Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report commissioned by Omydiar Network on the Business Case for Open Data: “Economic analysis has confirmed the significant contribution to economic growth and productivity achievable through an open data agenda. Governments, the private sector, individuals and communities all stand to benefit from the innovation and information that will inform investment, drive the creation of new industries, and inform decision making and research. To mark a step change in the way valuable information is created and reused, the G20 should release information as open data.
In May 2014, Omidyar Network commissioned Lateral Economics to undertake economic analysis on the potential of open data to support the G20’s 2% growth target and illustrate how an open data agenda can make a significant contribution to economic growth and productivity. Combining all G20 economies, output could increase by USD 13 trillion cumulatively over the next five years. Implementation of open data policies would thus boost cumulative G20 GDP by around 1.1 percentage points (almost 55%) of the G20’s 2% growth target over five years.
Recommendations
Importantly, open data cuts across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption. This memo suggests an open data thread that runs across all G20 priorities. The more data is opened, the more it can be used, reused, repurposed and built on—in combination with other data—for everyone’s benefit.
We call on G20 economies to sign up to the Open Data Charter.
The G20 should ensure that data released by G20 working groups and themes is in line with agreed open data standards. This will lead to more accountable, efficient, effective governments who are going further to expose inadequacy, fight corruption and spur innovation.
Data is a national resource and open data is a ‘win-win’ policy. It is about making more of existing resources. We know that the cost of opening data is smaller than the economic returns, which could be significant. Methods to respect privacy concerns must be taken into account. If this is done, as the public and private sector share of information grows, there will be increasing positive returns.
The G20 opportunity
This November, leaders of the G20 Member States will meet in Australia to drive forward commitments made in the St Petersburg G20 Leaders Declaration last September and to make firm progress on stimulating growth. Actions across the G20 will include increasing investment, lifting employment and participation, enhancing trade and promoting competition.
The resulting ‘Brisbane Action Plan’ will encapsulate all of these commitments with the aim of raising the level of G20 output by at least 2% above the currently projected level over the next five years. There are major opportunities for cooperative and collective action by G20 governments.
Governments should intensify the release of existing public sector data – both government and publicly funded research data. But much more can be done to promote open data than simply releasing more government data. In appropriate circumstances, governments can mandate public disclosure of private sector data (e.g. in corporate financial reporting).
Recommendations for action

  • G20 governments should adopt the principles of the Open Data Charter to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
  • G20 governments should adopt specific open data targets under each G20 theme, as illustrated below, such as releasing open data related to beneficial owners of companies, as well revenues from extractive industries
  • G20 governments should consider harmonizing licensing regimes across the G20
  • G20 governments should adopt metrics for measuring the quantity and quality of open data publication, e.g. using the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Certificates as a bottom-up mechanism for driving the adoption of common standards.

Illustrative G20 examples
Fiscal and monetary policy
Governments possess rich real time data that is not open or accessed by government macro-economic managers. G20 governments should:

  • Open up models that lie behind economic forecasts and help assess alternative policy settings;
  • Publish spending and contractual data to enable comparative shopping by government between government suppliers.

Anti corruption
Open data may directly contribute to reduced corruption by increasing the likelihood corruption will be detected. G20 governments should:

  • Release open data related to beneficial owners of companies as well as revenues from extractive industries,
  • Collaborate on harmonised technical standards that permit the tracing of international money flows – including the tracing of beneficial owners of commercial entities, and the comparison and reconciliation of transactions across borders.

Trade
Obtaining and using trade data from multiple jurisdictions is difficult. Access fees, specific licenses, and non-machine readable formats all involve large transaction costs. G20 governments should:

  • Harmonise open data policies related to trade data.
  • Use standard trade schema and formats.

Employment
Higher quality information on employment conditions would facilitate better matching of employees to organizations, producing greater job-satisfaction and improved productivity. G20 governments should:

  • Open up centralised job vacancy registers to provide new mechanisms for people to find jobs.
  • Provide open statistical information about the demand for skills in particular areas to help those supporting training and education to hone their offerings.

