Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shannon Mattern at Places: “We know what rocket science looks like in the movies: a windowless bunker filled with blinking consoles, swivel chairs, and shirt-sleeved men in headsets nonchalantly relaying updates from “Houston” to outer space. Lately, that vision of Mission Control has taken over City Hall. NASA meets Copacabana, proclaimed the New York Times, hailing Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center as a “potentially lucrative experiment that could shape the future of cities around the world.” The Times photographed an IBM executive in front of a seemingly endless wall of screens integrating data from 30 city agencies, including transit video, rainfall patterns, crime statistics, car accidents, power failures, and more. 1

Futuristic control rooms have proliferated in dozens of global cities. Baltimore has its CitiStat Room, where department heads stand at a podium before a wall of screens and account for their units’ performance.  The Mayor’s office in London’s City Hall features a 4×3 array of iPads mounted in a wooden panel, which seems an almost parodic, Terry Gilliam-esque take on the Brazilian Ops Center. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister David Cameron commissioned an iPad app – the “No. 10 Dashboard” (a reference to his residence at 10 Downing Street) – which gives him access to financial, housing, employment, and public opinion data. As The Guardian reported, “the prime minister said that he could run government remotely from his smartphone.”

This is the age of Dashboard Governance, heralded by gurus like Stephen Few, founder of the “visual business intelligence” and “sensemaking” consultancy Perceptual Edge, who defines the dashboard as a “visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” A well-designed dashboard, he says — one that makes proper use of bullet graphs, sparklines, and other visualization techniques informed by the “brain science” of aesthetics and cognition — can afford its users not only a perceptual edge, but a performance edge, too. The ideal display offers a big-picture view of what is happening in real time, along with information on historical trends, so that users can divine the how and why and redirect future action. As David Nettleton emphasizes, the dashboard’s utility extends beyond monitoring “the current situation”; it also “allows a manager to … make provisions, and take appropriate actions.”….

The dashboard market now extends far beyond the corporate world. In 1994, New York City police commissioner William Bratton adapted former officer Jack Maple’s analog crime maps to create the CompStat model of aggregating and mapping crime statistics. Around the same time, the administrators of Charlotte, North Carolina, borrowed a business idea — Robert Kaplan’s and David Norton’s “total quality management” strategy known as the “Balanced Scorecard” — and began tracking performance in five “focus areas” defined by the City Council: housing and neighborhood development, community safety, transportation, economic development, and the environment. Atlanta followed Charlotte’s example in creating its own city dashboard.

In 1999, Baltimore mayor Martin O’Malley, confronting a crippling crime rate and high taxes, designed CitiStat, “an internal process of using metrics to create accountability within his government.” (This rhetoric of data-tested internal “accountability” is prevalent in early dashboard development efforts.) The project turned to face the public in 2003, when Baltimore launched a website of city operational statistics, which inspired DCStat (2005), Maryland’s StateStat (2007), and NYCStat (2008). Since then, myriad other states and metro areas — driven by a “new managerialist” approach to urban governance, committed to “benchmarking” their performance against other regions, and obligated to demonstrate compliance with sustainability agendas — have developed their own dashboards.

The Open Michigan Mi Dashboard is typical of these efforts. The state website presents data on education, health and wellness, infrastructure, “talent” (employment, innovation), public safety, energy and environment, financial health, and seniors. You (or “Mi”) can monitor the state’s performance through a side-by-side comparison of “prior” and “current” data, punctuated with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down icon indicating the state’s “progress” on each metric. Another click reveals a graph of annual trends and a citation for the data source, but little detail about how the data are actually derived. How the public is supposed to use this information is an open question….(More)”

Big Data for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to a Special Issue of the Journal “Big Data” by Catlett Charlie and Ghani Rayid: “…organizations focused on social good are realizing the potential as well but face several challenges as they seek to become more data-driven. The biggest challenge they face is a paucity of examples and case studies on how data can be used for social good. This special issue of Big Data is targeted at tackling that challenge and focuses on highlighting some exciting and impactful examples of work that uses data for social good. The special issue is just one example of the recent surge in such efforts by the data science community. …

This special issue solicited case studies and problem statements that would either highlight (1) the use of data to solve a social problem or (2) social challenges that need data-driven solutions. From roughly 20 submissions, we selected 5 articles that exemplify this type of work. These cover five broad application areas: international development, healthcare, democracy and government, human rights, and crime prevention.

“Understanding Democracy and Development Traps Using a Data-Driven Approach” (Ranganathan et al.) details a data-driven model between democracy, cultural values, and socioeconomic indicators to identify a model of two types of “traps” that hinder the development of democracy. They use historical data to detect causal factors and make predictions about the time expected for a given country to overcome these traps.

