With Wikistrat, crowdsourcing gets geopolitical

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
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 Wikistrat – could out-forecast the world’s leading intelligence agencies seems almost farcical. But it is an eye-opening example of yet another way that crowdsourcing is upending conventional wisdom.
Crowdsourcing has long been heralded as a means to shake up stale thinking in corporate spheres by providing cheaper, faster means of processing information and problem solving. But now even traditionally enigmatic defence and intelligence organisations and other geopolitical soothsayers are getting in on the act by using the “wisdom of the crowd” to predict how the chips of world events might fall.
Meanwhile, companies with crucial geopolitical interests, such as energy and financial services firms, have begun commissioning crowdsourced simulations of their own from Wikistrat to better gauge investment risk.

While some intelligence agencies have experimented with crowdsourcing to gain insights from the general public, Wikistrat uses a “closed crowd” of subject experts and bills itself as the world’s first crowdsourced analytical services consultancy.

A typical simulation, run on its interactive web platform, has roughly 70 participants. The crowd’s expertise and diversity is combined with Wikistrat’s patented model of “collaborative competition” that rewards participants for the breadth and quality of their contributions. The process is designed to provide a fresh view and shatter the traditional confines of groupthink….”

Can big data help build more wind and solar farms?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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 campaigning and big data skills – honed from his years of working in politics – to find the most likely customers for renewables and convince them to switch. Ethical Electric was born.
Matzzie’s company isn’t the first to sell renewable energy, but it might be the smartest. For the most part, convincing people to switch away from dirty energy is an unprofitable and work-intensive process, requiring electrical company representatives to approach thousands of randomly chosen customers. Ethical Electric, on the other hand, uses a highly-targeted, strategic method to identify its potential customers.
From finding votes to finding customers
Matzzie, who is now CEO of Ethical Electric, explained that the secret lies in his company’s use of big data, a resource that he and his partners mastered on the political front lines. In the last few presidential elections, big data fundamentally changed the way candidates – and their teams – approached voters. “We couldn’t rely on voter registration lists to make assumptions about who would be willing to vote in the next election,” Matzzie said. “What happened in politics is a real revolution in data.”…”

The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve.  Perhaps there can be different models.  For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services.  Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown.  There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government.    Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis.  For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”

Fifteen open data insights

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Tim Davies from ODRN: “…below are the 15 points from the three-page briefing version, and you can find a full write-up of these points for download. You can also find reports from all the individual project partners, including a collection of quick-read research posters over on the Open Data Research Network website.