Energy
Open data will help reduce the cost of energy supply and improve energy efficiency. G20 governments should:

  • Provide incentives for energy companies to publish open data from consumers and suppliers to enable cost savings through optimizing energy plans.
  • Release energy performance certifications for buildings
  • Publish real-time energy consumption for government buildings.

Infrastructure
Current infrastructure asset information is fragmented and inefficient. Exposing current asset data would be a significant first step in understanding gaps and providing new insights. G20 governments should:

  • Publish open data on governments’ infrastructure assets and plans to better understand infrastructure gaps, enable greater efficiency and insights in infrastructure development and use and analyse cost/benefits.
  • Publish open infrastructure data, including contracts via Open Contracting Partnership, in a consistent and harmonised way across G20 countries…”

Crowdsourcing moving beyond the fringe

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Bob Brown in Networked World: ” Depending up on how you look at it, crowdsourcing is all the rage these days — think Wikipedia, X Prize and Kickstarter — or at the other extreme, greatly underused.
To the team behind the new “insight network” Yegii, crowdsourcing has not nearly reached its potential despite having its roots as far back as the early 1700s and a famous case of the British Government seeking a solution to “The Longitude Problem” in order to make sailing less life threatening. (I get the impression that mention of this example is obligatory at any crowdsourcing event.)
This angel-funded startup, headed by an MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer and operating from a Boston suburb, is looking to exploit crowdsourcing’s potential through a service that connects financial, healthcare, technology and other organizations seeking knowledge with experts who can provide it – and fairly fast. To CEO Trond Undheim, crowdsourcing is “no longer for fringe freelance work,” and the goal is to get more organizations and smart individuals involved.
“Yegii is essentially a network of networks, connecting people, organizations, and knowledge in new ways,” says Undheim, who explains that the name Yegii is Korean for “talk” or “discussion”. “Our focus is laser sharp: we only rank and rate knowledge that says something essential about what I see as the four forces of industry disruption: technology, policy, user dynamics and business models.  We tackle challenging business issues across domains, from life sciences to energy to finance.  The point is that today’s industry classification is falling apart. We need more specific insight than in-house strategizing or generalist consulting advice.”
Undheim attempted to drum up interest in the new business last week at an event at Babson College during which a handful of crowdsourcing experts spoke. Harvard Business School adjunct professor Alan MacCormack discussed the X Prize, Netflix Prize and other examples of spurring competition through crowdsourcing. MIT’s Peter Gloor extolled the virtue of collaborative and smart swarms of people vs. stupid crowds (such as football hooligans). A couple of advertising/marketing execs shared stories of how clients and other brands are increasingly tapping into their customer base and the general public for new ideas from slogans to products, figuring that potential new customers are more likely to trust their peers than corporate ads. Another speaker dove into more details about how to run a crowdsourcing challenge, which includes identifying motivation that goes beyond money.
All of this was to frame Yegii’s crowdsourcing plan, which is at the beta stage with about a dozen clients (including Akamai and Santander bank) and is slated for mass production later this year. Yegii’s team consists of five part-timers, plus a few interns, who are building a web-based platform that consists of “knowledge assets,” that is market research, news reports and datasets from free and paid sources. That content – on topics that range from Bitcoin’s impact on banks to telecom bandwidth costs — is reviewed and ranked through a combination of machine learning and human peers. Information seekers would pay Yegii up to hundreds of dollars per month or up to tens of thousands of dollars per project, and then multidisciplinary teams would accept the challenge of answering their questions via customized reports within staged deadlines.
“We are focused on building partnerships with other expert networks and associations that have access to smart people with spare capacity, wherever they are,” Undheim says.
One reason organizations can benefit from crowdsourcing, Undheim says, is because of the “ephemeral nature of expertise in today’s society.” In other words, people within your organization might think of themselves as experts in this or that, but when they really think about it, they might realize their level of expertise has faded. Yegii will strive to narrow down the best sources of information for those looking to come up to speed on a subject over a weekend, whereas hunting for that information across a vast search engine would not be nearly as efficient….”

