Open Data Could Unlock $230 Billion In Energy-Efficiency Savings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeff McMahon at Forbes: “Energy-efficiency startups just need access to existing data—on electricity usage, housing characteristics, renovations and financing—to unlock hundreds of billions of dollars in savings, two founders of  startups said in Chicago Tuesday.
“One of the big barriers to scaling energy efficiency is the lack of data in the market,” said Andy Frank of Sealed, a startup that encourages efficiency improvements by guaranteeing homeowners a lower bill than they’re paying now.
In a forum hosted by the Energy Policy Institute at Chicago, Frank and Matt Gee, founder of Effortless Energy, advocated an open-energy-data warehouse that would collect anonymized data from utilities, cities, contractors, and financiers, to make the data available for research, government, and industry.
“There needs to be some sort of entity that organizes all this information and has it in some sort of standard format,” said Gee, whose startup pays for home improvements up front and then splits the savings with investors and the homeowner.
According to Gee, the current $9.5 billion energy-efficiency market operates without data on the actual savings it produces for homeowners. He outlined the current market like this:

  1. A regulatory body, usually a public utility commission, mandates that a utility spend money on efficiency.
  2. The utility passes on the cost to customers through an efficiency surcharge (this is how the $9.5 billion is raised).
  3. The utility hires a program implementer.
  4. The program implementer sends auditors to customer homes.
  5. Potential savings from improvements like new insulation or new appliances are estimated based on models.
  6. Those modeled estimates determine what the contractor can do in the home.
  7. The modeled estimates determine what financing is available.

In some cases, utilities will hire consultants to estimate the savings generated from these improvements. California utilities spend $40 million a year estimating savings, Gee said, but actual savings are neither verified nor integrated in the process.
“Nowhere in this process do actual savings enter,” Gee said. “They don’t drive anyone’s incentives, which is just absolutely astounding, right? The opportunity here is that energy efficiency actually pays for itself. It should be something that’s self-financed.”
For that to happen, the market needs reliable information on how much energy is currently being wasted and how much is saved by improvements….”

