Brian Libby at City Lab: “By the time Constantine Kontokosta got involved with New York City’s Hudson Yards development, it was already on track to be historically big and ambitious. Over the course of the next decade, developers from New York’s Related Companies and Canada-based Oxford Properties Group are building the largest real-estate development in United States history: a 28-acre neighborhood on Manhattan’s far West Side over a Long Island Rail Road yard, with some 17 million square feet of new commercial, residential, and retail space. Hudson Yards is also being planned as an innovative model of efficiency. Its... (More >)
New Data for a New Energy Future
(This post originally appeared on the blog of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.) Two growing concerns—climate change and U.S. energy self-sufficiency—have accelerated the search for affordable, sustainable approaches to energy production and use. In this area, as in many others, data-driven innovation is a key to progress. Data scientists are working to help improve energy efficiency and make new forms of energy more economically viable, and are building new, profitable businesses in the process. In the same way that government data has been used by other kinds of new businesses, the Department of Energy is releasing data that... (More >)
Announcing New U.S. Open Government Commitments on the Third Anniversary of the Open Government Partnership
US White House Fact Sheet: “Three years ago, President Obama joined with the leaders of seven other nations to launch the Open Government Partnership (OGP), an international partnership between governments and civil society to promote transparency, fight corruption, energize civic engagement, and leverage new technologies to open up governments worldwide. The United States and other founding countries pledged to transform the way that governments serve their citizens in the 21st century. Today, as heads of state of OGP participating countries gather at the UN General Assembly, this partnership has grown from 8 to 65 nations and hundreds of civil... (More >)
Creating a national citizen engagement process for energy policy
Paper by Nick Pidgeon et al in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS): “This paper examines some of the science communication challenges involved when designing and conducting public deliberation processes on issues of national importance. We take as our illustrative case study a recent research project investigating public values and attitudes toward future energy system change for the United Kingdom. National-level issues such as this are often particularly difficult to engage the public with because of their inherent complexity, derived from multiple interconnected elements and policy frames, extended scales of analysis, and different manifestations of uncertainty.... (More >)
Five Cities Selected As Winners in Bloomberg Philanthropies 2014 Mayors Challenge
Bloomberg Philanthropies: “Grand Prize Winner Barcelona Aims to Create Digital and Community ‘Trust Network’ for Each of its At-Risk Elderly Residents Athens, Greece; Kirklees in Yorkshire, UK; Stockholm, Sweden; and Warsaw, Poland Also Win Funds for Innovative Solutions to Pressing Urban Challenges Bloomberg Philanthropies today announced the winners in its 2014 Mayors Challenge, an ideas competition that encourages cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life – and that have the potential to spread to other cities. Barcelona will receive the Mayors Challenge Grand Prize for Innovation and €5 million toward its proposal to... (More >)
How Local Governments Can Use Instameets to Promote Citizen Engagement
Chris Shattuck at Arc3Communications: “With more than 200 million active monthly users, Instagram reports that it shares more than 20 million photos every day with a combined average of 1.6 billion likes. Instagram engagement is also more than 15 times that of Facebook with a user base that is predominately young, female and affluent, according to a recent report by L2, a think tank for digital innovation. Therefore, it’s no wonder that 92 percent of prestige brands prominently incorporate Instagram into their social media strategies, according to the same report. However, many local governments have been slow to adopt... (More >)
The Public and Decision-making Process: Who and Why Needs Citizen Participation?
Article by O. Bychkova in Voprosy Economiki: “The participation of the public in the decision-making and policy discussion is expected to allow the officials to re-valuate the proposed decisions, save money on their implementation and restore public trust in government. However, from the point of view of bureaucrats, direct participation is often unproductive: you are required to spend work time and energy on discussions with non-experts and have no means to predict the effectiveness and efficiency of these debates. The article considers theories and empirical studies that can explain a new fashion trend of openness and transparency in world’s... (More >)
With Wikistrat, crowdsourcing gets geopolitical
Aaron Stanley in the Financial Times: “In January, while the world was focused on the build up to the Winter Olympics in Sochi, a team of analysts scattered around the globe huddled in front of their computer screens and forecast that ethnic strife in Ukraine would lead to the eventual incorporation of Crimea into neighbouring Russia. Much to the surprise of western intelligence, in a matter of weeks Vladimir Putin’s troops would occupy the disputed peninsula and a referendum would be passed authorising secession from Ukraine. That a dispersed team of thinkers – assembled by a consultancy known as... (More >)
Can big data help build more wind and solar farms?
Rachael Post in The Guardian: “Convincing customers to switch to renewable energy is an uphill battle. But for a former political operative, finding business is as easy as mining a consumer behavior database…After his father died from cancer related to pollution from a coal-burning plant, Tom Matzzie, the former director of democratic activist group MoveOn.org, decided that he’d had enough with traditional dirty energy. But when he installed solar panels on his home, he discovered that the complicated permitting and construction process made switching to renewable energy difficult and unwieldy. The solution, he concluded, was to use his online... (More >)
The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams
Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging. Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement. This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance. Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams. Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions.... (More >)