The Field Guide to Data Science

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Booz Allen Hamilton: “Data Science is the competitive advantage of the future for organizations interested in turning their data into a product through analytics. Industries from health, to national security, to finance, to energy can be improved by creating better data analytics through Data Science. The winners and the losers in the emerging data economy are going to be determined by their Data Science teams.
Booz Allen Hamilton created The Field Guide to Data Science to help organizations of all types and missions understand how to make use of data as a resource. The text spells out what Data Science is and why it matters to organizations as well as how to create Data Science teams. Along the way, our team of experts provides field-tested approaches, personal tips and tricks, and real-life case studies. Senior leaders will walk away with a deeper understanding of the concepts at the heart of Data Science. Practitioners will add to their toolboxes.
In The Field Guide to Data Science, our Booz Allen experts provide their insights in the following areas:

  • Start Here for the Basics provides an introduction to Data Science, including what makes Data Science unique from other analysis approaches. We will help you understand Data Science maturity within an organization and how to create a robust Data Science capability.
  • Take Off the Training Wheels is the practitioners guide to Data Science. We share our established processes, including our approach to decomposing complex Data Science problems, the Fractal Analytic Model. We conclude with the Guide to Analytic Selection to help you select the right analytic techniques to conquer your toughest challenges.
  • Life in the Trenches gives a first hand account of life as a Data Scientist. We share insights on a variety of Data Science topics through illustrative case studies. We provide tips and tricks from our own experiences on these real-life analytic challenges.
  • Putting it All Together highlights our successes creating Data Science solutions for our clients. It follows several projects from data to insights and see the impact Data Science can have on your organization…”

A brief history of open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Luke Fretwell in FCW: “In December 2007, 30 open-data pioneers gathered in Sebastopol, Calif., and penned a set of eight open-government data principles that inaugurated a new era of democratic innovation and economic opportunity.
“The objective…was to find a simple way to express values that a bunch of us think are pretty common, and these are values about how the government could make its data available in a way that enables a wider range of people to help make the government function better,” Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig said. “That means more transparency in what the government is doing and more opportunity for people to leverage government data to produce insights or other great business models.”
The eight simple principles — that data should be complete, primary, timely, accessible, machine-processable, nondiscriminatory, nonproprietary and license-free — still serve as the foundation for what has become a burgeoning open-data movement.

The benefits of open data for agencies

  • Save time and money when responding to Freedom of Information Act requests.
  • Avoid duplicative internal research.
  • Use complementary datasets held by other agencies.
  • Empower employees to make better-informed, data-driven decisions.
  • Attract positive attention from the public, media and other agencies.
  • Generate revenue and create new jobs in the private sector.

Source: Project Open Data

In the seven years since those principles were released, governments around the world have adopted open-data initiatives and launched platforms that empower researchers, journalists and entrepreneurs to mine this new raw material and its potential to uncover new discoveries and opportunities. Open data has drawn civic hacker enthusiasts around the world, fueling hackathons, challenges, apps contests, barcamps and “datapaloozas” focused on issues as varied as health, energy, finance, transportation and municipal innovation.
In the United States, the federal government initiated the beginnings of a wide-scale open-data agenda on President Barack Obama’s first day in office in January 2009, when he issued his memorandum on transparency and open government, which declared that “openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.” The president gave federal agencies three months to provide input into an open-government directive that would eventually outline what each agency planned to do with respect to civic transparency, collaboration and participation, including specific objectives related to releasing data to the public.
In May of that year, Data.gov launched with just 47 datasets and a vision to “increase public access to high-value, machine-readable datasets generated by the executive branch of the federal government.”
When the White House issued the final draft of its federal Open Government Directive later that year, the U.S. open-government data movement got its first tangible marching orders, including a 45-day deadline to open previously unreleased data to the public.
Now five years after its launch, Data.gov boasts more than 100,000 datasets from 227 local, state and federal agencies and organizations….”