“Targeting Villages for Rural Development Using Satellite Image Analysis” (Varshney et al.) discusses two case studies that use data and machine learning techniques for international economic development—solar-powered microgrids in rural India and targeting financial aid to villages in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, the authors stress the importance of understanding the characteristics and provenance of the data and the criticality of incorporating local “on the ground” expertise.

In “Human Rights Event Detection from Heterogeneous Social Media Graphs,” Chen and Neil describe efficient and scalable techniques to use social media in order to detect emerging patterns in human rights events. They test their approach on recent events in Mexico and show that they can accurately detect relevant human rights–related tweets prior to international news sources, and in some cases, prior to local news reports, which could potentially lead to more timely, targeted, and effective advocacy by relevant human rights groups.

“Finding Patterns with a Rotten Core: Data Mining for Crime Series with Core Sets” (Wang et al.) describes a case study with the Cambridge Police Department, using a subspace clustering method to analyze the department’s full housebreak database, which contains detailed information from thousands of crimes from over a decade. They find that the method allows human crime analysts to handle vast amounts of data and provides new insights into true patterns of crime committed in Cambridge…..(More)

Gamification harnesses the power of games to motivate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kevin Werbach at the Conversation: “Walk through any public area and you’ll see people glued to their phones, playing mobile games like Game of War and Candy Crush Saga. They aren’t alone. 59% of Americans play video games, and contrary to stereotypes, 48% of gamers are women. The US$100 billion video game industry is among the least-appreciated business phenomena in the world today.

But this isn’t an article about video games. It’s about where innovative organizations are applying the techniques that make those games so powerfully engaging: everywhere else.

Gamification is the perhaps-unfortunate name for the growing practice of applying structural elements, design patterns, and psychological insights from game design to business, education, health, marketing, crowdsourcing and other fields. Over the past four years, gamification has gone through a cycle of (over-)hype and (overblown) disappointment common for technological trends. Yet if you look carefully, you’ll see it everywhere.

Tapping into pieces of games

Gamification involves two primary mechanisms. The first is to take design structures from games, such as levels, achievements, points, and leaderboards — in my book, For the Win, my co-author and I label them “game elements” — and incorporate them into activities. The second, more subtle but ultimately more effective, is to mine the rich vein of design techniques that game designers have developed over many years. Good games pull you in and carry you through a journey that remains engaging, using an evolving balance of challenges and a stream of well crafted, actionable feedback.

Many enterprises now use tools built on top of Salesforce.com’s customer relationship management platform to motivate employees through competitions, points and leaderboards. Online learning platforms such as Khan Academy commonly challenge students to “level up” by sprinkling game elements throughout the process. Even games are now gamified: Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PS4 consoles offer a meta-layer of achievements and trophies to promote greater game-play.

The differences between a gamified system that incorporates good design principles and one that doesn’t aren’t always obvious on the surface. They show up in the results.

Duolingo is an online language-learning app. It’s pervasively and thoughtfully gamified: points, levels, achievements, bonuses for “streaks,” visual progression indicators, even a virtual currency with various ways to spend it. The well integrated gamification is a major differentiator for Duolingo, which happens to be the most successful tool of its kind. With over 60 million registered users, it teaches languages to more people than the entire US public school system.

Most of the initial high-profile cases of gamification were for marketing: for example, USA Network ramped up its engagement numbers with web-based gamified challenges for fans of its shows, and Samsung gave points and badges for learning about its products.

Soon it became clear that other applications were equally promising. Today, organizations are using gamification to enhance employee performance, promote health and wellness activities, improve retention in online learning, help kids with cancer endure their treatment regimen, and teach people how to code, to name just a few examples. Gamification has potential anywhere that motivation is an important element of success.

Gamification works because our responses to games are deeply hard-wired into our psychology. Game design techniques can activate our innate desires to recognize patterns, solve puzzles, master challenges, collaborate with others, and be in the drivers’ seat when experiencing the world around us. They can also create a safe space for experimentation and learning. After all, why not try something new when you know that even if you fail, you’ll get another life?…(More)

What Your Tweets Say About You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the New Yorker: “How much can your tweets reveal about you? Judging by the last nine hundred and seventy-two words that I used on Twitter, I’m about average when it comes to feeling upbeat and being personable, and I’m less likely than most people to be depressed or angry. That, at least, is the snapshot provided by AnalyzeWords, one of the latest creations from James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas who studies how language relates to well-being and personality. One of Pennebaker’s most famous projects is a computer program called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (L.I.W.C.), which looks at the words we use, and in what frequency and context, and uses this information to gauge our psychological states and various aspects of our personality….

