A World That Counts: Mobilising a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Summary of the Report by the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development (IEAG): “Data are the lifeblood of decision-making and the raw material for accountability. Without high-quality data providing the right information on the right things at the right time; designing, monitoring and evaluating effective policies becomes almost impossible.
New technologies are leading to an exponential increase in the volume and types of data available, creating unprecedented possibilities for informing and transforming society and protecting the environment. Governments, companies, researchers and citizen groups are in a ferment of experimentation, innovation and adaptation to the new world of data, a world in which data are bigger, faster and more detailed than ever before. This is the data revolution.
Some are already living in this new world. But too many people, organisations and governments are excluded because of lack of resources, knowledge, capacity or opportunity. There are huge and growing inequalities in access to data and information and in the ability to use it.
Data needs improving. Despite considerable progress in recent years, whole groups of people are not being counted and important aspects of people’s lives and environmental conditions are still not measured. For people, this can lead to the denial of basic rights, and for the planet, to continued environmental degradation. Too often, existing data remain unused because they are released too late or not at all, not well-documented and harmonized, or not available at the level of detail needed for decision-making.
As the world embarks on an ambitious project to meet new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is an urgent need to mobilise the data revolution for all people and the whole planet in order to monitor progress, hold governments accountable and foster sustainable development. More diverse, integrated, timely and trustworthy information can lead to better decision-making and real-time citizen feedback. This in turn enables individuals, public and private institutions, and companies to make choices that are good for them and for the world they live in.
This report sets out the main opportunities and risks presented by the data revolution for sustain-able development. Seizing these opportunities and mitigating these risks requires active choices, especially by governments and international institutions. Without immediate action, gaps between developed and developing countries, between information-rich and information-poor people, and between the private and public sectors will widen, and risks of harm and abuses of human rights will grow.

An urgent call for action: Key recommendations

The strong leadership of the United Nations (UN) is vital for the success of this process. The Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG), established in August 2014, offers the UN Secretary-General several key recommendations for actions to be taken in the near future, summarised below:

  1. Develop a global consensus on principles and standards: The disparate worlds of public, private and civil society data and statistics providers need to be urgently brought together to build trust and confidence among data users. We propose that the UN establish a process whereby key stakeholders create a “Global Consensus on Data”, to adopt principles concerning legal, technical, privacy, geospatial and statistical standards which, among other things, will facilitate openness and information exchange and promote and protect human rights.
  2. Share technology and innovations for the common good: To create mechanisms through which technology and innovation can be shared and used for the common good, we propose
    to create a global “Network of Data Innovation Networks”, to bring together the organisations and experts in the field. This would: contribute to the adoption of best practices for improving the monitoring of SDGs, identify areas where common data-related infrastructures could address capacity problems and improve efficiency, encourage collaborations, identify critical research gaps and create incentives to innovate.
  3. New resources for capacity development: Improving data is a development agenda in
    its own right, and can improve the targeting of existing resources and spur new economic opportunities. Existing gaps can only be overcome through new investments and the strengthening of capacities. A new funding stream to support the data revolution for sustainable development should be endorsed at the “Third International Conference on Financing for Development”, in Addis Ababa in July 2015. An assessment will be needed of the scale of investments, capacity development and technology transfer that is required, especially for low income countries; and proposals developed for mechanisms to leverage the creativity and resources of the private sector. Funding will also be needed to implement an education program aimed at improving people’s, infomediaries’ and public servants’ capacity and data literacy to break down barriers between people and data.
  4. Leadership for coordination and mobilisation: A UN-led “Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data” is proposed, tomobiliseandcoordinate the actions and institutions required to make the data revolution serve sustainable development, promoting several initiatives, such as:
    • A “World Forum on Sustainable Development Data” to bring together the whole data ecosystem to share ideas and experiences for data improvements, innovation, advocacy and technology transfer. The first Forum should take place at the end of 2015, once the SDGs are agreed;
    • A “Global Users Forum for Data for SDGs”, to ensure feedback loops between data producers and users, help the international community to set priorities and assess results;
    • Brokering key global public-private partnerships for data sharing.
  5. Exploit some quick wins on SDG data: Establishing a “SDGs data lab” to support the development of a first wave of SDG indicators, developing an SDG analysis and visualisation platform using the most advanced tools and features for exploring data, and building a dashboard from diverse data sources on ”the state of the world”.

