How Crowdsourced Astrophotographs on the Web Are Revolutionizing Astronomy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Astrophotography is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the increased availability of high quality digital cameras and the software available to process the pictures after they have been taken.
Since photographs of the night sky are almost always better with long exposures that capture more light, this processing usually involves combining several images of the same part of the sky to produce one with a much longer effective exposure.
That’s all straightforward if you’ve taken the pictures yourself with the same gear under the same circumstances. But astronomers want to do better.
“The astrophotography group on Flickr alone has over 68,000 images,” say Dustin Lang at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a couple of pals. These and other images represent a vast source of untapped data for astronomers.
The problem is that it’s hard to combine images accurately when little is known about how they were taken. Astronomers take great care to use imaging equipment in which the pixels produce a signal that is proportional to the number of photons that hit.
But the same cannot be said of the digital cameras widely used by amateurs. All kinds of processes can end up influencing the final image.
So any algorithm that combines them has to cope with these variations. “We want to do this without having to infer the (possibly highly nonlinear) processing that has been applied to each individual image, each of which has been wrecked in its own loving way by its creator,” say Lang and co.
Now, these guys say they’ve cracked it. They’ve developed a system that automatically combines images from the same part of the sky to increase the effective exposure time of the resulting picture. And they say the combined images can rival those from much professional telescopes.
They’ve tested this approach by downloading images of two well-known astrophysical objects: the NGC 5907 Galaxy and the colliding pair of galaxies—Messier 51a and 51b.
For NGC 5907, they ended up with 4,000 images from Flickr, 1,000 from Bing and 100 from Google. They used an online system called astrometry.net that automatically aligns and registers images of the night sky and then combined the images using their new algorithm, which they call Enhance.
The results are impressive. They say that the combined images of NGC5907 (bottom three images) show some of the same faint features that revealed a single image taken over 11 hours of exposure using a 50 cm telescope (the top left image). All the images reveal the same kind of fine detail such as a faint stellar stream around the galaxy.
The combined image for the M51 galaxies is just as impressive, taking only 40 minutes to produce on a single processor. It reveals extended structures around both galaxies, which astronomers know to be debris from their gravitational interaction as they collide.
Lang and co say these faint features are hugely important because they allow astronomers to measure the age, mass ratios, and orbital configurations of the galaxies involved. Interestingly, many of these faint features are not visible in any of the input images taken from the Web. They emerge only once images have been combined.
One potential problem with algorithms like this is that they need to perform well as the number of images they combine increases. It’s no good if they grind to a halt as soon as a substantial amount of data becomes available.
On this score, Lang and co say astronomers can rest easy. The performance of their new Enhance algorithm scales linearly with the number of images it has to combine. That means it should perform well on large datasets.
The bottom line is that this kind of crowd-sourced astronomy has the potential to make a big impact, given that the resulting images rival those from large telescopes.
And it could also be used for historical images, say Lang and co. The Harvard Plate Archives, for example, contain half a million images dating back to the 1880s. These were all taken using different emulsions, with different exposures and developed using different processes. So the plates all have different responses to light, making them hard to compare.
That’s exactly the problem that Lang and co have solved for digital images on the Web. So it’s not hard to imagine how they could easily combine the data from the Harvard archives as well….”
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.1528 : Towards building a Crowd-Sourced Sky Map

Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book chapter by S. Grauwin, S. Sobolevsky, S. Moritz, I. Gódor, C. Ratti, to be published in “Computational Approaches for Urban Environments” (Springer Ed.), October 2014: “This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity profile and land usage in three global cities: New York, London and Hong Kong. By comparing whole cities typical patterns, we provide insights on how cultural, technological and economical factors shape human dynamics. At a more local scale, we use clustering analysis to identify locations with similar patterns within a city. Our research reveals a universal structure of cities, with core financial centers all sharing similar activity patterns and commercial or residential areas with more city-specific patterns. These findings hint that as the economy becomes more global, common patterns emerge in business areas of different cities across the globe, while the impact of local conditions still remains recognizable on the level of routine people activity.”

Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Tasks and Peer Production

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

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

Technological advances are creating a new paradigm by which institutions and organizations are increasingly outsourcing tasks to an open community, allocating specific needs to a flexible, willing and dispersed workforce. “Microtasking” platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are a burgeoning source of income for individuals who contribute their time, skills and knowledge on a per-task basis. In parallel, citizen science projects – task-based initiatives in which citizens of any background can help contribute to scientific research – like Galaxy Zoo are demonstrating the ability of lay and expert citizens alike to make small, useful contributions to aid large, complex undertakings. As governing institutions seek to do more with less, looking to the success of citizen science and microtasking initiatives could provide a blueprint for engaging citizens to help accomplish difficult, time-consuming objectives at little cost. Moreover, the incredible success of peer-production projects – best exemplified by Wikipedia – instills optimism regarding the public’s willingness and ability to complete relatively small tasks that feed into a greater whole and benefit the public good. You can learn more about this new wave of “collective intelligence” by following the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and their annual Collective Intelligence Conference.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press, 2006. http://bit.ly/1aaU7Yb.

  • In this book, Benkler “describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing – and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.”
  • In his discussion on Wikipedia – one of many paradigmatic examples of people collaborating without financial reward – he calls attention to the notable ongoing cooperation taking place among a diversity of individuals. He argues that, “The important point is that Wikipedia requires not only mechanical cooperation among people, but a commitment to a particular style of writing and describing concepts that is far from intuitive or natural to people. It requires self-discipline. It enforces the behavior it requires primarily through appeal to the common enterprise that the participants are engaged in…”

Brabham, Daren C. Using Crowdsourcing in Government. Collaborating Across Boundaries Series. IBM Center for The Business of Government, 2013. http://bit.ly/17gzBTA.

  • In this report, Brabham categorizes government crowdsourcing cases into a “four-part, problem-based typology, encouraging government leaders and public administrators to consider these open problem-solving techniques as a way to engage the public and tackle difficult policy and administrative tasks more effectively and efficiently using online communities.”
  • The proposed four-part typology describes the following types of crowdsourcing in government:
    • Knowledge Discovery and Management
    • Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking
    • Broadcast Search
    • Peer-Vetted Creative Production
  • In his discussion on Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking, Brabham argues that Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and other microtasking platforms could be useful in a number of governance scenarios, including:
    • Governments and scholars transcribing historical document scans
    • Public health departments translating health campaign materials into foreign languages to benefit constituents who do not speak the native language
    • Governments translating tax documents, school enrollment and immunization brochures, and other important materials into minority languages
    • Helping governments predict citizens’ behavior, “such as for predicting their use of public transit or other services or for predicting behaviors that could inform public health practitioners and environmental policy makers”

Boudreau, Kevin J., Patrick Gaule, Karim Lakhani, Christoph Reidl, Anita Williams Woolley. “From Crowds to Collaborators: Initiating Effort & Catalyzing Interactions Among Online Creative Workers.” Harvard Business School Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit Working Paper No. 14-060. January 23, 2014. https://bit.ly/2QVmGUu.

  • In this working paper, the authors explore the “conditions necessary for eliciting effort from those affecting the quality of interdependent teamwork” and “consider the the role of incentives versus social processes in catalyzing collaboration.”
  • The paper’s findings are based on an experiment involving 260 individuals randomly assigned to 52 teams working toward solutions to a complex problem.
  • The authors determined the level of effort in such collaborative undertakings are sensitive to cash incentives. However, collaboration among teams was driven more by the active participation of teammates, rather than any monetary reward.

Franzoni, Chiara, and Henry Sauermann. “Crowd Science: The Organization of Scientific Research in Open Collaborative Projects.” Research Policy (August 14, 2013). http://bit.ly/HihFyj.

  • In this paper, the authors explore the concept of crowd science, which they define based on two important features: “participation in a project is open to a wide base of potential contributors, and intermediate inputs such as data or problem solving algorithms are made openly available.” The rationale for their study and conceptual framework is the “growing attention from the scientific community, but also policy makers, funding agencies and managers who seek to evaluate its potential benefits and challenges. Based on the experiences of early crowd science projects, the opportunities are considerable.”
  • Based on the study of a number of crowd science projects – including governance-related initiatives like Patients Like Me – the authors identify a number of potential benefits in the following categories:
    • Knowledge-related benefits
    • Benefits from open participation
    • Benefits from the open disclosure of intermediate inputs
    • Motivational benefits
  • The authors also identify a number of challenges:
    • Organizational challenges
    • Matching projects and people
    • Division of labor and integration of contributions
    • Project leadership
    • Motivational challenges
    • Sustaining contributor involvement
    • Supporting a broader set of motivations
    • Reconciling conflicting motivations

Kittur, Aniket, Ed H. Chi, and Bongwon Suh. “Crowdsourcing User Studies with Mechanical Turk.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 453–456. CHI ’08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008. http://bit.ly/1a3Op48.