Findings of the Big Data and Privacy Working Group Review

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Podesta at the White House Blog: “Over the past several days, severe storms have battered Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and other states. Dozens of people have been killed and entire neighborhoods turned to rubble and debris as tornadoes have touched down across the region. Natural disasters like these present a host of challenges for first responders. How many people are affected, injured, or dead? Where can they find food, shelter, and medical attention? What critical infrastructure might have been damaged?
Drawing on open government data sources, including Census demographics and NOAA weather data, along with their own demographic databases, Esri, a geospatial technology company, has created a real-time map showing where the twisters have been spotted and how the storm systems are moving. They have also used these data to show how many people live in the affected area, and summarize potential impacts from the storms. It’s a powerful tool for emergency services and communities. And it’s driven by big data technology.
In January, President Obama asked me to lead a wide-ranging review of “big data” and privacy—to explore how these technologies are changing our economy, our government, and our society, and to consider their implications for our personal privacy. Together with Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, the President’s Science Advisor John Holdren, the President’s Economic Advisor Jeff Zients, and other senior officials, our review sought to understand what is genuinely new and different about big data and to consider how best to encourage the potential of these technologies while minimizing risks to privacy and core American values.
Over the course of 90 days, we met with academic researchers and privacy advocates, with regulators and the technology industry, with advertisers and civil rights groups. The President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology conducted a parallel study of the technological trends underpinning big data. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly organized three university conferences at MIT, NYU, and U.C. Berkeley. We issued a formal Request for Information seeking public comment, and hosted a survey to generate even more public input.
Today, we presented our findings to the President. We knew better than to try to answer every question about big data in three months. But we are able to draw important conclusions and make concrete recommendations for Administration attention and policy development in a few key areas.
There are a few technological trends that bear drawing out. The declining cost of collection, storage, and processing of data, combined with new sources of data like sensors, cameras, and geospatial technologies, mean that we live in a world of near-ubiquitous data collection. All this data is being crunched at a speed that is increasingly approaching real-time, meaning that big data algorithms could soon have immediate effects on decisions being made about our lives.
The big data revolution presents incredible opportunities in virtually every sector of the economy and every corner of society.
Big data is saving lives. Infections are dangerous—even deadly—for many babies born prematurely. By collecting and analyzing millions of data points from a NICU, one study was able to identify factors, like slight increases in body temperature and heart rate, that serve as early warning signs an infection may be taking root—subtle changes that even the most experienced doctors wouldn’t have noticed on their own.
Big data is making the economy work better. Jet engines and delivery trucks now come outfitted with sensors that continuously monitor hundreds of data points and send automatic alerts when maintenance is needed. Utility companies are starting to use big data to predict periods of peak electric demand, adjusting the grid to be more efficient and potentially averting brown-outs.
Big data is making government work better and saving taxpayer dollars. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have begun using predictive analytics—a big data technique—to flag likely instances of reimbursement fraud before claims are paid. The Fraud Prevention System helps identify the highest-risk health care providers for waste, fraud, and abuse in real time and has already stopped, prevented, or identified $115 million in fraudulent payments.
But big data raises serious questions, too, about how we protect our privacy and other values in a world where data collection is increasingly ubiquitous and where analysis is conducted at speeds approaching real time. In particular, our review raised the question of whether the “notice and consent” framework, in which a user grants permission for a service to collect and use information about them, still allows us to meaningfully control our privacy as data about us is increasingly used and reused in ways that could not have been anticipated when it was collected.
Big data raises other concerns, as well. One significant finding of our review was the potential for big data analytics to lead to discriminatory outcomes and to circumvent longstanding civil rights protections in housing, employment, credit, and the consumer marketplace.
No matter how quickly technology advances, it remains within our power to ensure that we both encourage innovation and protect our values through law, policy, and the practices we encourage in the public and private sector. To that end, we make six actionable policy recommendations in our report to the President:
Advance the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. Consumers deserve clear, understandable, reasonable standards for how their personal information is used in the big data era. We recommend the Department of Commerce take appropriate consultative steps to seek stakeholder and public comment on what changes, if any, are needed to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, first proposed by the President in 2012, and to prepare draft legislative text for consideration by stakeholders and submission by the President to Congress.
Pass National Data Breach Legislation. Big data technologies make it possible to store significantly more data, and further derive intimate insights into a person’s character, habits, preferences, and activities. That makes the potential impacts of data breaches at businesses or other organizations even more serious. A patchwork of state laws currently governs requirements for reporting data breaches. Congress should pass legislation that provides for a single national data breach standard, along the lines of the Administration’s 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.
Extend Privacy Protections to non-U.S. Persons. Privacy is a worldwide value that should be reflected in how the federal government handles personally identifiable information about non-U.S. citizens. The Office of Management and Budget should work with departments and agencies to apply the Privacy Act of 1974 to non-U.S. persons where practicable, or to establish alternative privacy policies that apply appropriate and meaningful protections to personal information regardless of a person’s nationality.
Ensure Data Collected on Students in School is used for Educational Purposes. Big data and other technological innovations, including new online course platforms that provide students real time feedback, promise to transform education by personalizing learning. At the same time, the federal government must ensure educational data linked to individual students gathered in school is used for educational purposes, and protect students against their data being shared or used inappropriately.
Expand Technical Expertise to Stop Discrimination. The detailed personal profiles held about many consumers, combined with automated, algorithm-driven decision-making, could lead—intentionally or inadvertently—to discriminatory outcomes, or what some are already calling “digital redlining.” The federal government’s lead civil rights and consumer protection agencies should expand their technical expertise to be able to identify practices and outcomes facilitated by big data analytics that have a discriminatory impact on protected classes, and develop a plan for investigating and resolving violations of law.
Amend the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The laws that govern protections afforded to our communications were written before email, the internet, and cloud computing came into wide use. Congress should amend ECPA to ensure the standard of protection for online, digital content is consistent with that afforded in the physical world—including by removing archaic distinctions between email left unread or over a certain age.
We also identify several broader areas ripe for further study, debate, and public engagement that, collectively, we hope will spark a national conversation about how to harness big data for the public good. We conclude that we must find a way to preserve our privacy values in both the domestic and international marketplace. We urgently need to build capacity in the federal government to identify and prevent new modes of discrimination that could be enabled by big data. We must ensure that law enforcement agencies using big data technologies do so responsibly, and that our fundamental privacy rights remain protected. Finally, we recognize that data is a valuable public resource, and call for continuing the Administration’s efforts to open more government data sources and make investments in research and technology.
While big data presents new challenges, it also presents immense opportunities to improve lives, the United States is perhaps better suited to lead this conversation than any other nation on earth. Our innovative spirit, technological know-how, and deep commitment to values of privacy, fairness, non-discrimination, and self-determination will help us harness the benefits of the big data revolution and encourage the free flow of information while working with our international partners to protect personal privacy. This review is but one piece of that effort, and we hope it spurs a conversation about big data across the country and around the world.
Read the Big Data Report.
See the fact sheet from today’s announcement.“