Take a study, out last month, from a group of researchers based at the University of Pennsylvania. The psychologist Johannes Eichstaedt and his colleagues analyzed eight hundred and twenty-six million tweets across fourteen hundred American counties. (The counties contained close to ninety per cent of the U.S. population.) Then, using lists of words—some developed by Pennebaker, others by Eichstaedt’s team—that can be reliably associated with anger, anxiety, social engagement, and positive and negative emotions, they gave each county an emotional profile. Finally, they asked a simple question: Could those profiles help determine which counties were likely to have more deaths from heart disease?

The answer, it turned out, was yes….

The researchers have a theory: they suggest that “the language of Twitter may be a window into the aggregated and powerful effects of the community context.” They point to other epidemiological studies which have shown that general facts about a community, such as its “social cohesion and social capital,” have consequences for the health of individuals. Broadly speaking, people who live in poorer, more fragmented communities are less healthy than people living in richer, integrated ones.“When we do a sub-analysis, we find that the power that Twitter has is in large part accounted for by community and socioeconomic variables,” Eichstaedt told me when we spoke over Skype. In short, a young person’s negative, angry, and stressed-out tweets might reflect his or her stress-inducing environment—and that same environment may have negative health repercussions for other, older members of the same community….(More)”

How to Fight the Next Epidemic

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bill Gates in the New York Times: “The Ebola Crisis Was Terrible. But Next Time Could Be Much Worse….Much of the public discussion about the world’s response to Ebola has focused on whether the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups could have responded more effectively. These are worthwhile questions, but they miss the larger point. The problem isn’t so much that the system didn’t work well enough. The problem is that we hardly have a system at all.

To begin with, most poor countries, where a natural epidemic is most likely to start, have no systematic disease surveillance in place. Even once the Ebola crisis was recognized last year, there were no resources to effectively map where cases occurred, or to use people’s travel patterns to predict where the disease might go next….

Data is another crucial problem. During the Ebola epidemic, the database that tracks cases has not always been accurate. This is partly because the situation is so chaotic, but also because much of the case reporting has been done on paper and then sent to a central location for data entry….

I believe that we can solve this problem, just as we’ve solved many others — with ingenuity and innovation.

We need a global warning and response system for outbreaks. It would start with strengthening poor countries’ health systems. For example, when you build a clinic to deliver primary health care, you’re also creating part of the infrastructure for fighting epidemics. Trained health care workers not only deliver vaccines; they can also monitor disease patterns, serving as part of the early warning systems that will alert the world to potential outbreaks. Some of the personnel who were in Nigeria to fight polio were redeployed to work on Ebola — and that country was able to contain the disease very quickly.

We also need to invest in disease surveillance. We need a case database that is instantly accessible to the relevant organizations, with rules requiring countries to share their information. We need lists of trained personnel, from local leaders to global experts, prepared to deal with an epidemic immediately. … (More)”

31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils  and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.

The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.

Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(More)”

Managerial Governance and Transparency in Public Sector to Improve Services for Citizens and Companies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nunzio Casalino and Peter Bednar: “Recent debate and associated initiatives dealing with public sector innovation have mainly aimed at improving the effectiveness and efficiency of the delivery of public services and improved transparency and user friendliness. Beyond typical administrative reforms, innovation is expected to help address societal challenges such as the aging population, inclusion, health care, education, public safety, environment and greenhouse gas emissions reduction. The public sector consists of a complex open system of organizations with various tasks. Therefore, decision-making can be slower than in the private sector because of large chains of command. Innovations here will often have an impact across this complex organizational structure, and thus must be supported by a robust strategy. To strengthen democracy, promote government efficiency and effectiveness, discourage wastes and misuses of government resources, public administrations have to promote a new stronger level of openness in government. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe an innovative approach for the governance of public systems and services, currently applied in the Italian public administration domain, which could be easily replicated in other countries as well. Two initiatives, to collect and provide relevant public information gathered from different and heterogeneous public organizations, to improve government processes and increase quality of services for citizens and companies, are described. The cases adopted have been validated through a case analysis approach involving the Italian Agency for the public administration digitalization to understand new e-government scenarios within the context of governmental reforms heavily influenced by the principles of Open Government Model….(More)

Why Entrepreneurs Should Go Work for Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Blanding interviewing Mitchell B. Weiss for HBS Working Knowledge:  “…In the past five years, cities around the world have increasingly become laboratories in innovation, producing idea labs that partner with outside businesses and nonprofits to solve thorny public policy problems—and along the way deal with challenges of knowing when to follow the established ways of government and when to break the mold. States and federal government, too, have been reaching out to designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help redo their operations. The new US Digital Service, for example, follows other federal efforts like 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows to streamline government websites and electronic records—adapting from models in the UK and elsewhere.

