Innovating at the Point of Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovLoop: “In this guide, we share 7 examples where government is improving access to services and information along the spectrum of citizen engagement: ‘must do’, ‘should do’ and ‘can do’ moments.…
“Must Do” Moments: These are the compulsory points of engagement. How do we leverage these “forced” moments to inform and invite citizens to other opportunities for engagement? We share two innovative examples in this section:

  • Retooling Tax Time: How the IRS Educates and Engages Taxpayers on the Go
  • Rejuvenating Jury Duty: How a “Captive” Audience Can Become a Catalyst for Action

“Should Do” Moments: These are the points of engagement when citizens aren’t required to participate, but it behooves them to do so. How does government make it easier to take advantage of these opportunities? This section covers case studies where government has effectively facilitated a connection:

  • Helping the Hard to Reach: How Savvy Social Workers Build Digital Bridges
  • Transforming Town Hall: How Takoma Park’s Co-Located Community Center

“Can Do” Moments: Sometimes citizens create their own rallying point. How does government most effectively come alongside these initiatives to appropriately fuel the positive, collective energy of a committed group of citizens? This section shares case studies of citizen-led, government-supported partnership.

  • Enabling Citizen Energy: How Raleigh Opens Up Opportunities for Innovation
  • Mobilizing a Movement: How Online Community Connects Neighbors in Need
  • Overcoming Budget Constraints: How Crowdfunding Supplements Tight Budgets”

When Ordinary Americans Accomplish What the Government Can’t

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in The National Journal: “Washington may be paralyzed by partisanship, but across the country, grassroots innovators are crafting solutions to our problems….This special issue of National Journal celebrates these pragmatic problem-solvers in business, the civic sector, local government, and partnerships that creatively combine all three. At a time of endemic stalemate in the nation’s capital, think of it as a report from the America that works (to borrow a recent phrase from The Economist)….
Another significant message is that the communications revolution, by greatly accelerating the sharing of ideas, has produced a “democratization of innovation,” as author Vijay Vaitheeswaran put it in his 2012 book, Need, Speed, and Greed. This dynamic has simultaneously allowed breakthroughs to disseminate faster than ever and empowered more people inside companies and communities to tackle problems previously left to elites. “One of the most interesting stories in social change today is how much creative problem-solving is emerging from citizens scattered far and wide who are taking it upon themselves to fix things and who, in many cases, are outperforming traditional organizations,” David Bornstein, founder of the Dowser.org website that tracks social innovation, wrote in The New York Times last year. Our honoree Eric Greitens, the former Navy SEAL who founded The Mission Continues for other post-9/11 veterans, personifies this trend. Across the categories, many honorees insist they have pursued new approaches in part because they could no longer wait for Washington to address the problems they face. In a world where barriers to the dispersal of ideas are crumbling, waiting for elites to propose answers may soon seem as outdated as waiting for a dial-up connection to the Internet.
The third conclusion limits the first two. Even many of the most dynamic grassroots innovations will remain isolated islands of excellence in this continent-sized society without energy and amplification from the top. Donald Kettl, dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy, notes the federal government is unavoidably a major force on many of the challenges facing America, particularly reforming education, health care, and training; developing regional economic strategies; and providing physical and digital infrastructure. Washington need not direct or control the response to these problems, but change on a massive scale is always harder without stronger signals and incentives than the federal government has provided in recent years. “It is possible to feed change aggressively from the bottom,” Kettl says. “[But] the federal government, for better or worse, inevitably is involved…. There’s a natural limit in what’s possible to bubble up from the bottom….
Special issue at https://web.archive.org/web/2013/http://www.nationaljournal.com/back-in-business ”
 
 