15 insights into open data supply, use and impacts

(1) There are many gaps to overcome before open data availability, can lead to widespread effective use and impact. Open data can lead to change through a ‘domino effect’, or by creating ripples of change that gradually spread out. However, often many of the key ‘domino pieces’ are missing, and local political contexts limit the reach of ripples. Poor data quality, low connectivity, scarce technical skills, weak legal frameworks and political barriers may all prevent open data triggering sustainable change. Attentiveness to all the components of open data impact is needed when designing interventions.
(2) There is a frequent mismatch between open data supply and demand in developing countries. Counting datasets is a poor way of assessing the quality of an open data initiative. The datasets published on portals are often the datasets that are easiest to publish, not the datasets most in demand. Politically sensitive datasets are particularly unlikely to be published without civil society pressure. Sometimes the gap is on the demand side – as potential open data users often do not articulate demands for key datasets.
(3) Open data initiatives can create new spaces for civil society to pursue government accountability and effectiveness. The conversation around transparency and accountability that ideas of open data can support is as important as the datasets in some developing countries.
(4) Working on open data projects can change how government creates, prepares and uses its own data. The motivations behind an open data initiative shape how government uses the data itself. Civil society and entrepreneurs interacting with government through open data projects can help shape government data practices. This makes it important to consider which intermediaries gain insider roles shaping data supply.
(5) Intermediaries are vital to both the supply and the use of open data. Not all data needed for governance in developing countries comes from government. Intermediaries can create data, articulate demands for data, and help translate open data visions from political leaders into effective implementations. Traditional local intermediaries are an important source of information, in particular because they are trusted parties.
(6) Digital divides create data divides in both the supply and use of data. In some developing countries key data is not digitised, or a lack of technical staff has left data management patchy and inconsistent. Where Internet access is scarce, few citizens can have direct access to data or services built with it. Full access is needed for full empowerment, but offline intermediaries, including journalists and community radio stations, also play a vital role in bridging the gaps between data and citizens.
(7) Where information is already available and used, the shift to open data involves data evolution rather than data revolution. Many NGOs and intermediaries already access the information which is now becoming available as data. Capacity building should start from existing information and data practices in organisations, and should look for the step-by-step gains to be made from a data-driven approach.
(8) Officials’ fears about the integrity of data are a barrier to more machine-readable data being made available. The publication of data as PDF or in scanned copies is often down to a misunderstanding of how open data works. Only copies can be changed, and originals can be kept authoritative. Helping officials understand this may help increase the supply of data.
(9) Very few datasets are clearly openly licensed, and there is low understanding of what open licenses entail. There are mixed opinions on the importance of a focus on licensing in different contexts. Clear licenses are important to building a global commons of interoperable data, but may be less relevant to particular uses of data on the ground. In many countries wider conversation about licensing are yet to take place.
(10) Privacy issues are not on the radar of most developing country open data projects, although commercial confidentiality does arise as a reason preventing greater data transparency. Much state held data is collected either from citizens or from companies. Few countries in the ODDC study have weak or absent privacy laws and frameworks, yet participants in the studies raised few personal privacy considerations. By contrast, a lack of clarity, and officials’ concerns, about potential breaches of commercial confidentiality when sharing data gathered from firms was a barrier to opening data.
(11) There is more to open data than policies and portals. Whilst central open data portals act as a visible symbol of open data initiatives, a focus on portal building can distract attention from wider reforms. Open data elements can also be built on existing data sharing practices, and data made available through the locations where citizens, NGOs are businesses already go to access information.
(12) Open data advocacy should be aware of, and build upon, existing policy foundations in specific countries and sectors. Sectoral transparency policies for local government, budget and energy industry regulation, amongst others, could all have open data requirements and standards attached, drawing on existing mechanisms to secure sustainable supplies of relevant open data in developing countries. In addition, open data conversations could help make existing data collection and disclosure requirements fit better with the information and data demands of citizens.
(13) Open data is not just a central government issue: local government data, city data, and data from the judicial and legislative branches are all important. Many open data projects focus on the national level, and only on the executive branch. However, local government is closer to citizens, urban areas bring together many of the key ingredients for successful open data initiatives, and transparency in other branches of government is important to secure citizens democratic rights.
(14) Flexibility is needed in the application of definitions of open data to allow locally relevant and effective open data debates and advocacy to emerge. Open data is made up of various elements, including proactive publication, machine-readability and permissions to re-use. Countries at different stages of open data development may choose to focus on one or more of these, but recognising that adopting all elements at once could hinder progress. It is important to find ways to both define open data clearly, and to avoid a reductive debate that does not recognise progressive steps towards greater openness.
(15) There are many different models for an open data initiative: including top-down, bottom-up and sector-specific. Initiatives may also be state-led, civil society-led and entrepreneur-led in their goals and how they are implemented – with consequences for the resources and models required to make them sustainable. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to open data. More experimentation, evaluation and shared learning on the components, partners and processes for putting open data ideas into practice must be a priority for all who want to see a world where open-by-default data drives real social, political and economic change.
You can read more about each of these points in the full report.”

The Myth of Everybody

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laurenellen McCann at Medium: “What is the difference between “with” and “for”? “With” implies togetherness, a network: a larger group, possibly, a messier group, but a group (meaning 2 people+) nonetheless. Acting “with” others implies certain degrees of collaboration, collective action, coordination, and even unity. You run a three-legged race with your partner (or you’re going to fall). When you use the word “with” it means that, however many people are involved, whatever their individual roles, they’re acting as one — or at least, towards a shared goal.

By contrast, when we use the word “for” we center on the experience of individuals in a relationship, with one unit acting on behalf of or doing something to another. (“For another.”) In the “for” universe, there’s usually a receiver and a giver. There can be many people involved or few, but there are almost always actors and those acted upon. In a democracy like ours, where we have government of, by, and for the people, we understand that when we vote for an elected representative, they are then empowered to speak and act for us. To govern for us….but with our consent.

Representative democracy in action.

At least, that’s the way it’s described in textbooks. In reality, however, governance is awash with intermediaries: companies, contractors, public/private partnerships, lobbyists, NGOs, think tanks — organizations of people, formal and informal, that support, distribute, and sometimes do the work of our government for our government and for us. This (very simplified overview of our) system of proxies isn’t necessarily good or bad; it’s just the way we’ve structured things to work in the US.