Never again should it be possible to say “we didn’t know”. No one should be invisible. This is the world we want – a world that counts.”

Governing the Smart, Connected City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Blog by Susan Crawford at HBR: “As politics at the federal level becomes increasingly corrosive and polarized, with trust in Congress and the President at historic lows, Americans still celebrate their cities. And cities are where the action is when it comes to using technology to thicken the mesh of civic goods — more and more cities are using data to animate and inform interactions between government and citizens to improve wellbeing.
Every day, I learn about some new civic improvement that will become possible when we can assume the presence of ubiquitous, cheap, and unlimited data connectivity in cities. Some of these are made possible by the proliferation of smartphones; others rely on the increasing number of internet-connected sensors embedded in the built environment. In both cases, the constant is data. (My new book, The Responsive City, written with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, tells stories from Chicago, Boston, New York City and elsewhere about recent developments along these lines.)
For example, with open fiber networks in place, sending video messages will become as accessible and routine as sending email is now. Take a look at rhinobird.tv, a free lightweight, open-source video service that works in browsers (no special download needed) and allows anyone to create a hashtag-driven “channel” for particular events and places. A debate or protest could be viewed from a thousand perspectives. Elected officials and public employees could easily hold streaming, virtual town hall meetings.
Given all that video and all those livestreams, we’ll need curation and aggregation to make sense of the flow. That’s why visualization norms, still in their infancy, will become a greater part of literacy. When the Internet Archive attempted late last year to “map” 400,000 hours of television news, against worldwide locations, it came up with pulsing blobs of attention. Although visionary Kevin Kelly has been talking about data visualization as a new form of literacy for years, city governments still struggle with presenting complex and changing information in standard, easy-to-consume ways.
Plenar.io is one attempt to resolve this. It’s a platform developed by former Chicago Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein that allows public datasets to be combined and mapped with easy-to-see relationships among weather and crime, for example, on a single city block. (A sample question anyone can ask of Plenar.io: “Tell me the story of 700 Howard Street in San Francisco.”) Right now, Plenar.io’s visual norm is a map, but it’s easy to imagine other forms of presentation that could become standard. All the city has to do is open up its widely varying datasets…”

The Internet of Things vision: Key Features, Applications and Open Issues

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Eleonora Borgia in Computer Communications: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is a new paradigm that combines aspects and technologies coming from different approaches. Ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, Internet Protocol, sensing technologies, communication technologies, and embedded devices are merged together in order to form a system where the real and digital worlds meet and are continuously in symbiotic interaction. The smart object is the building block of the IoT vision. By putting intelligence into everyday objects, they are turned into smart objects able not only to collect information from the environment and interact/control the physical world, but also to be interconnected, to each other, through Internet to exchange data and information. The expected huge number of interconnected devices and the significant amount of available data open new opportunities to create services that will bring tangible benefits to the society, environment, economy and individual citizens. In this paper we present the key features and the driver technologies of IoT. In addition to identifying the application scenarios and the correspondent potential applications, we focus on research challenges and open issues to be faced for the IoT realization in the real world.”