OSTP’s Own Open Government Plan

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Nick Sinai and Corinna Zarek: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) today released its 2014 Open Government Plan. The OSTP plan highlights three flagship efforts as well as the team’s ongoing work to embed the open government principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration into its activities.
OSTP advises the President on the effects of science and technology on domestic and international affairs. The work of the office includes policy efforts encompassing science, environment, energy, national security, technology, and innovation. This plan builds off of the 2010 and 2012 Open Government Plans, updating progress on past initiatives and adding new subject areas based on 2014 guidance.
Agencies began releasing biennial Open Government Plans in 2010, with direction from the 2009 Open Government Directive. These plans serve as a roadmap for agency openness efforts, explaining existing practices and announcing new endeavors to be completed over the coming two years. Agencies build these plans in consultation with civil society stakeholders and the general public. Open government is a vital component of the President’s Management Agenda and our overall effort to ensure the government is expanding economic growth and opportunity for all Americans.
OSTP’s 2014 flagship efforts include:

  • Access to Scientific Collections: OSTP is leading agencies in developing policies that will improve the management of and access to scientific collections that agencies own or support. Scientific collections are assemblies of physical objects that are valuable for research and education—including drilling cores from the ocean floor and glaciers, seeds, space rocks, cells, mineral samples, fossils, and more. Agency policies will help make scientific collections and information about scientific collections more transparent and accessible in the coming years.
  • We the Geeks: We the Geeks Google+ Hangouts feature informal conversations with experts to highlight the future of science, technology, and innovation in the United States. Participants can join the conversation on Twitter by using the hashtag #WeTheGeeks and asking questions of the presenters throughout the hangout.
  • “All Hands on Deck” on STEM Education: OSTP is helping lead President Obama’s commitment to an “all-hands-on-deck approach” to providing students with skills they need to excel in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In support of this goal, OSTP is bringing together government, industry, non-profits, philanthropy, and others to expand STEM education engagement and awareness through events like the annual White House Science Fair and the upcoming White House Maker Faire.

OSTP looks forward to implementing the 2014 Open Government Plan over the coming two years to continue building on its strong tradition of transparency, participation, and collaboration—with and for the American people.”

Open Data Is Open for Business

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Stinson at Stateline: ” Last month, web designer Sean Wittmeyer and colleague Wojciech Magda walked away with a $25,000 prize from the state of Colorado for designing an online tool to help businesses decide where to locate in the state.
The tool, called “Beagle Score,” is a widget that can be embedded in online commercial real estate listings. It can rate a location by taxes and incentives, zoning, even the location of possible competitors – all derived from about 30 data sets posted publicly by the state of Colorado and its municipalities.
The creation of Beagle Score is an example of how states, cities, counties and the federal government are encouraging entrepreneurs to take raw government data posted on “open data” websites and turn the information into products the public will buy.
“The (Colorado contest) opened up a reason to use the data,” said Wittmeyer, 25, of Fort Collins. “It shows how ‘open data’ can solve a lot of challenges. … And absolutely, we can make it commercially viable. We can expand it to other states, and fairly quickly.”
Open-data advocates, such as President Barack Obama’s former information chief Vivek Kundra, estimate a multibillion-dollar industry can be spawned by taking raw government data files on sectors such as weather, population, energy, housing, commerce or transportation and turn them into products for the public to consume or other industries to pay for.
They can be as simple as mobile phone apps identifying every stop sign you will encounter on a trip to a different town, or as intricate as taking weather and crops data and turning it into insurance policies farmers can buy.

States, Cities Sponsor ‘Hackathons’