Why? Well, because we govern in a “for” system. Because there are so many of us and our lives are interconnected. Because we balance majority rule with minority rights. Because of all the reasons you learned in social studies class (if you went to a US public high school) and because this is the way most of us believes society has to work.

But there are other ways.

— Take your hand off the “COMMUNIST” alarm. I’m talking about the “civic” revolution.

In the last 6 or so years, as the buzz around “Gov2.0” waned, obsession with “civic”-ness waxed. What “civic” means exactly, well, we’re all still figuring that out. Sure, there are official definitions that relate “civic” to all things local…and overlapping understandings of “civics” that lend the air of government involvement…but with increasing interest from folks in the tech and innovation sectors (and funders), the word has taken on new shape. Today, “civic” is the center of a Venn Diagram encircling notions commonly associated with “society,” “community,” “governance,” and public commons (or goods). The sheen of social impact, social responsibility, and “community-ness” — that’s what terms of art like “civic innovation,” “civic engagement,” “civic decisions,” “civic participation”, and “civic tech” are all trying to describe.

To be clear, it’s not that this intersection of societal something hasn’t been outlined before: language like “social” (see “social innovation”) and civil (see “civil society”) has been used to describe similar concepts for decades. “Civic” is just the newest coat of paint, its popularity driven in part by interest from NGOs, start-ups, digital strategists, and governing bodies attempting to bring new flavor and energy to long-standing questions, like

How can we make democracy work? What can we do to make the systems in place work better? And what do we need to change to make systems work better for everybody?…”

Selected Readings on Economic Impact of Open Data

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The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of open data was originally published in 2014.

Open data is publicly available data – often released by governments, scientists, and occasionally private companies – that is made available for anyone to use, in a machine-readable format, free of charge. Considerable attention has been devoted to the economic potential of open data for businesses and other organizations, and it is now widely accepted that open data plays an important role in spurring innovation, growth, and job creation. From new business models to innovation in local governance, open data is being quickly adopted as a valuable resource at many levels.

Measuring and analyzing the economic impact of open data in a systematic way is challenging, and governments as well as other providers of open data seek to provide access to the data in a standardized way. As governmental transparency increases and open data changes business models and activities in many economic sectors, it is important to understand best practices for releasing and using non-proprietary, public information. Costs, social challenges, and technical barriers also influence the economic impact of open data.

These selected readings are intended as a first step in the direction of answering the question of if we can and how we consider if opening data spurs economic impact.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Bonina, Carla. New Business Models and the Values of Open Data: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities. NEMODE 3K – Small Grants Call 2013. http://bit.ly/1xGf9oe

  • In this paper, Dr. Carla Bonina provides an introduction to open data and open data business models, evaluating their potential economic value and identifying future challenges for the effectiveness of open data, such as personal data and privacy, the emerging data divide, and the costs of collecting, producing and releasing open (government) data.

Carpenter, John and Phil Watts. Assessing the Value of OS OpenData™ to the Economy of Great Britain – Synopsis. June 2013. Accessed July 25, 2014. http://bit.ly/1rTLVUE

  • John Carpenter and Phil Watts of Ordnance Survey undertook a study to examine the economic impact of open data to the economy of Great Britain. Using a variety of methods such as case studies, interviews, downlad analysis, adoption rates, impact calculation, and CGE modeling, the authors estimates that the OS OpenData initiative will deliver a net of increase in GDP of £13 – 28.5 million for Great Britain in 2013.

Capgemini Consulting. The Open Data Economy: Unlocking Economic Value by Opening Government and Public Data. Capgemini Consulting. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7MR02

  • This report explores how governments are leveraging open data for economic benefits. Through using a compariative approach, the authors study important open data from organizational, technological, social and political perspectives. The study highlights the potential of open data to drive profit through increasing the effectiveness of benchmarking and other data-driven business strategies.

Deloitte. Open Growth: Stimulating Demand for Open Data in the UK. Deloitte Analytics. December 2012. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1oeFhks

  • This early paper on open data by Deloitte uses case studies and statistical analysis on open government data to create models of businesses using open data. They also review the market supply and demand of open government data in emerging sectors of the economy.