“We have many talented people in government, but by and large they have tended to be analysts and strategists, rather than inventors and builders,” says Weiss, who hopes his course can help change that. “One reason we didn’t have them is we weren’t training them. At policy schools we had not been training people to be all that entrepreneurial, and at business schools, we were not prepping or prodding entrepreneurial people to enter the public sector or even just to invent for the public realm.”

“Government should be naturals at crowdsourcing”

Government entrepreneurship takes many forms. There are “public-public entrepreneurs” who work within government agencies, as well as “private-public entrepreneurs” who establish private businesses that sell to government agencies or sometimes to citizens directly.

In Philadelphia, for example, Textizen enables citizens to communicate with city health and human services agencies by text messages, leading to new enforcement on air pollution controls. In California, OpenCounter streamlined registration for small businesses and provided zoning clearances in a fraction of the usual time. In New York, Mark43 is developing software to analyze crime statistics and organize law enforcement records. And in Boston, Bridj developed an on-demand bus service for routes underserved by public transportation.

The innovations are happening at a scale large enough to even attract venture capital investment, despite past VC skepticism about funding public projects.

“There was this paradox—on the one hand, government is the biggest customer in the world; on the other hand, 90 out of 100 VCs would say they don’t back business models that sell to government,” says Weiss. “Though that’s starting to change as startups and government are starting to change.” OpenGov received a $15 million round of funding last spring led by Andreessen Horowitz, and $17 million was pumped into civic social-networking app MindMixer last fall….

Governments could attract even more capital by examining their procurement rules to speed buying, says Weiss, giving them that same sense of urgency and lean startup practices needed to be successful in entrepreneurial projects…(More)”

New take on game theory offers clues on why we cooperate

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexander J Stewart at The Conversation: “Why do people cooperate? This isn’t a question anyone seriously asks. The answer is obvious: we cooperate because doing so is usually synergistic. It creates more benefit for less cost and makes our lives easier and better.
Maybe it’s better to ask why don’t people always cooperate. But the answer here seems obvious too. We don’t do so if we think we can get away with it. If we can save ourselves the effort of working with someone else but still gain the benefits of others’ cooperation. And, perhaps, we withhold cooperation as punishment for others’ past refusal to collaborate with us.
Since there are good reasons to cooperate – and good reasons not to do so – we are left with a question without an obvious answer: under what conditions will people cooperate?
Despite its seeming simplicity, this question is very complicated, from both a theoretical and an experimental point of view. The answer matters a great deal to anyone trying to create an environment that fosters cooperation, from corporate managers and government bureaucrats to parents of unruly siblings.
New research into game theory I’ve conducted with Joshua Plotkin offers some answers – but raises a lot of questions of its own too.
Traditionally, research into game theory – the study of strategic decision making – focused either on whether a rational player should cooperate in a one-off interaction or on looking for the “winning solutions” that allow an individual who wants to cooperate make the best decisions across repeated interactions.
Our more recent inquiries aim to understand the subtle dynamics of behavioral change when there are an infinite number of potential strategies (much like life) and the game payoffs are constantly shifting (also much like life).
By investigating this in more detail, we can better learn how to incentivize people to cooperate – whether by setting the allowance we give kids for doing chores, by rewarding teamwork in school and at work or even by how we tax to pay for public benefits such as healthcare and education.
What emerges from our studies is a complex and fascinating picture: the amount of cooperation we see in large groups is in constant flux, and incentives that mean well can inadvertently lead to less rather than more cooperative behavior….(More)”

Budgets for the People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paolo Spada and Hollie Russon Gilman on Brazil’s Democratic Innovations in Foreign Affairs: “At a time of record low trust in public institutions, thousands of new channels for citizen involvement in government are opening across the world. They go further than electoral participation; they increase citizens’ ability to monitor, regulate, and, in some cases, directly affect political decision-making.Labeled by scholars as democratic innovations, these efforts strengthen existing democratic institutions and promote participation in politics that exceeds infrequent voting. Participatory budgeting (PB) is a standout within the realm of democratic innovations, allowing citizens direct control over portions of government spending. Thirteen Brazilian cities introduced PB programs in 1989. By 2001, there were more than 100 cities implementing PB in Brazil, and in 2015, there are thousands of cities adopting variants of the process worldwide.
Brazilian best practices were instrumental in showcasing the potential of PB to the world. A 2008 World Bank study showed that implementing the process for ten years reduced poverty and improved access to clean water. Recent research has also shown that municipal governments that adopt PB receive an increase in public spending for services such as sanitation and health care. Scholars have also found that PB leads to an eight percent increase in the number of civil society organizations within a given Brazilian municipality, highlighting how this democratic innovation promotes citizen engagement, efficacy, voice, transparency, accountability, and lower levels of corruption. On a global scale, the spread of PB could help build trust among a citizenry that craves more participatory, transparent, and accountable institutions….(More)”