Twenty-one European Cities Advance in Bloomberg Philanthropies' Mayors Challenge Competition to Create Innovative Solutions to Urban Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Bloomberg Philanthropies today revealed the 21 European cities that have emerged as final contenders in its 2013-2014 Mayors Challenge, a competition to inspire cities to generate innovative ideas that solve major challenges and improve city life, and that ultimately can spread to other cities. One grand prize winner will receive €5 million for the most creative and transferable idea. Four additional cities will be awarded €1 million, and all will be announced in the fall. The finalists’ proposed solutions address some of Europe’s most critical issue areas: youth unemployment, aging populations, civic engagement, economic development, environment and energy concerns, public health and safety, and making government more efficient…
James Anderson, the head of government innovation for Bloomberg Philanthropies, said: “While the ideas are very diverse, we identified key themes. The ideas tended toward networked, distributed solutions as opposed to costly centralized ones. There was a lot of interest in citizen engagement as both a means and end. Technology that concretely and positively affects the lives of individual citizens – from the blind person in Warsaw to the unemployed youth in Amsterdam to the homeowner in Schaerbeek — also played a significant role.”
Bloomberg Philanthropies staff and an independent selection committee of 12 members from across Europe closely considered each application over multiple rounds of review, culminating in feedback and selection earlier this month, resulting in 21 cities’ ideas moving forward for further development. The submissions will be judged on four critieria: vision, potential for impact, implementation plan, and potential to spread to other cities. The finalists and their ideas are:

  1. AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Youth Unemployment: Tackling widespread youth unemployment by equipping young people with 21st century skills and connecting them with jobs and apprenticeships across Europe through an online game
  2. ATHENS, Greece – Civic Engagement: Empowering citizens with a new online platform to address the large number of small-scale urban challenges accelerated by the Greek economic crisis
  3. BARCELONA, Spain – Aging: Improving quality of life and limiting social isolation by establishing a network of public and private support – including family, friends, social workers, and volunteers – for each elderly citizen
  4. BOLOGNA, Italy – Youth Unemployment: Building an urban scale model of informal education labs and civic engagement to prevent youth unemployment by teaching children aged 6-16 entrepreneurship and 21st century skills
  5. BRISTOL, United Kingdom – Health/Anti-obesity: Tackling obesity and unemployment by creating a new economic system that increases access to locally grown, healthy foods
  6. BRNO, Czech Republic – Public Safety/Civic Engagement: Engaging citizens in keeping their own communities safe to build social cohesion and reduce crime
  7. CARDIFF, United Kingdom – Economic Development: Increasing productivity little by little in residents’ personal and professional lives, so that a series of small improvements add up to a much more productive city
  8. FLORENCE, Italy – Economic Development: Combatting unemployment with a new economic development model that combines technology and social innovation, targeting the city’s historic artisan and maker community
  9. GDAŃSK, Poland – Civic Engagement: Re-instilling faith in local democracy by mandating that city government formally debate local issues put forward by citizens
  10. KIRKLEES, United Kingdom – Social Capital: Pooling the city and community’s idle assets – from vehicles to unused spaces to citizens’ untapped time and expertise – to help the area make the most of what it has and do more with less
  11. KRAKOW, Poland – Transportation: Implementing smart, personalized transportation incentives and a seamless and unified public transit payment system to convince residents to opt for greener modes of transportation
  12. LISBON, Portugal – Energy: Transforming wasted kinetic energy generated by the city’s commuting traffic into electricity, reducing the carbon footprint and increasing environmental sustainability
  13. LONDON, United Kingdom – Public Health: Empowering citizens to monitor and improve their own health through a coordinated, multi-stakeholder platform and new technologies that dramatically improve quality of life and reduce health care costs
  14. MADRID, Spain – Energy: Diversifying its renewable energy options by finding and funding the best ways to harvest underground power, such as wasted heat generated by the city’s below-ground infrastructure
  15. SCHAERBEEK, Belgium – Energy: Using proven flyover and 3D geothermal mapping technology to provide each homeowner and tenant with a personalized energy audit and incentives to invest in energy-saving strategies
  16. SOFIA, Bulgaria – Civic Engagement: Transforming public spaces by deploying mobile art units to work side-by-side with local residents, re-envisioning and rejuvenating underused spaces and increasing civic engagement
  17. STARA ZAGORA, Bulgaria – Economic Development: Reversing the brain-drain of the city’s best and brightest by helping young entrepreneurs turn promising ideas into local high-tech businesses
  18. STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Environment: Combatting climate change by engaging citizens to produce biochar, an organic material that increases tree growth, sequesters carbon, and purifies storm runoff
  19. THE HAGUE, Netherlands – Civic Engagement: Enabling citizens to allocate a portion of their own tax money to support the local projects they most believe in
  20. WARSAW, Poland – Transportation/Accessibility: Enabling the blind and visually impaired to navigate the city as easily as their sighted peers by providing high-tech auditory alerts which will save them travel time and increase their independence
  21. YORK, United Kingdom – Government Systems: Revolutionizing the way citizens, businesses, and others can propose new ideas to solve top city problems, providing a more intelligent way to acquire or develop the best solutions, thus enabling greater civic participation and saving the city both time and money

Further detail and related elements for this year’s Mayors Challenge can be found via: http://mayorschallenge.bloomberg.org/”

Smart cities are here today — and getting smarter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Computer World: “Smart cities aren’t a science fiction, far-off-in-the-future concept. They’re here today, with municipal governments already using technologies that include wireless networks, big data/analytics, mobile applications, Web portals, social media, sensors/tracking products and other tools.
These smart city efforts have lofty goals: Enhancing the quality of life for citizens, improving government processes and reducing energy consumption, among others. Indeed, cities are already seeing some tangible benefits.
But creating a smart city comes with daunting challenges, including the need to provide effective data security and privacy, and to ensure that myriad departments work in harmony.

The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.5% per year between 2025 and 2030, mostly in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization.

What makes a city smart? As with any buzz term, the definition varies. But in general, it refers to using information and communications technologies to deliver sustainable economic development and a higher quality of life, while engaging citizens and effectively managing natural resources.
Making cities smarter will become increasingly important. For the first time ever, the majority of the world’s population resides in a city, and this proportion continues to grow, according to the World Health Organization, the coordinating authority for health within the United Nations.
A hundred years ago, two out of every 10 people lived in an urban area, the organization says. As recently as 1990, less than 40% of the global population lived in a city — but by 2010 more than half of all people lived in an urban area. By 2050, the proportion of city dwellers is expected to rise to 70%.
As many city populations continue to grow, here’s what five U.S. cities are doing to help manage it all:

Scottsdale, Ariz.