Gruen, Nicholas, John Houghton and Richard Tooth. Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target.  Accessed July 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/UOmBRe

  • This report highlights the potential economic value of the open data agenda in Australia and the G20. The report provides an initial literature review on the economic value of open data, as well as a asset of case studies on the economic value of open data, and a set of recommendations for how open data can help the G20 and Australia achieve target objectives in the areas of trade, finance, fiscal and monetary policy, anti-corruption, employment, energy, and infrastructure.

Heusser, Felipe I. Understanding Open Government Data and Addressing Its Impact (draft version). World Wide Web Foundation. http://bit.ly/1o9Egym

  • The World Wide Web Foundation, in collaboration with IDRC has begun a research network to explore the impacts of open data in developing countries. In addition to the Web Foundation and IDRC, the network includes the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the Open Development Technology Alliance and Practical Participation.

Howard, Alex. San Francisco Looks to Tap Into the Open Data Economy. O’Reilly Radar: Insight, Analysis, and Reach about Emerging Technologies.  October 19, 2012.  Accessed July 24, 2014. http://oreil.ly/1qNRt3h

  • Alex Howard points to San Francisco as one of the first municipalities in the United States to embrace an open data platform.  He outlines how open data has driven innovation in local governance.  Moreover, he discusses the potential impact of open data on job creation and government technology infrastructure in the City and County of San Francisco.

Huijboom, Noor and Tijs Van den Broek. Open Data: An International Comparison of Strategies. European Journal of ePractice. March 2011. Accessed July 24, 2014.  http://bit.ly/1AE24jq

  • This article examines five countries and their open data strategies, identifying key features, main barriers, and drivers of progress for of open data programs. The authors outline the key challenges facing European, and other national open data policies, highlighting the emerging role open data initiatives are playing in political and administrative agendas around the world.

Manyika, J., Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, Steve Van Kuiken, Peter Groves, and Elizabeth Almasi Doshi. Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Innovation. McKinsey Global Institute. October 2013. Accessed July 24, 2014.  http://bit.ly/1lgDX0v

  • This research focuses on quantifying the potential value of open data in seven “domains” in the global economy: education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance.

Moore, Alida. Congressional Transparency Caucus: How Open Data Creates Jobs. April 2, 2014. Accessed July 30, 2014. Socrata. http://bit.ly/1n7OJpp

  • Socrata provides a summary of the March 24th briefing of the Congressional Transparency Caucus on the need to increase government transparency through adopting open data initiatives. They include key takeaways from the panel discussion, as well as their role in making open data available for businesses.

Stott, Andrew. Open Data for Economic Growth. The World Bank. June 25, 2014. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7PRJF

  • In this report, The World Bank examines the evidence for the economic potential of open data, holding that the economic potential is quite large, despite a variation in the published estimates, and difficulties assessing its potential methodologically. They provide five archetypes of businesses using open data, and provides recommendations for governments trying to maximize economic growth from open data.

What ‘urban physics’ could tell us about how cities work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ruth Graham at Boston Globe: “What does a city look like? If you’re walking down the street, perhaps it looks like people and storefronts. Viewed from higher up, patterns begin to emerge: A three-dimensional grid of buildings divided by alleys, streets, and sidewalks, nearly flat in some places and scraping the sky in others. Pull back far enough, and the city starts to look like something else entirely: a cluster of molecules.

At least, that’s what it looks like to Franz-Josef Ulm, an engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ulm has built a career as an expert on the properties, patterns, and environmental potential of concrete. Taking a coffee break at MIT’s Stata Center late one afternoon, he and a colleague were looking at a large aerial photograph of a city when they had a “eureka” moment: “Hey, doesn’t that look like a molecular structure?”
With colleagues, Ulm began analyzing cities the way you’d analyze a material, looking at factors such as the arrangement of buildings, each building’s center of mass, and how they’re ordered around each other. They concluded that cities could be grouped into categories: Boston’s structure, for example, looks a lot like an “amorphous liquid.” Seattle is another liquid, and so is Los Angeles. Chicago, which was designed on a grid, looks like glass, he says; New York resembles a highly ordered crystal.
So far Ulm and his fellow researchers have presented their work at conferences, but it has not yet been published in a scientific journal. If the analogy does hold up, Ulm hopes it will give planners a new tool to understand a city’s structure, its energy use, and possibly even its resilience to climate change.
Ulm calls his new work “urban physics,” and it places him among a number of scientists now using the tools of physics to analyze the practically infinite amount of data that cities produce in the 21st century, from population density to the number of patents produced to energy bill charges. Physicist Marta González, Ulm’s colleague at MIT, recently used cellphone data to analyze traffic patterns in Boston with unprecedented complexity, for example. In 2012, a theoretical physicist was named founding director of New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, whose research is devoted to “urban informatics”; one of its first projects is helping to create the country’s first “quantified community” on the West Side of Manhattan.
In Ulm’s case, he and his colleagues have used freely available data, including street layouts and building coordinates, to plot the structures of 12 cities and analogize them to existing complex materials. In physics, an “order parameter” is a number between 0 and 1 that describes how atoms are arranged in relationship to other atoms nearby; Ulm applies this idea to city layouts. Boston, he says, has an “order parameter” of .52, equivalent to that of a liquid like water. This means its structure is notably disordered, which may have something to do with how it developed. “Boston has grown organically,” he said. “The city, in the way its buildings are organized today, carries that information from its historical evolution.”…