  • In this paper, the authors examine “[m]icro-task markets, such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, [which] offer a potential paradigm for engaging a large number of users for low time and monetary costs. [They] investigate the utility of a micro-task market for collecting user measurements, and discuss design considerations for developing remote micro user evaluation tasks.”
  • The authors conclude that in addition to providing a means for crowdsourcing small, clearly defined, often non-skill-intensive tasks, “Micro-task markets such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk are promising platforms for conducting a variety of user study tasks, ranging from surveys to rapid prototyping to quantitative measures. Hundreds of users can be recruited for highly interactive tasks for marginal costs within a timeframe of days or even minutes. However, special care must be taken in the design of the task, especially for user measurements that are subjective or qualitative.”

Kittur, Aniket, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael S. Bernstein, Elizabeth M. Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matthew Lease, and John J. Horton. “The Future of Crowd Work.” In 16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2013), 2012. http://bit.ly/1c1GJD3.

  • In this paper, the authors discuss paid crowd work, which “offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale.” However, they caution that, “it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework.”
  • The authors argue that seven key challenges must be met to ensure that crowd work processes evolve and reach their full potential:
    • Designing workflows
    • Assigning tasks
    • Supporting hierarchical structure
    • Enabling real-time crowd work
    • Supporting synchronous collaboration
    • Controlling quality

Madison, Michael J. “Commons at the Intersection of Peer Production, Citizen Science, and Big Data: Galaxy Zoo.” In Convening Cultural Commons, 2013. http://bit.ly/1ih9Xzm.

  • This paper explores a “case of commons governance grounded in research in modern astronomy. The case, Galaxy Zoo, is a leading example of at least three different contemporary phenomena. In the first place, Galaxy Zoo is a global citizen science project, in which volunteer non-scientists have been recruited to participate in large-scale data analysis on the Internet. In the second place, Galaxy Zoo is a highly successful example of peer production, some times known as crowdsourcing…In the third place, is a highly visible example of data-intensive science, sometimes referred to as e-science or Big Data science, by which scientific researchers develop methods to grapple with the massive volumes of digital data now available to them via modern sensing and imaging technologies.”
  • Madison concludes that the success of Galaxy Zoo has not been the result of the “character of its information resources (scientific data) and rules regarding their usage,” but rather, the fact that the “community was guided from the outset by a vision of a specific organizational solution to a specific research problem in astronomy, initiated and governed, over time, by professional astronomers in collaboration with their expanding universe of volunteers.”

Malone, Thomas W., Robert Laubacher and Chrysanthos Dellarocas. “Harnessing Crowds: Mapping the Genome of Collective Intelligence.” MIT Sloan Research Paper. February 3, 2009. https://bit.ly/2SPjxTP.

  • In this article, the authors describe and map the phenomenon of collective intelligence – also referred to as “radical decentralization, crowd-sourcing, wisdom of crowds, peer production, and wikinomics – which they broadly define as “groups of individuals doing things collectively that seem intelligent.”
  • The article is derived from the authors’ work at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, where they gathered nearly 250 examples of Web-enabled collective intelligence. To map the building blocks or “genes” of collective intelligence, the authors used two pairs of related questions:
    • Who is performing the task? Why are they doing it?
    • What is being accomplished? How is it being done?
  • The authors concede that much work remains to be done “to identify all the different genes for collective intelligence, the conditions under which these genes are useful, and the constraints governing how they can be combined,” but they believe that their framework provides a useful start and gives managers and other institutional decisionmakers looking to take advantage of collective intelligence activities the ability to “systematically consider many possible combinations of answers to questions about Who, Why, What, and How.”

Mulgan, Geoff. “True Collective Intelligence? A Sketch of a Possible New Field.” Philosophy & Technology 27, no. 1. March 2014. http://bit.ly/1p3YSdd.

  • In this paper, Mulgan explores the concept of a collective intelligence, a “much talked about but…very underdeveloped” field.
  • With a particular focus on health knowledge, Mulgan “sets out some of the potential theoretical building blocks, suggests an experimental and research agenda, shows how it could be analysed within an organisation or business sector and points to possible intellectual barriers to progress.”
  • He concludes that the “central message that comes from observing real intelligence is that intelligence has to be for something,” and that “turning this simple insight – the stuff of so many science fiction stories – into new theories, new technologies and new applications looks set to be one of the most exciting prospects of the next few years and may help give shape to a new discipline that helps us to be collectively intelligent about our own collective intelligence.”