The Role Of Open Data In Choosing Neighborhood

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PlaceILive Blog: “To what extent is it important to get familiar with our environment?
If we think about how the world surrounding us has changed throughout the years, it is not so unreasonable that, while walking to work, we might encounter some new little shops, restaurants, or gas stations we had never noticed before. Likewise, how many times did we wander about for hours just to find green spaces for a run? And the only one we noticed was even more polluted than other urban areas!
Citizens are not always properly informed about the evolution of the places they live in. And that is why it would be crucial for people to be constantly up-to-date with accurate information of the neighborhood they have chosen or are going to choose.
London is a neat evidence of how transparency in providing data is basic in order to succeed as a Smart City.
The GLA’s London Datastore, for instance, is a public platform of datasets revealing updated figures on the main services offered by the town, in addition to population’s lifestyle and environmental risks. These data are then made more easily accessible to the community through the London Dashboard.
The importance of dispensing free information can be also proved by the integration of maps, which constitute an efficient means of geolocation. Consulting a map where it’s easy to find all the services you need as close as possible can be significant in the search for a location.
Wheel 435
(source: Smart London Plan)
The Open Data Index, published by The Open Knowledge Foundation in 2013, is another useful tool for data retrieval: it showcases a rank of different countries in the world with scores based on openness and availability of data attributes such as transport timetables and national statistics.
Here it is possible to check UK Open Data Census and US City Open Data Census.
As it was stated, making open data available and easily findable online not only represented a success for US cities but favoured apps makers and civic hackers too. Lauren Reid, a spokesperson at Code for America, reported according to Government Technology: “The more data we have, the better picture we have of the open data landscape.”
That is, on the whole, what Place I Live puts the biggest effort into: fostering a new awareness of the environment by providing free information, in order to support citizens willing to choose the best place they can live.
The outcome is soon explained. The website’s homepage offers visitors the chance to type address of their interest, displaying an overview of neighborhood parameters’ evaluation and a Life Quality Index calculated for every point on the map.
The research of the nearest medical institutions, schools or ATMs thus gets immediate and clear, as well as the survey about community’s generic information. Moreover, data’s reliability and accessibility are constantly examined by a strong team of professionals with high competence in data analysis, mapping, IT architecture and global markets.
For the moment the company’s work is focused on London, Berlin, Chicago, San Francisco and New York, while higher goals to reach include more than 200 cities.
US Open Data Census finally saw San Francisco’s highest score achievement as a proof of the city’s labour in putting technological expertise at everyone’s disposal, along with the task of fulfilling users’ needs through meticulous selections of datasets. This challenge seems to be successfully overcome by San Francisco’s new investment, partnering with the University of Chicago, in a data analytics dashboard on sustainability performance statistics named Sustainable Systems Framework, which is expected to be released in beta version by the the end of 2015’s first quarter.
 
Another remarkable collaboration in Open Data’s spread comes from the Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA) of the University College London (UCL); Oliver O’Brien, researcher at UCL Department of Geography and software developer at the CASA, is indeed one of the contributors to this cause.
Among his products, an interesting accomplishment is London’s CityDashboard, a real-time reports’ control panel in terms of spatial data. The web page also allows to visualize the whole data translated into a simplified map and to look at other UK cities’ dashboards.
Plus, his Bike Share Map is a live global view to bicycle sharing systems in over a hundred towns around the world, since bike sharing has recently drawn a greater public attention as an original form of transportation, in Europe and China above all….”

Codifying Collegiality: Recent Developments in Data Sharing Policy in the Life Sciences

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Genevieve Pham-Kanter et al in PLoS ONE: “Over the last decade, there have been significant changes in data sharing policies and in the data sharing environment faced by life science researchers. Using data from a 2013 survey of over 1600 life science researchers, we analyze the effects of sharing policies of funding agencies and journals. We also examine the effects of new sharing infrastructure and tools (i.e., third party repositories and online supplements). We find that recently enacted data sharing policies and new sharing infrastructure and tools have had a sizable effect on encouraging data sharing. In particular, third party repositories and online supplements as well as data sharing requirements of funding agencies, particularly the NIH and the National Human Genome Research Institute, were perceived by scientists to have had a large effect on facilitating data sharing. In addition, we found a high degree of compliance with these new policies, although noncompliance resulted in few formal or informal sanctions. Despite the overall effectiveness of data sharing policies, some significant gaps remain: about one third of grant reviewers placed no weight on data sharing plans in their reviews, and a similar percentage ignored the requirements of material transfer agreements. These patterns suggest that although most of these new policies have been effective, there is still room for policy improvement.”