The city of Scottsdale, Ariz., has several initiatives underway.
One is MyScottsdale, a mobile application the city deployed in the summer of 2013 that allows citizens to report cracked sidewalks, broken street lights and traffic lights, road and sewer issues, graffiti and other problems in the community….”

Charities Try New Ways to Test Ideas Quickly and Polish Them Later

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “A year ago, a division of TechSoup Global began working on an app to allow donors to buy a hotel room for victims of domestic violence when no other shelter is available. Now that app is a finalist in a competition run by a foundation that combats human trafficking—and a win could mean a grant worth several hundred thousand dollars. The app’s evolution—adding a focus on sex slaves to the initial emphasis on domestic violence—was hardly accidental.
Caravan Studios, the TechSoup division that created the app, has embraced a new management approach popular in Silicon Valley known as “lean start-up.”
The principles, which are increasingly popular among nonprofits, emphasize experimentation over long-term planning and urge groups to get products and services out to clients as early as possible so the organizations can learn from feedback and make changes.
When the app, known as SafeNight, was still early in the design phase, Caravan posted details about the project on its website, including applications for grants that Caravan had not yet received. In lean-start-up lingo, Caravan put out a “minimal viable product” and hoped for feedback that would lead to a better app.
Caravan soon heard from antitrafficking organizations, which were interested in the same kind of service. Caravan eventually teamed up with the Polaris Project and the State of New Jersey, which were working on a similar app, to jointly create an app for the final round of the antitrafficking contest. Humanity United, the foundation sponsoring the contest, plans to award $1.8-million to as many as three winners later this month.
Marnie Webb, CEO of Caravan, which is building an array of apps designed to curb social problems, says lean-start-up principles help Caravan work faster and meet real needs.
“The central idea is that any product that we develop will get better if it lives as much of its life as possible outside of our office,” Ms. Webb says. “If we had kept SafeNight inside and polished it and polished it, it would have been super hard to bring on a partner because we would have invested too much.”….
Nonprofits developing new tech tools are among the biggest users of lean-start-up ideas.
Upwell, an ocean-conservation organization founded in 2011, scans the web for lively ocean-related discussions and then pushes to turn them into full-fledged movements through social-media campaigns.
Lean principles urge groups to steer clear of “vanity metrics,” such as site visits, that may sound impressive but don’t reveal much. Upwell tracks only one number—“social mentions”—the much smaller group of people who actually say something about an issue online.
After identifying a hot topic, Upwell tries to assemble a social-media strategy within 24 hours—what it calls a “minimum viable campaign.”
“We do the least amount of work to get something out the door that will get results and information,” says Rachel Dearborn, Upwell’s campaign director.
Campaigns that don’t catch on are quickly scrapped. But campaigns that do catch on get more time, energy, and money from Upwell.
After Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, a prominent writer on ocean issues and others began pushing the idea that revitalizing the oyster beds near New York City could help protect the shore from future storm surges. Upwell’s “I (Oyster) New York” campaign featured a catchy logo and led to an even bigger spike in attention.

‘Build-Measure-Learn’

Some organizations that could hardly be called start-ups are also using lean principles. GuideStar, the 20-year-old aggregator of financial information about charities, is using the lean approach to develop tools more quickly that meet the needs of its users.
The lean process promotes short “build-measure-learn” cycles, in which a group frequently updates a product or service based on what it hears from its customers.
GuideStar and the Nonprofit Finance Fund have developed a tool called Financial Scan that allows charities to see how they compare with similar groups on various financial measures, such as their mix of earned revenue and grant funds.
When it analyzed who was using the tool, GuideStar found heavy interest from both foundations and accounting firms, says Evan Paul, GuideStar’s senior director of products and marketing.
In the future, he says, GuideStar may create three versions of Financial Scan to meet the distinct interests of charities, foundations, and accountants.
“We want to get more specific about how people are using our data to make decisions so that we can help make those decisions better and faster,” Mr. Paul says….

