faces more obstacles in developing countries, but has growing promise there, as well.”

We Need a Citizen Maker Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lorelei Kelly at the Huffington Post: “It was hard to miss the giant mechanical giraffe grazing on the White House lawn last week. For the first time ever, the President organized a Maker Faire–inviting entrepreneurs and inventors from across the USA to celebrate American ingenuity in the service of economic progress.
The maker movement is a California original. Think R2D2 serving margaritas to a jester with an LED news scroll. The #nationofmakers Twitter feed has dozens of examples of collaborative production, of making, sharing and learning.
But since this was the White House, I still had to ask myself, what would the maker movement be if the economy was not the starting point? What if it was about civics? What if makers decided to create a modern, hands-on democracy?
What is democracy anyway but a never ending remix of new prototypes? Last week’s White House Maker Faire heralded a new economic bonanza. This revolution’s poster child is 3-D printing– decentralized fabrication that is customized to meet local needs. On the government front, new design rules for democracy are already happening in communities, where civics and technology have generated a front line of maker cities.
But the distance between California’s tech capacity and DC does seem 3000 miles wide. The NSA’s over collection/surveillance problem and Healthcare.gov’s doomed rollout are part of the same system-wide capacity deficit. How do we close the gap between California’s revolution and our institutions?

  • In California, disruption is a business plan. In DC, it’s a national security threat.
  • In California, hackers are artists. In DC, they are often viewed as criminals.
  • In California, “cyber” is a dystopian science fiction word. In DC, cyber security is in a dozen oversight plans for Congress.
  • in California, individuals are encouraged to “fail forward.” In DC, risk-aversion is bipartisan.

Scaling big problems with local solutions is a maker specialty. Government policymaking needs this kind of help.
Here’s the issue our nation is facing: The inability of the non-military side of our public institutions to process complex problems. Today, this competence and especially the capacity to solve technical challenges often exist only in the private sector. If something is urgent and can’t be monetized, it becomes a national security problem. Which increasingly means that critical decision making that should be in the civilian remit instead migrates to the military. Look at our foreign policy. Good government is a counter terrorism strategy in Afghanistan. Decades of civilian inaction on climate change means that now Miami is referred to as a battle space in policy conversations.
This rhetoric reflects an understandable but unacceptable disconnect for any democracy.
To make matters more confusing, much of the technology in civics (like list building petitions) is suited for elections, not for governing. It is often antagonistic. The result? policy making looks like campaigning. We need some civic tinkering to generate governing technology that comes with relationships. Specifically, this means technology that includes many voices, but has identifiable channels for expertise that can sort complexity and that is not compromised by financial self-interest.
Today, sorting and filtering information is a huge challenge for participation systems around the world. Information now ranks up there with money and people as a lever of power. On the people front, the loud and often destructive individuals are showing up effectively. On the money front, our public institutions are at risk of becoming purely pay to play (wonks call this “transactional”).
Makers, ask yourselves, how can we turn big data into a political constituency for using real evidence–one that can compete with all the negative noise and money in the system? For starters, technologists out West must stop treating government like it’s a bad signal that can be automated out of existence. We are at a moment where our society requires an engineering mindset to develop modern, tech-savvy rules for democracy. We need civic makers….”

The Impact of Open: Keeping you healthy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

of Sunlight: “In healthcare, the goal-set shared widely throughout the field is known as “the Triple Aim”: improving individual experience of care, improving population health, and reducing the cost of care. Across the wide array of initiatives undertaken by health care data users, the great majority seem to fall within the scope of at least one aspect of the Triple Aim. Below is a set of examples that reveal how data — both open and not — is being used to achieve its elements.

The use of open data to reduce costs:

The use of open data to improve quality of care:

  • Using open data on a substantial series of individual hospital quality measures, CMS created a hospital comparison tool that allows consumers to compare average quality of care outcomes across their local hospitals.

  • Non-profit organizations survey hospitals and have used this data to provide another national measure of hospital quality that consumers can use to select a high-quality hospital.

  • In New York state, widely-shared data on cardiac surgery outcomes associated with individual providers has led to improved outcomes and better understanding of successful techniques.

  • In the UK, the National Health Service is actively working towards defining concrete metrics to evaluate how the system as a whole is moving towards improved quality. …

  • The broad cultural shift towards data-sharing in healthcare appears to have facilitated additional secured sharing in order to achieve the joint goal of improving healthcare quality and effectiveness. The current effort to securely network of millions of patient data records through the federal PCORI system has the potential to advance understanding of disease treatment at an unprecedented pace.

  • Through third-party tools, people are able to use the products of aggregated patient data in order to begin diagnosing their own symptoms more accurately, giving them a head start in understanding how to optimize their visit to a provider.