At least 39 states and 46 cities and counties have created open-data sites since the federal government, Utah, California and the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., began opening data in 2009, according to the federal site, Data.gov.
Jeanne Holm, the federal government’s Data.gov “evangelist,” said new sites are popping up and new data are being posted almost daily. The city of Los Angeles, for example, opened a portal last week.
In March, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that in the year since it was launched, his state’s site has grown to some 400 data sets with 50 million records from 45 agencies. Available are everything from horse injuries and deaths at state race tracks to maps of regulated child care centers. The most popular data: top fishing spots in the state.
State and local governments are sponsoring “hackathons,” “data paloozas,” and challenges like Colorado’s, inviting businesspeople, software developers, entrepreneurs or anyone with a laptop and a penchant for manipulating data to take part. Lexington, Kentucky, had a civic hackathon last weekend. The U.S. Transportation Department and members of the Geospatial Transportation Mapping Association had a three-day data palooza that ended Wednesday in Arlington, Virginia.
The goals of the events vary. Some, like Arlington’s transportation event, solicit ideas for how government can present its data more effectively. Others seek ideas for mining it.
Aldona Valicenti, Lexington’s chief information officer, said many cities want advice on how to use the data to make government more responsive to citizens, and to communicate with them on issues ranging from garbage pickups and snow removal to upcoming civic events.
Colorado and Wyoming had a joint hackathon last month sponsored by Google to help solve government problems. Colorado sought apps that might be useful to state emergency personnel in tracking people and moving supplies during floods, blizzards or other natural disasters. Wyoming sought help in making its tax-and-spend data more understandable and usable by its citizens.
Unless there’s some prize money, hackers may not make a buck from events like these, and participate out of fun, curiosity or a sense of public service. But those who create an app that is useful beyond the boundaries of a particular city or state, or one that is commercially valuable to business, can make serious money – just as Beagle Score plans to do. Colorado will hold onto the intellectual property rights to Beagle Score for a year. But Wittmeyer and his partner will be able to profit from extending it to other states.

States Trail in Open Data

Open data is an outgrowth of the e-government movement of the 1990s, in which government computerized more of the data it collected and began making it available on floppy disks.
States often have trailed the federal government or many cities in adjusting to the computer age and in sharing information, said Emily Shaw, national policy manager for the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government. The first big push to share came with public accountability, or “checkbook” sites, that show where government gets its revenue and how it spends it.
The goal was to make government more transparent and accountable by offering taxpayers information on how their money was spent.
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts site, established in 2007, offers detailed revenue, spending, tax and contracts data. Republican Comptroller Susan Combs’ office said having a one-stop electronic site also has saved taxpayers about $12.3 million in labor, printing, postage and other costs.
Not all states’ checkbook sites are as openly transparent and detailed as Texas, Shaw said. Nor are their open-data sites. “There’s so much variation between the states,” she said.
Many state legislatures are working to set policies for releasing data. Since the start of 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nine states have enacted open-data laws, and more legislation is pending. But California, for instance, has been posting open data for five years without legislation setting policies.
Just as states have lagged in getting data out to the public, less of it has been turned into commercial use, said Joel Gurin, senior adviser at the Governance Lab at New York University and author of the book “Open Data Now.”
Gurin leads Open Data 500, which identifies firms that that have made products from open government data and turned them into regional or national enterprises. In April, it listed 500. It soon may expand. “We’re finding more and more companies every day,” he said. “…

Lessons in Mass Collaboration

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Elizabeth Walker, Ryan Siegel, Todd Khozein, Nick Skytland, Ali Llewellyn, Thea Aldrich, and Michael Brennan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “significant advances in technology in the last two decades have opened possibilities to engage the masses in ways impossible to imagine centuries ago. Beyond coordination, today’s technological capability permits organizations to leverage and focus public interest, talent, and energy through mass collaborative engagement to better understand and solve today’s challenges. And given the rising public awareness of a variety of social, economic, and environmental problems, organizations have seized the opportunity to leverage and lead mass collaborations in the form of hackathons.
Hackathons emerged in the mid-2000s as a popular approach to leverage the expertise of large numbers of individuals to address social issues, often through the creation of online technological solutions. Having led hundreds of mass collaboration initiatives for organizations around the world in diverse cultural contexts, we at SecondMuse offer the following lessons as a starting point for others interested in engaging the masses, as well as challenges others’ may face.

What Mass Collaboration Looks Like

An early example of a mass collaborative endeavor was Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), which formed in 2009. RHoK was initially developed in collaboration with Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA, the World Bank, and later, HP as a volunteer mobilization effort; it aimed to build technology that would enable communities to respond better to crises such as natural disasters. In 2012, nearly 1,000 participants attended 30 events around the world to address 176 well-defined problems.
In 2013, NASA and SecondMuse led the International Space Apps Challenge, which engaged six US federal agencies, 400 partner institutions, and 9,000 global citizens through a variety of local and global team configurations; it aimed to address 58 different challenges to improve life on Earth and in space. In Athens, Greece, for example, in direct response to the challenge of creating a space-deployable greenhouse, a team developed a modular spinach greenhouse designed to survive the harsh Martian climate. Two months later, 11,000 citizens across 95 events participated in the National Day of Civic Hacking in 83 different US cities, ultimately contributing about 150,000 person-hours and addressing 31 federal and several state and local challenges over a single weekend. One result was Keep Austin Fed from Austin, Texas, which leveraged local data to coordinate food donations for those in need.
Strong interest on the part of institutions and an enthusiastic international community has paved the way for follow-up events in 2014.