New certificates launched to help everyone discover, understand, and use open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Press Release from the Open Data Institute: “The ODI is today launching Open Data Certificates to help everyone find, understand and use open data that is being released. The new certificates are being announced by CEO Gavin Starks at a G8 Summit event: Open for Growth. The certificates have been created in response to business, government, and citizen needs to bring rigour to the publication, dissemination and usage of open data. Over the last six months, ODI has been collaborating with dozens of organisations around the world to define the certificates. Today sees their first Beta release.
The certificate is made up of two components:1)  a visual mark that shows the quality level of the data
2) a human and machine-readable description of the data being released
There are four levels of certificates:
Raw: A great start at the basics of publishing open data.
Pilot: Data users receive extra support from, and provide feedback to the publisher.
Standard: Regularly published open data with robust support that people can rely on.
Expert: An exceptional example of information infrastructure.
Benefits of the certificates include helping:

  • publishers of data understand how they can better connect with their users;
  • users of data to understand its quality, licensing, structure, and its usability;
  • businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators have confidence that the data has value to them;
  • policy-makers benchmark and compare the progress and quality of the data released.

Commercial and public sector organisations have already committed to the certificates including:
– Open Corporates: corporate information for over 50 million companies worldwide
– OpenStreetMap: the free wiki world map offering worldwide open geodata
–  legislation.gov.uk: 500 years of UK legislation information
– amee: an environmental score for each of the 2.7 million companies in Britain
– MastodonC:  energy monitoring data analysis from Retrofit for the Future projects
– Placr: transport data covering all 360,000 stops and stations nationwide
Certificates are created online, for free, at http://certificates.theodi.org/. The process involves publishers answering a series of questions, each of which affect the certificate generated at the end.Read Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude’s opening remarks at the conference, with the emphasis firmly on open data and transparency”

Is Cybertopianism Really Such a Bad Thing?

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in Slate: “As the historian and technology scholar Langdon Winner suggests, “The arrival of any new technology that has significant power and practical potential always brings with it a wave of visionary enthusiasm that anticipates the rise of a utopian social order.” Technologies that connect individuals to one another—like the airplane, the telegraph, and the radio—appear particularly powerful at helping us imagine a smaller, more connected world. Seen through this lens, the Internet’s underlying architecture—it is no more and no less than a network that connects networks—and the sheer amount written about it in the past decade guaranteed that the network would be placed at the center of visions for a world made better through connection. These visions are so abundant that they’ve even spawned a neologism: “cyberutopianism.”

The term “cyberutopian” tends to be used only in the context of critique. Calling someone a cyberutopian implies that he or she has an unrealistic and naïvely overinflated sense of what technology makes possible and an insufficient understanding of the forces that govern societies. Curiously, the commonly used term for an opposite stance, a belief that Internet technologies are weakening society, coarsening discourse, and hastening conflict is described with a less weighted term: “cyberskepticism.” Whether or not either of these terms adequately serves us in this debate, we should consider cyberutopianism’s appeal, and its merits….

If we reject the notion that technology makes certain changes inevitable, but accept that the aspirations of the “cyberutopians” are worthy ones, we are left with a challenge: How do we rewire the tools we’ve built to maximize our impact on an interconnected world? Accepting the shortcomings of the systems we’ve built as inevitable and unchangeable is lazy. As Benjamin Disraeli observed in Vivian Grey, “Man is not the creature of circumstances, circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.” And, as Rheingold suggests, believing that people can use technology to build a world that’s more just, fair, and inclusive isn’t merely defensible. It’s practically a moral imperative.


Excerpted from Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman.”