The use of open data to improve population health:

  • Out of the three elements of the triple aim, population health may have the longest and deepest relationship with open data. Public datasets like those collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the US Census have for decades been used to monitor disease prevalence, verify access to health insurance, and track mortality and morbidity statistics.

  • Population health improvement has been a major focus for newer developments as well. Health data has been a regular feature in tech efforts to improve the ways that governments — including local health departments — reach their constituencies. The use of data in new communication tools improves population health by increasing population awareness of local health trends and disease prevention opportunities. Two examples of this work in action include the Chicago Health Atlas, which combines health data and healthcare consumer problem-solving, and Philadelphia’s map interface to city data about available flu vaccines.

One final observation for open data advocates to take from health data concerns the way that the sector encourages the two-way information flow: it embraces the notion that data users can also be data producers. Open data ecosystems are properly characterized by multi-directional relationships among governmental and non-governmental actors, with opportunities for feedback, correction and augmentation of open datasets. That this happens at the scale of health data is important and meaningful for open data advocates who can face push-back when they ask their governments to ingest externally-generated data….”

15 Ways to bring Civic Innovation to your City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Moore at AcuitasGov: “In my previous blog post I wrote about a desire to see our Governments transform to be part of the  21st century.  I saw a recent reference to how governments across Canada have lost their global leadership, how government in Canada at all levels is providing analog services to a digital society.  I couldn’t agree more.  I have been thinking lately about some practical ways that Mayors and City Managers could innovate in their communities.  I realize that there are a number of municipal elections happening this fall across Canada, a time when leadership changes and new ideas emerge.  So this blog is also for Mayoral candidates who have a sense that technology and innovation have a role to play in their city and in their administration.
I thought I would identify 15 initiatives that cities could pursue as part of their Civic Innovation Strategy.   For the last 50 years technology in local government in Canada has been viewed as an expense, as a necessary evil, not always understood by elected officials and senior administrators.  Information and Technology is part of every aspect of a city, it is critical in delivering services.  It is time to not just think of this as an expense but as an investment, as a way to innovate, reduce costs, enhance citizen service delivery and transform government operations.
Here are my top 15 ways to bring Civic Innovation to your city:
1. Build 21st Century Digital Infrastructure like the Chattanooga Gig City Project.
2. Build WiFi networks like the City of Edmonton on your own and in partnership with others.
3. Provide technology and internet to children and youth in need like the City of Toronto.
4. Connect to a national Education and Research network like Cybera in Alberta and CANARIE.
5. Create a Mayors Task-force on Innovation and Technology leveraging your city’s resources.
6. Run a hackathon or two or three like the City of Glasgow or maybe host a hacking health event like the City of Vancouver.
7. Launch a Startup incubator like Startup Edmonton or take it to the next level and create a civic lab like the City of Barcelona.
8. Develop an Open Government Strategy, I like to the Open City Strategy from Edmonton.
9. If Open Government is too much then just start with Open Data, Edmonton has one of the best.
10. Build a Citizen Dashboard to showcase your cities services and commitment to the public.
11. Put your Crime data online like the Edmonton Police Service.
12. Consider a pilot project with sensor technology for parking like the City of Nice or for  waste management like the City of Barcelona.
13. Embrace Car2Go, Modo and UBER as ways to move people in your city.
14. Consider turning your IT department into the Innovation and Technology Department like they did at the City of Chicago.
15. Partner with other near by local governments to create a shared Innovation and Technology agency.
Now more than ever before cities need to find ways to innovate, to transform and to create a foundation that is sustainable.  Now is the time for both courage and innovations in government.  What is your city doing to move into the 21st Century?”

Index: The Networked Public

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on the networked public and was originally published in 2014.

Global Overview

  • The proportion of global population who use the Internet in 2013: 38.8%, up 3 percentage points from 2012
  • Increase in average global broadband speeds from 2012 to 2013: 17%
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that access the internet at least once a day in 2012: 96
  • Hours spent online in 2012 each month across the globe: 35 billion
  • Country with the highest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: United Kingdom (85%)
  • Country with the lowest online population, as a percent of total population in 2012: India (8%)
  • Trend with the highest growth rate in 2012: Location-based services (27%)
  • Years to reach 50 million users: telephone (75), radio (38), TV (13), internet (4)