Benefits of Mass Collaboration

The benefits of this approach to problem-solving are many, including:

  • Incentivizing the use of government data. As institutions push to make data available to the public, mass collaboration can increase the usefulness of that data by creating products from it, as well as inform and streamline future data collection processes.
  • Increasing transparency. Engaging citizens in the process of addressing public concerns educates them about the work that institutions do and advances efforts to meet public expectations of transparency.
  • Increasing outcome ownership. When people engage in a collaborative process of problem solving, they naturally have a greater stake in the outcome. Put simply, the more people who participate in the process, the greater the sense of community ownership. Also, when spearheading new policies or initiatives, the support of a knowledgeable community can be important to long-term success.
  • Increasing awareness. Engaging the populace in addressing challenges of public concern increases awareness of issues and helps develop an active citizenry. As a result, improved public perception and license to operate bolster governmental and non-governmental efforts to address challenges.
  • Saving money. By providing data and structures to the public, and allowing them to build and iterate on plans and prototypes, mass collaboration gives agencies a chance to harness the power of open innovation with minimal time and funds.
  • Harnessing cognitive surplus. The advent of online tools allowing for distributed collaboration enables citizens to use their free time incrementally toward collective endeavors that benefit local communities and the nation.

Challenges of Mass Collaboration

Although the benefits can be significant, agencies planning to lead mass collaborations should be aware of several challenges:

  • Investing time and effort. A mass collaboration is most effective when it is not a one-time event. The up-front investment in building a collaboration of supporting partner organizations, creating a robust framework for action, developing the necessary tools and defining the challenges, and investing in implementation and scaling of the most promising results all require substantial time to secure long-term commitment and strong relationships.
  • Forging an institution-community relationship. Throughout the course of most engagements, the power dynamic between the organization providing the frameworks and challenges and the groupings of individuals responding to the call to action can shift dramatically as the community incorporates the endeavor into their collective identity. Everyone involved should embrace this as they lay the foundation for self-sustaining mass collaboration communities. Once participants develop a firmly entrenched collective identity and sense of ownership, the convening organization can fully tap into its collective genius, as they can work together based on trust and shared vision. Without community ownership, organizers need to allot more time, energy, and resources to keep their initiative moving forward, and to battle against volunteer fatigue, diminished productivity, and substandard output.
  • Focusing follow-up. Turning a massive infusion of creative ideas, concepts, and prototypes into concrete solutions requires a process of focused follow-up. Identifying and nurturing the most promising seeds to fruition requires time, discrete skills, insight, and—depending on the solutions you scale—support from a variety of external organizations.
  • Understanding ROI. Any resource-intensive endeavor where only a few of numerous resulting products ever see the light of day demands deep consideration of what constitutes a reasonable return on investment. For mass collaborations, this means having an initial understanding of the potential tangible and intangible outcomes, and making a frank assessment of whether those outcomes meet the needs of the collaborators.

Technological developments in the last century have enabled relationships between individuals and institutions to blossom into a rich and complex tapestry…”

The Trend towards “Smart Cities”

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Chien-Chu Chen in the International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology (AUSMT): “Looking back over the past century, the steady pace of development in many of the world’s cities has resulted in a situation where a high percentage of these cities are now faced with the problem of aging, decrepit urban infrastructure; a considerable number of cities are having to undertake large-scale infrastructure renewal projects. While creating new opportunities in the area of infrastructure, ongoing urbanization is also creating problems, such as excessive consumption of water, electric power and heat energy, environmental pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions, traffic jams, and the aging of the existing residential housing stock, etc. All of these problems present a challenge to cities’ ability to achieve sustainable development. In response to these issues, the concept of the “smart city” has grown in popularity throughout the world. The aim of smart city initiatives is to make the city a vehicle for “smartification” through the integration of different industries and sectors. As initiatives of this kind move beyond basic automation into the realm of real “smartification,” the smart city concept is beginning to take concrete form….”