Sauermann, Henry and Chiara Franzoni. “Participation Dynamics in Crowd-Based Knowledge Production: The Scope and Sustainability of Interest-Based Motivation.” SSRN Working Papers Series. November 28, 2013. http://bit.ly/1o6YB7f.

  • In this paper, Sauremann and Franzoni explore the issue of interest-based motivation in crowd-based knowledge production – in particular the use of the crowd science platform Zooniverse – by drawing on “research in psychology to discuss important static and dynamic features of interest and deriv[ing] a number of research questions.”
  • The authors find that interest-based motivation is often tied to a “particular object (e.g., task, project, topic)” not based on a “general trait of the person or a general characteristic of the object.” As such, they find that “most members of the installed base of users on the platform do not sign up for multiple projects, and most of those who try out a project do not return.”
  • They conclude that “interest can be a powerful motivator of individuals’ contributions to crowd-based knowledge production…However, both the scope and sustainability of this interest appear to be rather limited for the large majority of contributors…At the same time, some individuals show a strong and more enduring interest to participate both within and across projects, and these contributors are ultimately responsible for much of what crowd science projects are able to accomplish.”

Schmitt-Sands, Catherine E. and Richard J. Smith. “Prospects for Online Crowdsourcing of Social Science Research Tasks: A Case Study Using Amazon Mechanical Turk.” SSRN Working Papers Series. January 9, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ugaYja.

  • In this paper, the authors describe an experiment involving the nascent use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as a social science research tool. “While researchers have used crowdsourcing to find research subjects or classify texts, [they] used Mechanical Turk to conduct a policy scan of local government websites.”
  • Schmitt-Sands and Smith found that “crowdsourcing worked well for conducting an online policy program and scan.” The microtasked workers were helpful in screening out local governments that either did not have websites or did not have the types of policies and services for which the researchers were looking. However, “if the task is complicated such that it requires ongoing supervision, then crowdsourcing is not the best solution.”

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008. https://bit.ly/2QysNif.

  • In this book, Shirky explores our current era in which, “For the first time in history, the tools for cooperating on a global scale are not solely in the hands of governments or institutions. The spread of the Internet and mobile phones are changing how people come together and get things done.”
  • Discussing Wikipedia’s “spontaneous division of labor,” Shirky argues that the process is like, “the process is more like creating a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, than creating a car. And the key to creating those individual actions is to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.”

Silvertown, Jonathan. “A New Dawn for Citizen Science.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24, no. 9 (September 2009): 467–471. http://bit.ly/1iha6CR.

  • This article discusses the move from “Science for the people,” a slogan adopted by activists in the 1970s to “’Science by the people,’ which is “a more inclusive aim, and is becoming a distinctly 21st century phenomenon.”
  • Silvertown identifies three factors that are responsible for the explosion of activity in citizen science, each of which could be similarly related to the crowdsourcing of skills by governing institutions:
    • “First is the existence of easily available technical tools for disseminating information about products and gathering data from the public.
    • A second factor driving the growth of citizen science is the increasing realisation among professional scientists that the public represent a free source of labour, skills, computational power and even finance.
    • Third, citizen science is likely to benefit from the condition that research funders such as the National Science Foundation in the USA and the Natural Environment Research Council in the UK now impose upon every grantholder to undertake project-related science outreach. This is outreach as a form of public accountability.”

Szkuta, Katarzyna, Roberto Pizzicannella, David Osimo. “Collaborative approaches to public sector innovation: A scoping study.” Telecommunications Policy. 2014. http://bit.ly/1oBg9GY.

  • In this article, the authors explore cases where government collaboratively delivers online public services, with a focus on success factors and “incentives for services providers, citizens as users and public administration.”
  • The authors focus on six types of collaborative governance projects:
    • Services initiated by government built on government data;
    • Services initiated by government and making use of citizens’ data;
    • Services initiated by civil society built on open government data;
    • Collaborative e-government services; and
    • Services run by civil society and based on citizen data.
  • The cases explored “are all designed in the way that effectively harnesses the citizens’ potential. Services susceptible to collaboration are those that require computing efforts, i.e. many non-complicated tasks (e.g. citizen science projects – Zooniverse) or citizens’ free time in general (e.g. time banks). Those services also profit from unique citizens’ skills and their propensity to share their competencies.”