Growth Rates in 2014

  • Rate at which the total number of Internet users is growing: less than 10% a year
  • Worldwide annual smartphone growth: 20%
  • Tablet growth: 52%
  • Mobile phone growth: 81%
  • Percentage of all mobile users who are now smartphone users: 30%
  • Amount of all web usage in 2013 accounted for by mobile: 14%
  • Amount of all web usage in 2014 accounted for by mobile: 25%
  • Percentage of money spent on mobile used for app purchases: 68%
  • Growth of BitCoin wallet between 2013 and 2014: 8 times increase
  • Number of listings on AirBnB in 2014: 550k, 83% growth year on year
  • How many buyers are on Alibaba in 2014: 231MM buyers, 44% growth year on year

Social Media

  • Number of Whatsapp messages on average sent per day: 50 billion
  • Number sent per day on Snapchat: 1.2 billion
  • How many restaurants are registered on GrubHub in 2014: 29,000
  • Amount the sale of digital songs fell in 2013: 6%
  • How much song streaming grew in 2013: 32%
  • Number of photos uploaded and shared every day on Flickr, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp combined in 2014: 1.8 billion
  • How many online adults in the U.S. use a social networking site of some kind: 73%
  • Those who use multiple social networking sites: 42%
  • Dominant social networking platform: Facebook, with 71% of online adults
  • Number of Facebook users in 2004, its founding year: 1 million
  • Number of monthly active users on Facebook in September 2013: 1.19 billion, an 18% increase year-over-year
  • How many Facebook users log in to the site daily: 63%
  • Instagram users who log into the service daily: 57%
  • Twitter users who are daily visitors: 46%
  • Number of photos uploaded to Facebook every minute: over 243,000, up 16% from 2012
  • How much of the global internet population is actively using Twitter every month: 21%
  • Number of tweets per minute: 350,000, up 250% from 2012
  • Fastest growing demographic on Twitter: 55-64 year age bracket, up 79% from 2012
  • Fastest growing demographic on Facebook: 45-54 year age bracket, up 46% from 2012
  • How many LinkedIn accounts are created every minute: 120, up 20% from 2012
  • The number of Google searches in 2013: 3.5 million, up 75% from 2012
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media in 2012: 90
  • Percent of internet users surveyed globally that use social media daily: 60
  • Time spent social networking, the most popular online activity: 22%, followed by searches (21%), reading content (20%), and emails/communication (19%)
  • The average age at which a child acquires an online presence through their parents in 10 mostly Western countries: six months
  • Number of children in those countries who have a digital footprint by age 2: 81%
  • How many new American marriages between 2005-2012 began by meeting online, according to a nationally representative study: more than one-third 
  • How many of the world’s 505 leaders are on Twitter: 3/4
  • Combined Twitter followers: of 505 world leaders: 106 million
  • Combined Twitter followers of Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Lady Gaga: 122 million
  • How many times all Wikipedias are viewed per month: nearly 22 billion times
  • How many hits per second: more than 8,000 
  • English Wikipedia’s share of total page views: 47%
  • Number of articles in the English Wikipedia in December 2013: over 4,395,320 
  • Platform that reaches more U.S. adults between ages 18-34 than any cable network: YouTube
  • Number of unique users who visit YouTube each month: more than 1 billion
  • How many hours of video are watched on YouTube each month: over 6 billion, 50% more than 2012
  • Proportion of YouTube traffic that comes from outside the U.S.: 80%
  • Most common activity online, based on an analysis of over 10 million web users: social media
  • People on Twitter who recommend products in their tweets: 53%
  • People who trust online recommendations from people they know: 90%

Mobile and the Internet of Things

  • Number of global smartphone users in 2013: 1.5 billion
  • Number of global mobile phone users in 2013: over 5 billion
  • Percent of U.S. adults that have a cell phone in 2013: 91
  • Number of which are a smartphone: almost two thirds
  • Mobile Facebook users in March 2013: 751 million, 54% increase since 2012
  • Growth rate of global mobile traffic as a percentage of global internet traffic as of May 2013: 15%, up from .9% in 2009
  • How many smartphone owners ages 18–44 “keep their phone with them for all but two hours of their waking day”: 79%
  • Those who reach for their smartphone immediately upon waking up: 62%
  • Those who couldn’t recall a time their phone wasn’t within reach or in the same room: 1 in 4
  • Facebook users who access the service via a mobile device: 73.44%
  • Those who are “mobile only”: 189 million
  • Amount of YouTube’s global watch time that is on mobile devices: almost 40%
  • Number of objects connected globally in the “internet of things” in 2012: 8.7 billion
  • Number of connected objects so far in 2013: over 10 billion
  • Years from tablet introduction for tables to surpass desktop PC and notebook shipments: less than 3 (over 55 million global units shipped in 2013, vs. 45 million notebooks and 35 million desktop PCs)
  • Number of wearable devices estimated to have been shipped worldwide in 2011: 14 million
  • Projected number of wearable devices in 2016: between 39-171 million
  • How much of the wearable technology market is in the healthcare and medical sector in 2012: 35.1%
  • How many devices in the wearable tech market are fitness or activity trackers: 61%
  • The value of the global wearable technology market in 2012: $750 million
  • The forecasted value of the market in 2018: $5.8 billion
  • How many Americans are aware of wearable tech devices in 2013: 52%
  • Devices that have the highest level of awareness: wearable fitness trackers,
  • Level of awareness for wearable fitness trackers amongst American consumers: 1 in 3 consumers
  • Value of digital fitness category in 2013: $330 million
  • How many American consumers surveyed are aware of smart glasses: 29%
  • Smart watch awareness amongst those surveyed: 36%