Paris awaits result of referendum on how to spend €20m of city budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in The Guardian: “Given €20m (£15.5m) of taxpayers’ money, what would Parisians do to improve their city? The final answer is expected after voting closes on Wednesday in the French capital’s first “participatory budget”.
City-dwellers of all ages and nationalities were given the chance to choose from 15 projects, including walls of vegetation, pop-up swimming pools and mini “learning gardens” in schools. The most popular will be included in the 2015 city’s spending plan. Work will begin on them in January.
The city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, said allowing people to decide the destination of 5% of the city hall investment budget every year from now until 2020 was “handing the keys of the budget to the citizens”.
Parisians were given a week to vote, either online or at mairies (council buildings) in each of the city’s 20 arrondissements.
As voting ended on Wednesday, the most popular choices reflected concern with the environment and the shortage of green spaces in the city centre, and a desire to breathe new life into its gloomiest corners.
A €2m project to cover at least 40 “blind” walls with plants to cheer up local areas and create a “microclimate and biodiversity” had received the most votes.
The second most popular was a €1.5m scheme to use derelict and abandoned areas around and under the périphérique – the city’s ring road – for concerts, exhibitions, film projections and other community events.
Third was a €1m project to introduce “learning gardens” in all infant and primary schools….
There are similar “participative democracy” schemes in hundreds of cities, including Toronto, Canada, and Porto Alegre in Brazil, which was the first to introduce it, in 1989, as well as in smaller communes in France. However, nowhere else is believed to have allotted such a significant sum of public money.
Hidalgo said the idea was “a new tool for citizens to participate allowing all Parisians to propose and choose projects that will make the Paris of tomorrow. They can have a real effect on local life. I see it as a major democratic innovation.”

Uncovering State And Local Gov’s 15 Hidden Successes

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Jarvis at GovLoop: “From garbage trucks to vacant lots, cities and states are often tasked with the thankless job of cleaning up a community’s mess. These are tasks that are often overlooked, but are critical to keeping a community vibrant.
But even in these sometimes thankless jobs, there are real innovations happening. Take Miami-Dade County where they are using hybrid garbage trucks to save the community millions of dollars in fuel every year and make the environment a little cleaner. Or head over to Milwaukee where the city is turning vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms.
There are just two of the fifteen examples, GovLoop uncovered in our new guide, From the State House to the County Clerk – 15 Challenges and Success Stories.
We have broken the challenges into four categories:

  • Internal Best Practices
  • Tech Challenges
  • Health and Safety
  • Community Engagement and Outreach

Here’s another example, the open data movement has the potential to effect governing and civic engagement at the state and local government levels. But today very few agencies are actively providing open data. In fact, only 46 U.S. cities and counties have open data sites. One of the cities on the leading edge of the open data movement is Fort Worth, Texas.

“When I came into office, that was one of my campaign promises, that we would get Fort Worth into this century on technology and that we would take a hard look at open records requests and requests for data,” Mayor Betsy Price said in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “It goes a lot further to being transparent and letting people participate in their government and see what we are doing. It is the people’s data, and it should be easy to access.”

The website, data.fortworthtexas.gov, offers data and documents such as certificates of occupancy, development permits and residential permits for download in several formats, including Excel and PDF. Not all datasets are available yet — the city said its priority was to put the most-requested data on the portal first. Next up? Crime data, code violations, restaurant ratings and capital projects progress.

City officials’ ultimate goal is to create and adopt a full open data policy. As part of the launch, they are also looking for local software developers and designers who want to help guide the open data initiative. Those interested in participating can sign up online to receive more information….”

Brighter Futures Together

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Welcome to the Brighter Futures Together toolkit! It contains lots of information and ideas to help you improve and grow your community. It covers lots of issues like the environment, climate change, health, safety, and involving children and young people….
There are lots of factsheets on all sorts of issues and each factsheet features step-by-step advice, and explains where to go to get further help. You can look through each of the factsheets individually, click on a category on the right to browse the factsheets, or use the search function in the top left hand corner to find a particular factsheet. We hope you find it useful….
Map assets in your community…

Participatory budgeting in your community…”

 
 