Open Government Will Reshape Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alejandro Guerrero at Medium: “When people think on the place for innovations, they typically think on innovation being spurred by large firms and small startups based in the US. And particularly in that narrow stretch of land and water called Silicon Valley.
However, the flux of innovation taking place in the intersection between technology and government is phenomenal and emerging everywhere. From the marble hallways of parliaments everywhere —including Latin America’s legislative houses— to office hubs of tech-savvy non-profits full of enthusiastic social changers —also including Latin American startups— a driving force is starting to challenge our conception of how government and citizens can and should interact. And few people are discussing or analyzing these developments.
Open Government in Latin America
The potential for Open Government to improve government’s decision-making and performance is huge. And it is particularly immense in middle income countries such as the ones in Latin America, where the combination of growing incomes, more sophisticated citizens’ demands, and broken public services is generating a large bottom-up pressure and requesting more creative solutions from governments to meet the enormous social needs, while cutting down corruption and improving governance.
It is unsurprising that citizens from all over Latin America are increasingly taking the streets and demanding better public services and more transparent institutions.
While these protests are necessarily short-lived and unarticulated —a product of growing frustration with government— they are a symptom with deeper causes that won’t go easily away, and these protests will most likely come back with increasing frequency and the unresolved frustration may eventually transmute in political platforms with more radical ideas to challenge the status quo.
Behind the scene, governments across the region still face enormous weaknesses in public management, ill-prepared and underpaid public officials carry on with their duties as the platonic idea of a demotivated workforce, and the opportunities for corruption, waste, and nepotism are plenty. The growing segment of more affluent citizens simply opt out from government and resort to private alternatives, thus exacerbating inequalities in the already most unequal region in the world. The crumbling middle classes and the poor can just resort to voicing their complaints. And they are increasingly doing so.
And here is where open government initiatives might play a transformative role, disrupting the way governments make decisions and work while empowering citizens in the process.
The preconditions for OpenGov are almost here
In Latin America, connectivity rates are growing fast (reaching 61% in 2013 for the Americas as a whole), close to 90% of the population owns a cellphone, and access to higher levels of education keeps growing (as an example, the latest PISA report indicates that Mexico went from 58% in 2003 to 70% high-schoolers in 2012). The social conditions for a stronger role of citizens in government are increasingly there.
Moreover, most Latin American countries passed transparency laws during the 2000s, creating the enabling environment for open government initiatives to flourish. It is thus unsurprising that the next generation of young government bureaucrats, on average more internet-savvy and better educated than its predecessors, is taking over and embracing innovations in government. And they are finding echo (and suppliers of ideas and apps!) among local startups and civil society groups, while also being courted by large tech corporations (think of Google or Microsoft) behind succulent government contracts associated with this form of “doing good”.
This is an emerging galaxy of social innovators, technologically-savvy bureaucrats, and engaged citizens providing a large crowd-sourcing community and an opportunity to test different approaches. And the underlying tectonic shifts are pushing governments towards that direction. For a sampler, check out the latest developments for Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and (why not?) my own country, which I will include in the review often for the surprisingly limited progress of open government in this OECD member, which shares similar institutions and challenges with Latin America.

A Road Full of Promise…and Obstacles

Most of the progress in Latin America is quite recent, and the real impact is still often more limited once you abandon the halls of the Digital Government directorates and secretarías or look if you look beyond the typical government data portal. The resistance to change is as human as laughing, but it is particularly intense among the public sector side of human beings. Politics also typically plays a enormous role in resisting transparency open government, and in a context of weak institutions and pervasive corruption, the temptation to politically block or water down open data/open government projects is just too high. Selective release of data (if any) is too frequent, government agencies often act as silos by not sharing information with other government departments, and irrational fears by policy-makers combined with adoption barriers (well explained here) all contribute to deter the progress of the open government promise in Latin America…”

OSTP’s Own Open Government Plan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

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

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

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Democracy and open data: are the two linked?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
transparency
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:

While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.

Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:

  1. Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
  2. Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
  3. The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”