Access

  • How much of the developed world has mobile broadband subscriptions in 2013: 3/4
  • How much of the developing world has broadband subscription in 2013: 1/5
  • Percent of U.S. adults that had a laptop in 2012: 57
  • How many American adults did not use the internet at home, at work, or via mobile device in 2013: one in five
  • Amount President Obama initiated spending in 2009 in an effort to expand access: $7 billion
  • Number of Americans potentially shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, among other opportunities due to digital inequality: 60 million
  • American adults with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 7 out of 10
  • Americans aged 18-29 vs. 65+ with a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 80% vs. 43
  • American adults with college education (or more) vs. adults with no high school diploma that have a high-speed broadband connection at home as of May 2013: 89% vs. 37%
  • Percent of U.S. adults with college education (or more) that use the internet in 2011: 94
  • Those with no high school diploma that used the internet in 2011: 43
  • Percent of white American households that used the internet in 2013: 67
  • Black American households that used the internet in 2013: 57
  • States with lowest internet use rates in 2013: Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas
  • How many American households have only wireless telephones as of the second half of 2012: nearly two in five
  • States with the highest prevalence of wireless-only adults according to predictive modeling estimates: Idaho (52.3%), Mississippi (49.4%), Arkansas (49%)
  • Those with the lowest prevalence of wireless-only adults: New Jersey (19.4%), Connecticut (20.6%), Delaware (23.3%) and New York (23.5%)

Sources

The Emerging Power of Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New America Foundation Report on the Chicago experience of using big data: “Big data is transforming the commercial marketplace but it also has the potential to reshape government affairs and urban development.  In a new report from the Emerging Leaders Program at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, Lincoln S. Ellis, a founding member of the World Economic Roundtable, and other authors from the Emerging Leaders Program, explore how big data can be used by mega-cities to meet the challenges they face in an age of resource constraints to improve the lives of their residents.
Using Chicago as a case study, the report examines how the explosion of data availability enables cities to do more with less—to improve government services, fund much needed transportation, provide better education, and guarantee public safety.  And do more with less is what many cities have had to do over the past five years because many cities have had to cut their budgets and reduce the number of public employees in the post-financial crisis economy.  It is also what they will need to continue to do in the future.
“Unfortunately, resource constraints are a consistent feature of the post-crisis global landscape,” argues Ellis.  “Happily, so too is the renaissance in productivity gains garnered by our ability to leverage technology and information to achieve our most important public purposes in a smarter and more efficient way.”
Click here to view the report as a PDF.”

App pays commuters to take routes that ease congestion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Congestion at peak hours is a major problem in the world’s busiest city centres. We’ve recently seen Gothenburg in Sweden offering free bicycles to ease the burden on public transport services, but now a new app is looking to take a different approach to the same problem. Urban Engines uses algorithms to help cities determine key congestion choke points and times, and can then reward commuters for avoiding them.
The Urban Engines system is based on commuters using the smart commuter cards already found in many major cities. The company tracks journeys made with those commuter cards, and uses that data to identify main areas of congestion, and at what times the congestion occurs. The system has already been employed in Washington, D.C, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, helping provide valuable data for work with city planners.
It’s in Singapore, however, where the most interesting work has been achieved so far. There, commuters who have signed up and registered their commuter cards can earn rewards when they travel. They will earn one point for every kilometre travelled during peak hours, or triple that when travelling off-peak. The points earned can then be converted into discounts on future journeys, or put towards an in-app raffle game, where they have the opportunity to win sums of money. Urban Engines claim there’s been a 7 to 13 percent reduction in journeys made during peak hours, with 200,000 commuters taking part.
The company is based on an original experiment carried out in Bangalore. The rewards program there, carried out among 20,000 employees of the Indian company Infosys, lead to 17 percent of traffic shifting to off-peak travel times in six months. A similarly successful experiment has also been carried out on the Stanford University campus, and the plan is to now expand to other major cities…”