European Commission encourages re-use of public sector data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, the European Commission is publishing guidelines to help Member States benefit from the revised Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive). These guidelines explain for example how to give access to weather data, traffic data, property asset data and maps. Open data can be used as the basis for innovative value-added services and products, such as mobile apps, which encourage investment in data-driven sectors. The guidelines published today are based on a detailed consultation and cover issues such as:

  1. Licencing: guidelines on when public bodies can allow the re-use of documents without conditions or licences; gives conditions under which the re-use of personal data is possible. For example:

  • Public sector bodies should not impose licences when a simple notice is sufficient;

  • Open licences available on the web, such as several “Creative Commons” licences can facilitate the re-use of public sector data without the need to develop custom-made licences;

  • Attribution requirement is sufficient in most cases of PSI re-use.

  1. Datasets: presents five thematic dataset categories that businesses and other potential re-users are mostly interested in and could thus be given priority for being made available for re-use. For example:

  • Postcodes, national and local maps;

  • Weather, land and water quality, energy consumption, emission levels and other environmental and earth data;

  • Transport data: public transport timetables, road works, traffic information;

  • Statistics: GDP, age, health, unemployment, income, education etc.;

  • Company and business registers.

  1. Cost: gives an overview on how public sector bodies, including libraries, museums and archives, should calculate the amount they should charge re-users for data. For example:

  • Where digital documents are downloaded electronically a no‑cost policy is recommended;

  • For cost-recovery charging, any income generated in the process of collecting or producing documents, e.g. from registration fees or taxes, should be subtracted from the total costs incurred so as to establish the ‘net cost’ of collection, production, reproduction and dissemination.

European Commission Vice President @NeelieKroesEU said: “This guidance will help all of us benefit from the wealth of information public bodies hold. Opening and re-using this data will lead to many new businesses and convenient services.“

An independent report carried out by the consultants McKinsey in 2013 claimed that open data re-use could boost the global economy hugely; and a 2013 Spanish studyfound that commercial re-users in Spain could employ around 10,000 people and reach a business volume of €900 million….”

See also Speech by Neelie Kroes: Embracing the open opportunity

Meet the UK start-ups changing the world with open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sophie Curtis in The Telegraph: “Data is more accessible today than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. From corporate databases to social media and embedded sensors, data is exploding, with total worldwide volume expected to reach 6.6 zettabytes by 2020.
Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. For example, the Department for Education publishes open data about the performance of schools in England, so that companies can create league tables and citizens can find the best-performing schools in their catchment area.
Governments worldwide are working to open up more of their data. Since January 2010, more than 18,500 UK government data sets have been released via the data.gov.uk web portal, creating new opportunities for organisations to build innovative digital services.
Businesses are also starting to realise the value of making their non-personal data freely available, with open innovation leading to the creation products and services that they can benefit from….