Lean Start-Up: a Glossary of Terms for a Hot New Management Approach

Build-Measure-Learn

Instead of spending considerable time developing a product or service for a big rollout, organizations should consider using a continuous feedback loop: “build” a program or service, even if it is not fully fleshed out; “measure” how clients are affected; and “learn” by improving the program or going in a new direction. Repeat the cycle.

Minimum Viable Product

An early version of a product or service that may be lacking some features. This approach allows an organization to obtain feedback from clients and quickly determine the usefulness of a product or service and how to improve it.

Get Out of the Building

To determine whether a product or service is needed, talk to clients and share your ideas with them before investing heavily.

A/B Testing

Create two versions of a product or service, show them to different groups, and see which performs best.

Failing Fast

By quickly realizing that a product or service isn’t viable, organizations save time and money and gain valuable information for their next effort.

Pivot

Making a significant change in strategy when the early testing of a minimum viable product shows that the product or service isn’t working or isn’t needed.

Vanity Metrics

Measures that seem to provide a favorable picture but don’t accurately capture the impact of a product. An example might be a tally of website page views. A more meaningful measure—or an “actionable metric,” in the lean lexicon—might be the number of active users of an online service.
Sources: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries; The Ultimate Dictionary of Lean for Social Good, a publication by Lean Impact”

After the Protests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekc in the New York Times on why social media is fueling a boom-and-bust cycle of political: “LAST Wednesday, more than 100,000 people showed up in Istanbul for a funeral that turned into a mass demonstration. No formal organization made the call. The news had come from Twitter: Berkin Elvan, 15, had died. He had been hit in the head by a tear-gas canister on his way to buy bread during the Gezi protests last June. During the 269 days he spent in a coma, Berkin’s face had become a symbol of civic resistance shared on social media from Facebook to Instagram, and the response, when his family tweeted “we lost our son” and then a funeral date, was spontaneous.

Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment….

But after all that, in the approaching local elections, the ruling party is expected to retain its dominance.

Compare this with what it took to produce and distribute pamphlets announcing the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, and a few students sneaked into the duplicating room and worked all night to secretly mimeograph 52,000 leaflets to be distributed by hand with the help of 68 African-American political, religious, educational and labor organizations throughout the city. Even mundane tasks like coordinating car pools (in an era before there were spreadsheets) required endless hours of collaborative work.

By the time the United States government was faced with the March on Washington in 1963, the protest amounted to not just 300,000 demonstrators but the committed partnerships and logistics required to get them all there — and to sustain a movement for years against brutally enforced Jim Crow laws. That movement had the capacity to leverage boycotts, strikes and demonstrations to push its cause forward. Recent marches on Washington of similar sizes, including the 50th anniversary march last year, also signaled discontent and a desire for change, but just didn’t pose the same threat to the powers that be.

Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change. That’s one reason the same-sex marriage movement, which uses online and offline visibility as a key strategy, has been so successful, and it’s also why authoritarian governments try to ban social media.

During the Gezi protests, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Twitter and other social media a “menace to society.” More recently, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law greatly increasing the government’s ability to censor online content and expand surveillance, and Mr. Erdogan said he would consider blocking access to Facebook and YouTube. It’s also telling that one of the first moves by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia before annexing Crimea was to shut down the websites of dissidents in Russia.
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.”