Harnessing the Power of Data, Technology, and Innovation for a Clean Energy Economy

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The White House: “Today, the White House, the Energy Department, and the General Services Administration are teaming up to host an Energy Datapalooza, highlighting important new steps in the public and private sectors to leverage data and innovation in ways that promote a clean energy economy in America.
Advances in technology are making it easier for consumers and businesses across the nation to better understand how they are using and saving energy. Empowering citizens with information about their energy usage can help them make smart choices that cut energy waste, cut down energy bills, and preserve our environment.
The federal government has an important role to play in unleashing energy-related data and catalyzing innovation to support these savings. That is why the Obama Administration has taken unprecedented steps to make open government data more available to citizens, companies, and innovators — including by launching both an Energy Data Initiative and a Climate Data Initiative.
In addition, in 2011, the Administration launched the Green Button Initiative to provide families and businesses with easy and secure access to their own energy-usage information. And today, the Obama Administration is announcing a number of new steps to continue this momentum, including: a successful federal pilot applying the Green Button to help building managers achieve greater efficiencies; and new or expanded data resources and tools in the areas of geothermal, solar, hydropower, bio energy, and buildings.
Private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators are important partners in this effort. They are continually finding new ways to use groundbreaking software and technologies to analyze data about energy usage, building efficiency, renewable energy sources, and more, and providing those data to consumers in ways that help them achieve energy savings and help advance America’s clean energy goals.
At today’s Energy Datapalooza, companies, utilities, and innovators who are leading the charge in this important domain are announcing new commitments to make energy data available to their customers, provide consumers and first-responders with information about power outages, publish data about open building energy performance, and more. These innovators — and dozens more students, researchers, and technologists — will demonstrate exciting tools, apps, and services at a live Innovation Showcase, highlighting just some of the cutting-edge advances already underway in the energy-data space….
FACT SHEET: Harnessing the Power of Data for a Clean, Secure, and Reliable Energy Future ”
 

Continued Progress and Plans for Open Government Data

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Steve VanRoekel, and Todd Park at the White House:  “One year ago today, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This historic step is helping to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy.
Freely available data from the U.S. government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and economic growth. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government. This initiative is a key component of the President’s Management Agenda and our efforts to ensure the government is acting as an engine to expand economic growth and opportunity for all Americans. The Administration is committed to driving further progress in this area, including by designating Open Data as one of our key Cross-Agency Priority Goals.
Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a number of Open Data Initiatives aimed at scaling up open data efforts across the Health, Energy, Climate, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development sectors. The White House has also launched Project Open Data, designed to share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with opening data. These efforts have helped unlock troves of valuable data—that taxpayers have already paid for—and are making these resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public.
Other countries are also opening up their data. In June 2013, President Obama and other G7 leaders endorsed the Open Data Charter, in which the United States committed to publish a roadmap for our nation’s approach to releasing and improving government data for the public.
Building upon the Administration’s Open Data progress, and in fulfillment of the Open Data Charter, today we are excited to release the U.S. Open Data Action Plan. The plan includes a number of exciting enhancements and new data releases planned in 2014 and 2015, including:

  • Small Business Data: The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database of small business suppliers will be enhanced so that software developers can create tools to help manufacturers more easily find qualified U.S. suppliers, ultimately reducing the transaction costs to source products and manufacture domestically.
  • Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s entire digitized collection will be opened to software developers to make educational apps and tools. Today, even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.
  • FDA Adverse Drug Event Data: Each year, healthcare professionals and consumers submit millions of individual reports on drug safety to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These anonymous reports are a critical tool to support drug safety surveillance. Today, this data is only available through limited quarterly reports. But the Administration will soon be making these reports available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help pull potentially dangerous drugs off shelves faster than ever before.

We look forward to implementing the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, and to continuing to work with our partner countries in the G7 to take the open data movement global”.