Now a range of UK start-ups are working with the ODI to build businesses using open data, and have already unlocked a total of £2.5 million worth of investments and contracts.
Mastodon C joined the ODI start-up programme at its inception in December 2012. Shortly after joining, the company teamed up with Ben Goldacre and Open Healthcare UK, and embarked on a project investigating the use of branded statins over the far cheaper generic versions.
The data analysis identified potential efficiency savings to the NHS of £200 million. The company is now also working with the Technology Strategy Board and Nesta to help them gain better insight into their data.
Another start-up, CarbonCulture is a community platform designed to help people use resources more efficiently. The company uses high-tech metering to monitor carbon use in the workplace and help clients save money.
Organisations such as 10 Downing Street, Tate, Cardiff Council, the GLA and the UK Parliament are using the company’s digital tools to monitor and improve their energy consumption. CarbonCulture has also helped the Department of Energy and Climate Change reduce its gas use by 10 per cent.
Spend Network’s business is built on collecting the spend statements and tender documents published by government in the UK and Europe and then publishing this data openly so that anyone can use it. The company currently hosts over £1.2 trillion of transactions from the UK and over 1.8 million tenders from across Europe.
One of the company’s major breakthroughs was creating the first national, open spend analysis for central and local government. This was used to uncover a 45 per cent delay in the UK’s tendering process, holding up £22 billion of government funds to the economy.
Meanwhile, TransportAPI uses open data feeds from Traveline, Network Rail and Transport for London to provide nationwide timetables, departure and infrastructure information across all modes of public transport.
TransportAPI currently has 700 developers and organisations signed up to its platform, including individual taxpayers and public sector organisations like universities and local authorities. Travel portals, hyperlocal sites and business analytics are also integrating features, such as the ‘nearest transport’ widget, into their websites.
These are just four examples of how start-ups are using open data to create new digital services. The ODI this week announced seven new open data start-ups joining the programme, covering 3D printed learning materials, helping disabled communities, renewable energy markets, and smart cities….”

Is Crowdsourcing the Future for Legislation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Heaton in GovTech: “…While drafting legislation is traditionally the job of elected officials, an increasing number of lawmakers are using digital platforms such as Wikispaces and GitHub to give constituents a bigger hand in molding the laws they’ll be governed by. The practice has been used this year in both California and New York City, and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon, experts say.
Trond Undheim, crowdsourcing expert and founder of Yegii Inc., a startup company that provides and ranks advanced knowledge assets in the areas of health care, technology, energy and finance, said crowdsourcing was “certainly viable” as a tool to help legislators understand what constituents are most passionate about.
“I’m a big believer in asking a wide variety of people the same question and crowdsourcing has become known as the long-tail of answers,” Undheim said. “People you wouldn’t necessarily think of have something useful to say.”
California Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Los Angeles, agreed. He’s spearheaded an effort this year to let residents craft legislation regarding probate law — a measure designed to allow a court to assign a guardian to a deceased person’s pet. Gatto used the online Wikispaces platform — which allows for Wikipedia-style editing and content contribution — to let anyone with an Internet connection collaborate on the legislation over a period of several months.
The topic of the bill may not have been headline news, but Gatto was encouraged by the media attention his experiment received. As a result, he’s committed to running another crowdsourced bill next year — just on a bigger, more mainstream public issue.
New York City Council Member Ben Kallos has a plethora of technology-related legislation being considered in the Big Apple. Many of the bills are open for public comment and editing on GitHub. In an interview with Government Technology last month, Kallos said he believes using crowdsourcing to comment on and edit legislation is empowering and creates a different sense of democracy where people can put forward their ideas.
County governments also are joining the crowdsourcing trend. The Catawba Regional Council of Governments in South Carolina and the Centralia Council of Governments in North Carolina are gathering opinions on how county leaders should plan for future growth in the region.
At a public forum earlier this year, attendees were given iPads to go online and review four growth options and record their views on which they preferred. The priorities outlined by citizens will be taken back to decision-makers in each of the counties to see how well existing plans match up with what the public wants.
Gatto said he’s encouraged by how quickly the crowdsourcing of policy has spread throughout the U.S. He said there’s a disconnect between governments and their constituencies who believe elected officials don’t listen. But that could change as crowdsourcing continues to make its impact on lawmakers.
“When you put out a call like I did and others have done and say ‘I’m going to let the public draft a law and whatever you draft, I’m committed to introducing it … I think that’s a powerful message,” Gatto said. “I think the public appreciates it because it makes them understand that the government still belongs to them.”

Protecting the Process

Despite the benefits crowdsourcing brings to the legislative process, there remain some question marks about whether it truly provides insight into the public’s feelings on an issue. For example, because many political issues are driven by the influence of special interest groups, what’s preventing those groups from manipulating the bill-drafting process?
Not much, according to Undheim. He cautioned policymakers to be aware of the motivations from people taking part in crowdsourcing efforts to write and edit laws. Gatto shared Undheim’s concerns, but noted that the platform he used for developing his probate law – Wikispaces – has safeguards in place so that a member of his staff can revert language of a crowdsourced bill back to a previous version if it’s determined that someone was trying to unduly influence the drafting process….”