Open Wide

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in The New Inquiry: “Since the earliest days of Linux and of Wikipedia, conflicting attitudes to profit have co-existed with a commitment to digital sharing. Whether it’s source code, text, artistic works, or government data, some see the open digital commons as an ethical alternative to corporate production, while others believe that sharing and profit go together like wine and cheese. And now, as massively open online courses bring the rhetoric of digital openness to education and Web-based startups are making it easy to share apartments and cars and unused parking spaces and jobs, the seeds have been planted for a sharing economy whose flowering is welcomed both by idealists who value authenticity, sustainability and community sharing over commodity ownership and by venture capitalists looking to make their next fortune. Strange bedfellows.
Cities have long been sites of commons and commerce: full of trade and private enterprise but shaped by parks and streetscapes, neighborhoods and rhythms of daily life that grow from non-commodified sharing. In his 2012 book Rebel Cities, David Harvey observes how, in cities, “people of all sorts and classes mingle … to produce a common of perpetually changing and transitory life,” from the irrepressible energy of Manhattan to the café culture of Rome to Barcelona’s distinctive architecture to the symbolic meaning of modern Berlin. Yes, by 2009, volunteers had spent a hundred million hours building Wikipedia, but cities put this dramatic number into perspective: Every year the citizens of Canada alone volunteer roughly 20 Wikipedias for hospitals and children’s sports, for charities and the arts —  the equivalent of more than a million full-time jobs in a population of 30 million — and there is no reason to believe that the count is complete or that Canada is exceptional.
The similarities between urban and digital worlds are not incidental. Both are cultural spaces, and cultural spaces have always been iceberg-like. Above the surface, market forces and state interventions; beneath, a mass of noncommercial activity organized, at least in part, as open commons. But while digital entrepreneurs look to the “Internet’s way of working” to disrupt the bricks and mortar of our cities, urban experiences have sober lessons for the digerati if they will listen: The relationship between commons and commerce is fraught with contradictions. Harvey never once mentions computer technology in his book, but his reflections on cities make a compelling case that money-making and sharing are far from natural allies, and that the role of openness must be questioned if commons-based production is to be a real alternative.”

Empowering Consumers through the Smart Disclosure of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OSTP: “Today, the Administration’s interagency National Science and Technology Council released Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure—the first comprehensive description of the Federal Government’s efforts to promote the smart disclosure of information that can help consumers make wise decisions in the marketplace.
Whether they are searching for colleges, health insurance, credit cards, airline flights, or energy providers, consumers can find it difficult to identify the specific product or service that best suits their particular needs. In some cases, the effort required to sift through all of the available information is so large that consumers make decisions using inadequate information. As a result, they may overpay, miss out on a product that would better meet their needs, or be surprised by fees.
The report released today outlines ways in which Federal agencies and other governmental and non-governmental organizations can use—and in many cases are already using—smart disclosure approaches that increase market transparency and empower consumers facing complex choices in domains such as health, education, energy and personal finance.”

If My Data Is an Open Book, Why Can’t I Read It?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Natasha Singer in the New York Times: “Never mind all the hoopla about the presumed benefits of an “open data” society. In our day-to-day lives, many of us are being kept in the data dark.

“The fact that I am producing data and companies are collecting it to monetize it, if I can’t get a copy myself, I do consider it unfair,” says Latanya Sweeney, the director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard, where she is a professor of government and technology….

In fact, a few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who generate it — and offering tools to put it to use. It’s a small but provocative trend in the United States, where only a handful of industries, like health care and credit, are required by federal law to provide people with access to their records.

Last year, San Diego Gas and Electric, a utility, introduced an online energy management program in which customers can view their electricity use in monthly, daily or hourly increments. There is even a practical benefit: customers can earn credits by reducing energy consumption during peak hours….