Ants Are Cool but Teach Us Nothing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Bloomberg View: “…For nearly seven decades, starting in boyhood, I’ve studied hundreds of kinds of ants around the world, and this qualifies me, I believe, to offer some advice on ways their lives can be applied to ours. I’ll start with the question I’m most often asked: “What can I do about the ants in my kitchen?” My response comes from the heart: Watch your step, be careful of little lives. Ants especially like honey, tuna and cookie crumbs. So put down bits of those on the floor, and watch as the first scout finds the bait and reports back to her colony by laying an odor trail. Then, as a little column follows her out to the food, you will see social behavior so strange it might be on another planet. Think of kitchen ants not as pests or bugs, but as your personal guest superorganism.
Another question I hear a lot is, “What can we learn of moral value from the ants?” Here again I will answer definitively: nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brains and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season. They are built to be robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate, they are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators.
Many kinds of ants eat their dead — and their injured, too. You may have seen ant workers retrieve nestmates that you have mangled or killed underfoot (accidentally, I hope), thinking it battlefield heroism. The purpose, alas, is more sinister.
As ants grow older, they spend more time in the outermost chambers and tunnels of the nest, and are more prone to undertake dangerous foraging trips. They also are the first to attack enemy ants and other intruders. Here indeed is a major difference between people and ants: While we send our young men to war, ants send their old ladies.
The most complex societies of all ant species, and arguably of all animals everywhere, are the leafcutters of the American tropics. In lowland forests and grasslands from Mexico to South America, you find conspicuous long files of reddish ants. Many carry freshly cut pieces of leaves, flowers and twigs. The ants don’t eat this vegetation. They carry it deep into their nests, where they convert it into complex, spongelike structures. On this substrate they grow a fungus, which they do eat. The entire process employs a sequence of specialists: The leafcutters in the field are medium in size. As they head home with their burdens, tiny sister ant workers ride on their backs to protect them from parasitic phorid flies. Inside the nest, workers somewhat smaller than the gatherers scissor the leaf fragments into pieces. Still smaller ants chew the fragments into lumps and add their own fecal material as fertilizer. Even smaller workers use the gooey lumps thus created to construct the gardens. And workers as small as the fly guards plant and tend the fungus.
The largest caste of leafcutter ants have razor-sharp mandibles and the adductor muscles to close them with enough force to slice mammalian skin. These soldiers defend the nest against the most dangerous predators, including anteaters.
Species that have been able to evolve superorganismic colonies — almost purely on the basis of instinct — have as a whole been enormously successful. The 20,000 or so known species of social insects make up only 2 percent of the million known species of insects but three-fourths of the insect biomass.
With complexity, however, comes vulnerability, and that brings me to one of the other superorganism superstars, the domestic honeybee. When disease strikes solitary animals that we have embraced in symbiosis, such as chickens, pigs and dogs, veterinarians can usually diagnose and fix the problem. Honeybees, on the other hand, have by far the most complex lives of all our domestic partners. There are a great many more twists and turns in their adaptation to their environment that, upon failing, can damage some part of the colony life cycle. The intractability thus far of the honeybee colony collapse disorder of Europe and North America, which threatens so much of crop pollination, may represent an intrinsic weakness of superorganisms.
You may occasionally hear human societies described as superorganisms. This is a bit of a stretch. It is true that we form societies dependent on cooperation, labor specialization and frequent acts of altruism. But where social insects are ruled almost entirely by instinct, we base labor division on transmission of culture. Also, unlike social insects, we are too selfish to behave like cells in an organism. Human beings seek their own destiny. They will always revolt against slavery, and refuse to be treated like worker ants.”

Startup lessons from the Knight News Challenge: Make damn sure you fill a market need

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at GigaOm: “The Knight Foundation looked at the 28 media-focused startups it funded as part of its News Challenge competition in 2010 and 2011 and came up with some useful lessons for those who might want to follow in their footsteps
Media startups are a lot like any other startup, in the sense that they are a risky bet on an idea or vision — but what makes them even harder is that they are aimed at an industry that is undergoing unprecedented upheaval, filled with potential customers who are struggling to keep their heads above water. What does success look like in that kind of environment? The Knight Foundation knows better than most, since it has funded dozens of startup ventures over the years through its News Challenge, and it has come out with a report that looks at what it has learned.
The report considered the progress of 28 projects that applied for and won funding as part of the 2010-2011 Knight News Challenge competitions, and includes a profile of each — from the Front Porch Forum, a Vermont-based community-building service that started up in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene, to a winner called FrontlineSMS, which uses mobile technology to serve the information needs of small communities that don’t have reliable internet access.
Among the lessons that Knight drew from this roster of winners is one that will sound familiar to any technology startup or venture capital partner: namely, make sure your idea serves a market need, as opposed to just being a cool technical solution. This is especially important in an industry like media, the report says:

Selling innovations to news organizations is extremely difficult because they may lack the money and time to spend on innovative projects or the technical capacity to take full advantage of new tools. The innovation may also be entering a market guarded by institutions that may be resistant to change. Fundamentally, unless an innovation addresses a pressing need, journalists and news organizations will not adopt it.”