A civic-social platform for a new kind of citizen duty

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dirk Jan van der Wal at OpenSource.com: “In the Netherlands a community of civil servants has developed an open source platform for collaboration within the public sector. What began as a team of four has grown to over 75,000 registered users. What happened? And, why was open source key to the project’s success?
Society is rapidly changing. One change is the tremendous development of Internet and Web-based tools. These tools have opened up new ways for collaboration and sharing information. This is a big change for our society and democracy, having an impact on our politics. How does government change along with it?
A need to change the way government organizations worked and civil servants interacted too could not be ignored. Take for example, politicians resigning because of one tweet! Meanwhile, government organizations continually face the challenge of doing more with less funds. I think this increased the need to cooperate and share knowledge; it was not longer feasible for smaller communities to maintain knowledge on their own.
The question became: How do we cooperate in an efficient manner?
In the Netherlands, we have over 500 different government organizations: departments, city councils, provinces, and so on. All these organizations have their own information and communications technology (ICT) environment. So, with a growing network and discussions around multiple themes, it became clear that one of the basic requirements for cooperating efficiently is having a government-wide platform for people to communicate and work from.
So, a small team of four started Pleio for Dutch civil servants and citizens to meet each other, have discussions, and work together on things that matter to them.
(Pleio translates loosely in English to “government square.”)
As in real life, citizens and government officials work together across various teams, groups, and networks to think about and do work on projects that matter. Using the Pleio online platform, citizens and government officials can find and then engage with the right people to collaborate on a project or problem…”

CrowdOut: A mobile crowdsourcing service for road safety in digital cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Aubry, Elian: “Nowadays cities invest more in their public services, and particularly digital ones, to improve their resident’s quality of life and attract more people. Thus, new crowdsourcing services appear and they are based on contributions made by mobile users equipped with smartphones. For example, the respect of the traffic code is essential to ensure citizens’ security and welfare in their city. In this paper, we present CrowdOut, a new mobile crowdsourcing service for improving road safety in cities. CrowdOut allows users to report traffic offence they witness in real time and to map them on a city plan. CrowdOut service has been implemented and experiments and demonstrations have been performed in the urban environment of the Grand Nancy, in France. This service allows users appropriating their urban environment with an active participation regarding the collectivity. This service also represents a tool for city administrators to help for decisions and improve their urbanization policy, or to check the impact of their policy in the city environment.”

The rise of open data driven businesses in emerging markets

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alla Morrison at the Worldbank blog:

Key findings —

  • Many new data companies have emerged around the world in the last few years. Of these companies, the majority use some form of government data.
  • There are a large number of data companies in sectors with high social impact and tremendous development opportunities.
  • An actionable pipeline of data-driven companies exists in Latin America and in Asia. The most desired type of financing is equity, followed by quasi-equity in the amounts ranging from $100,000 to $5 million, with averages of between $2 and $3 million depending on the region. The total estimated need for financing may exceed $400 million.

“The economic value of open data is no longer a hypothesis
How can one make money with open data which is akin to air – free and open to everyone? Should the World Bank Group be in the catalyzer role for a sector that is just emerging?  And if so, what set of interventions would be the most effective? Can promoting open data-driven businesses contribute to the World Bank Group’s twin goals of fighting poverty and boosting shared prosperity?
These questions have been top of the mind since the World Bank Open Finances team convened a group of open data entrepreneurs from across Latin America to share their business models, success stories and challenges at the Open Data Business Models workshop in Uruguay in June 2013. We were in Uruguay to find out whether open data could lead to the creation of sustainable new businesses and jobs. To do so, we tested a couple of hypotheses: open data has economic value, beyond the benefits of increased transparency and accountability; and open data companies with sustainable business models already exist in emerging economies.
Encouraged by our findings in Uruguay we set out to further explore the economic development potential of open data, with a focus on:

  • Contribution of open data to countries’ GDP;
  • Innovative solutions to tackle social problems in key sectors like agriculture, health, education, transportation, climate change, financial services, especially those benefiting low income populations;
  • Economic benefits of governments’ buy-in into the commercial value of open data and resulting release of new datasets, which in turn would lead to increased transparency in public resource management (reductions in misallocations, a more level playing field in procurement) and better service delivery; and
  • Creation of data-related private sector jobs, especially suited for the tech savvy young generation.

We proposed a joint IFC/World Bank approach (From open data to development impact – the crucial role of private sector) that envisages providing financing to data-driven companies through a dedicated investment fund, as well as loans and grants to governments to create a favorable enabling environment. The concept was received enthusiastically for the most part by a wide group of peers at the Bank, the IFC, as well as NGOs, foundations, DFIs and private sector investors.
Thanks also in part to a McKinsey report last fall stating that open data could help unlock more than $3 trillion in value every year, the potential value of open data is now better understood. The acquisition of Climate Corporation (whose business model holds enormous potential for agriculture and food security, if governments open up the right data) for close to a billion dollars last November and the findings of the Open Data 500 project led by GovLab of the NYU further substantiated the hypothesis. These days no one asks whether open data has economic value; the focus has shifted to finding ways for companies, both startups and large corporations, and governments to unlock it. The first question though is – is it still too early to plan a significant intervention to spur open data driven economic growth in emerging markets?”