SmartSantander, the City that runs on Sensors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Businessweek: “Buried under the streets of Santander, Spain—or discreetly affixed to buses, utility poles, and dumpsters—are some 12,000 electronic sensors that track everything from traffic to noise to surfing conditions at local beaches. This digital nervous system puts the city of 180,000 at the forefront of one of the hottest trends in urban management: streaming real-time data to the public in an effort to increase the efficiency and reduce the stress of city life.
Santander’s narrow downtown streets are dotted with electronic signs that direct drivers to the nearest available parking spaces, reducing traffic congestion. Sensors are being installed on dumpsters to signal when they need emptying and are being buried in parks to measure soil dampness, preventing sprinkler overuse. Coming soon: wireless-enabled meters that monitor water consumption at homes and businesses, phasing out door-to-door meter readers. Mayor Iñigo de la Serna says the effort, known as SmartSantander, will cut city waste-management bills 20 percent this year, and he projects a 25 percent drop in energy bills as sensors conserve use in public building systems. “Smart innovation is improving our economic fabric and the quality of life,” the mayor says. “It has changed the way we work.”
The 20-person SmartSantander development team, which is led by University of Cantabria engineering professor Luis Muñoz, has also pushed residents to help collect and make use of data. Anyone in the city can download a mobile app to complain about potholes or other nuisances and receive updates from officials. A separate app tracks the availability of buses and taxis in real time. Still another city-provided app lets people wave their smartphones over barcode decals in shop windows to get price information or place orders. “This is the future, and we are already there,” says local shoe store owner Angel Benito, who has received orders from customers using the app….”
Euronews: Santander gets smart (Video):

New Open Data Executive Order and Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “The Obama Administration today took groundbreaking new steps to make information generated and stored by the Federal Government more open and accessible to innovators and the public, to fuel entrepreneurship and economic growth while increasing government transparency and efficiency.
Today’s actions—including an Executive Order signed by the President and an Open Data Policy released by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy—declare that information is a valuable national asset whose value is multiplied when it is made easily accessible to the public.  The Executive Order requires that, going forward, data generated by the government be made available in open, machine-readable formats, while appropriately safeguarding privacy, confidentiality, and security.
The move will make troves of previously inaccessible or unmanageable data easily available to entrepreneurs, researchers, and others who can use those files to generate new products and services, build businesses, and create jobs….
Along with the Executive Order and Open Data Policy, the Administration announced a series of complementary actions:
• A new Data.Gov.  In the months ahead, Data.gov, the powerful central hub for open government data, will launch new services that include improved visualization, mapping tools, better context to help locate and understand these data, and robust Application Programming Interface (API) access for developers.
• New open source tools to make data more open and accessible.  The US Chief Information Officer and the US Chief Technology Officer are releasing free, open source tools on Github, a site that allows communities of developers to collaboratively develop solutions.  This effort, known as Project Open Data, can accelerate the adoption of open data practices by providing plug-and-play tools and best practices to help agencies improve the management and release of open data.  For example, one tool released today automatically converts simple spreadsheets and databases into APIs for easier consumption by developers.  Anyone, from government agencies to private citizens to local governments and for-profit companies, can freely use and adapt these tools starting immediately.
• Building a 21st century digital government.  As part of the Administration’s Digital Government Strategy and Open Data Initiatives in health, energy, education, public safety, finance, and global development, agencies have been working to unlock data from the vaults of government, while continuing to protect privacy and national security.  Newly available or improved data sets from these initiatives will be released today and over the coming weeks as part of the one year anniversary of the Digital Government Strategy.
• Continued engagement with entrepreneurs and innovators to leverage government data.  The Administration has convened and will continue to bring together companies, organizations, and civil society for a variety of summits to highlight how these innovators use open data to positively impact the public and address important national challenges.  In June, Federal agencies will participate in the fourth annual Health Datapalooza, hosted by the nonprofit Health Data Consortium, which will bring together more than 1,800 entrepreneurs, innovators, clinicians, patient advocates, and policymakers for information sessions, presentations, and “code-a-thons” focused on how the power of data can be harnessed to help save lives and improve healthcare for all Americans.
For more information on open data highlights across government visit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/library/docsreports”

Visual argumentation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Volta: “Visualising arguments helps people assemble their throughts and get to grip with complex problems according to The Argumentation Factory, based in Amsterdam. Their Argument Maps, constructed for government agencies, NGOs and commercial organizations, are designed to enable people to make better decisions and share and communicate information.
Dutch research organisation TNO, in association with The Argumentation Factory, have launched the European Shale Gas Argument Map detailing the pros and cons of the production of shale gas for EU member states with shale gas resources. Their map is designed to provide the foundation for an open discussion and help the user make a balaced assessment.”

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