Climate Data Initiative Launches with Strong Public and Private Sector Commitments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Podesta and Dr. John P. Holdren at the White House blog:  “…today, delivering on a commitment in the President’s Climate Action Plan, we are launching the Climate Data Initiative, an ambitious new effort bringing together extensive open government data and design competitions with commitments from the private and philanthropic sectors to develop data-driven planning and resilience tools for local communities. This effort will help give communities across America the information and tools they need to plan for current and future climate impacts.
The Climate Data Initiative builds on the success of the Obama Administration’s ongoing efforts to unleash the power of open government data. Since data.gov, the central site to find U.S. government data resources, launched in 2009, the Federal government has released troves of valuable data that were previously hard to access in areas such as health, energy, education, public safety, and global development. Today these data are being used by entrepreneurs, researchers, tech innovators, and others to create countless new applications, tools, services, and businesses.
Data from NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Department of Defense, and other Federal agencies will be featured on climate.data.gov, a new section within data.gov that opens for business today. The first batch of climate data being made available will focus on coastal flooding and sea level rise. NOAA and NASA will also be announcing an innovation challenge calling on researchers and developers to create data-driven simulations to help plan for the future and to educate the public about the vulnerability of their own communities to sea level rise and flood events.
These and other Federal efforts will be amplified by a number of ambitious private commitments. For example, Esri, the company that produces the ArcGIS software used by thousands of city and regional planning experts, will be partnering with 12 cities across the country to create free and open “maps and apps” to help state and local governments plan for climate change impacts. Google will donate one petabyte—that’s 1,000 terabytes—of cloud storage for climate data, as well as 50 million hours of high-performance computing with the Google Earth Engine platform. The company is challenging the global innovation community to build a high-resolution global terrain model to help communities build resilience to anticipated climate impacts in decades to come. And the World Bank will release a new field guide for the Open Data for Resilience Initiative, which is working in more than 20 countries to map millions of buildings and urban infrastructure….”

The Next Frontier in Crowdsourcing: Your Smartphone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Metz in MIT TechnologyReview: “Rather than swiping the screen or entering a passcode to unlock the smartphone in my hand, I have to tell it how energetic the people around me are feeling by tapping one of four icons. I’m the only one here, and the one that best fits my actual energy level, to be honest, is a figure lying down and emitting a trail of z’s.
I’m trying out an Android app called Twitch. Created by Stanford researchers, it asks you to complete a few simple tasks—contributing information, as with the reported energy levels, or performing simple tasks like ranking images or structuring data extracted from Wikipedia pages—each time you unlock your phone. The information collected by apps like Twitch could be useful to academics, market researchers, or local businesses. Such software could also provide a low-cost way to perform useful work that can easily be broken up into pieces and fed to millions of devices.

Twitch is one of several projects exploring crowdsourcing via the lock screen. Plenty of people already contribute freely to crowdsourcing websites like Wikipedia and Quora or paid services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the sustained popularity of traffic app Waze shows that people are willing to contribute to a common cause from their handsets if it provides a timely, helpful result.
There are certainly enough smartphones with lock screens ready to be harnessed. According to data from market researcher comScore, 160 million people in the U.S.—or 67 percent of cell phone users—have smartphones, and nearly 52 percent of these run Google’s Android OS, which allows apps like Twitch to replace the standard lock screen….”

Get Smart: Commission brings “open planning” movement to Europe to speed spread of smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The European Commission is calling on those involved in creating smart cities to publish their efforts in order to help build an open planning movement from the ground up.
The challenge is being issued to city administrations, small and large companies and other organisations to go public with their ICT, energy and mobility plans, so that all parties can learn from each other and grow the smart city market. Through collaboration as well as traditional competition, the Europe will get smarter, more competitive and more sustainable.
The Commission is looking for both new commitments to “get smart” and for interested parties to share their current and past successes. Sharing these ideas will feed the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (see IP/13/1159 and MEMO/13/1049) and networks such as the Smart Cities Stakeholder Platform, the Green Digital Charter, the Covenant of Mayors, and CIVITAS.
What’s in it for me?
If you are working in the smart cities field, joining the open planning movement will help you find the right partners, get better access to finance and make it easier to learn from your peers. You will help grow the marketplace you work in, and create export opportunities outside of Europe.
If you live in a city, you will benefit sooner from better traffic flows, greener buildings, and cheaper or more convenient services.
European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said, “For those of us living in cities, – we need to make sure they are smart cities. Nothing else makes sense. And nothing else is such a worldwide economic opportunity – so we need to get sharing!”.
Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said: “Cities and Communities can only get smart if mayors and governors are committed to apply innovative industrial solutions”.
In June 2014 the Commission will then seek to analyse, group and promote the best plans and initiatives.”

Big Data, Big New Businesses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shaboldt and Michael Chui: “Many people have long believed that if government and the private sector agreed to share their data more freely, and allow it to be processed using the right analytics, previously unimaginable solutions to countless social, economic, and commercial problems would emerge. They may have no idea how right they are.

Even the most vocal proponents of open data appear to have underestimated how many profitable ideas and businesses stand to be created. More than 40 governments worldwide have committed to opening up their electronic data – including weather records, crime statistics, transport information, and much more – to businesses, consumers, and the general public. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the annual value of open data in education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance could reach $3 trillion.

These benefits come in the form of new and better goods and services, as well as efficiency savings for businesses, consumers, and citizens. The range is vast. For example, drawing on data from various government agencies, the Climate Corporation (recently bought for $1 billion) has taken 30 years of weather data, 60 years of data on crop yields, and 14 terabytes of information on soil types to create customized insurance products.

Similarly, real-time traffic and transit information can be accessed on smartphone apps to inform users when the next bus is coming or how to avoid traffic congestion. And, by analyzing online comments about their products, manufacturers can identify which features consumers are most willing to pay for, and develop their business and investment strategies accordingly.

Opportunities are everywhere. A raft of open-data start-ups are now being incubated at the London-based Open Data Institute (ODI), which focuses on improving our understanding of corporate ownership, health-care delivery, energy, finance, transport, and many other areas of public interest.

Consumers are the main beneficiaries, especially in the household-goods market. It is estimated that consumers making better-informed buying decisions across sectors could capture an estimated $1.1 trillion in value annually. Third-party data aggregators are already allowing customers to compare prices across online and brick-and-mortar shops. Many also permit customers to compare quality ratings, safety data (drawn, for example, from official injury reports), information about the provenance of food, and producers’ environmental and labor practices.

Consider the book industry. Bookstores once regarded their inventory as a trade secret. Customers, competitors, and even suppliers seldom knew what stock bookstores held. Nowadays, by contrast, bookstores not only report what stock they carry but also when customers’ orders will arrive. If they did not, they would be excluded from the product-aggregation sites that have come to determine so many buying decisions.

The health-care sector is a prime target for achieving new efficiencies. By sharing the treatment data of a large patient population, for example, care providers can better identify practices that could save $180 billion annually.

The Open Data Institute-backed start-up Mastodon C uses open data on doctors’ prescriptions to differentiate among expensive patent medicines and cheaper “off-patent” varieties; when applied to just one class of drug, that could save around $400 million in one year for the British National Health Service. Meanwhile, open data on acquired infections in British hospitals has led to the publication of hospital-performance tables, a major factor in the 85% drop in reported infections.

There are also opportunities to prevent lifestyle-related diseases and improve treatment by enabling patients to compare their own data with aggregated data on similar patients. This has been shown to motivate patients to improve their diet, exercise more often, and take their medicines regularly. Similarly, letting people compare their energy use with that of their peers could prompt them to save hundreds of billions of dollars in electricity costs each year, to say nothing of reducing carbon emissions.

Such benchmarking is even more valuable for businesses seeking to improve their operational efficiency. The oil and gas industry, for example, could save $450 billion annually by sharing anonymized and aggregated data on the management of upstream and downstream facilities.

Finally, the move toward open data serves a variety of socially desirable ends, ranging from the reuse of publicly funded research to support work on poverty, inclusion, or discrimination, to the disclosure by corporations such as Nike of their supply-chain data and environmental impact.

There are, of course, challenges arising from the proliferation and systematic use of open data. Companies fear for their intellectual property; ordinary citizens worry about how their private information might be used and abused. Last year, Telefónica, the world’s fifth-largest mobile-network provider, tried to allay such fears by launching a digital confidence program to reassure customers that innovations in transparency would be implemented responsibly and without compromising users’ personal information.

The sensitive handling of these issues will be essential if we are to reap the potential $3 trillion in value that usage of open data could deliver each year. Consumers, policymakers, and companies must work together, not just to agree on common standards of analysis, but also to set the ground rules for the protection of privacy and property.”