Better Governing Through Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Editorial Board of the New York Times: “Government bureaucracies, as opposed to casual friendships, are seldom in danger from too much information. That is why a new initiative by the New York City comptroller, Scott Stringer, to use copious amounts of data to save money and solve problems, makes such intuitive sense.

Called ClaimStat, it seeks to collect and analyze information on the thousands of lawsuits and claims filed each year against the city. By identifying patterns in payouts and trouble-prone agencies and neighborhoods, the program is supposed to reduce the cost of claims the way CompStat, the fabled data-tracking program pioneered by the New York Police Department, reduces crime.

There is a great deal of money to be saved: In its 2015 budget, the city has set aside $674 million to cover settlements and judgments from lawsuits brought against it. That amount is projected to grow by the 2018 fiscal year to $782 million, which Mr. Stringer notes is more than the combined budgets of the Departments of Aging and Parks and Recreation and the Public Library.

The comptroller’s office issued a report last month that applied the ClaimStat approach to a handful of city agencies: the Police Department, Parks and Recreation, Health and Hospitals Corporation, Environmental Protection and Sanitation. It notes that the Police Department generates the most litigation of any city agency: 9,500 claims were filed against it in 2013, leading to settlements and judgments of $137.2 million.

After adjusting for the crime rate, the report found that several precincts in the South Bronx and Central Brooklyn had far more claims filed against their officers than other precincts in the city. What does that mean? It’s hard to know, but the implications for policy and police discipline would seem to be a challenge that the mayor, police commissioner and precinct commanders need to figure out. The data clearly point to a problem.

Far more obvious conclusions may be reached from ClaimStat data covering issues like park maintenance and sewer overflows. The city’s tree-pruning budget was cut sharply in 2010, and injury claims from fallen tree branches soared. Multimillion-dollar settlements ensued.

The great promise of ClaimStat is making such shortsightedness blindingly obvious. And in exposing problems like persistent flooding from sewer overflows, ClaimStat can pinpoint troubled areas down to the level of city blocks. (We’re looking at you, Canarsie, and Community District 2 on Staten Island.)

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has offered only mild praise for the comptroller’s excellent idea (“the mayor welcomes all ideas to make the city more effective and better able to serve its citizens”) while noting, perhaps a little defensively, that it is already on top of this, at least where the police are concerned. It has created a “Risk Assessment and Compliance Unit” within the Police Department to examine claims and make recommendations. The mayor’s aides also point out that the city’s payouts have remained flat over the last 12 years, for which they credit a smart risk-assessment strategy that knows when to settle claims and when to fight back aggressively in court.

But the aspiration of a well-run city should not be to hold claims even but to shrink them. And, at a time when anecdotes and rampant theorizing are fueling furious debates over police crime-fighting strategies, it seems beyond arguing that the more actual information, independently examined and publicly available, the better.”

Reprogramming Government: A Conversation With Mikey Dickerson

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Q and A by in The New York Times: “President Obama owes Mikey Dickerson two debts of gratitude. Mr. Dickerson was a crucial member of the team that, in just six weeks, fixed the HealthCare.gov website when the two-year, $400 million health insurance project failed almost as soon as it opened to the public in October.

Mr. Dickerson, 35, also oversaw the computers and wrote software for Mr. Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, including crucial last-minute programs to figure out ad placement and plan “get out the vote” campaigns in critical areas. It was a good fit for him; since 2006, Mr. Dickerson had worked for Google on its computer systems, which have grown rapidly and are now among the world’s largest.

But last week Mr. Obama lured Mr. Dickerson away from Google. His new job at the White House will be to identify and fix other troubled government computer systems and websites. The engineer says he wants to change how citizens interact with the government as well as prevent catastrophes. He talked on Friday about his new role, in a conversation that has been condensed and edited….”

An Air-Quality Monitor You Take with You

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

MIT Technology Review: “A startup is building a wearable air-quality monitor using a sensing technology that can cheaply detect the presence of chemicals around you in real time. By reporting the information its sensors gather to an app on your smartphone, the technology could help people with respiratory conditions and those who live in highly polluted areas keep tabs on exposure.
Berkeley, California-based Chemisense also plans to crowdsource data from users to show places around town where certain compounds are identified.
Initially, the company plans to sell a $150 wristband geared toward kids with asthma—of which there are nearly 7 million in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention— to help them identify places and pollutants that tend to provoke attacks,  and track their exposure to air pollution over time. The company hopes people with other respiratory conditions, and those who are just concerned about air pollution, will be interested, too.
In the U.S., air quality is monitored at thousands of stations across the country; maps and forecasts can be viewed online. But these monitors offer accurate readings only in their location.
Chemisense has not yet made its initial product, but it expects it will be a wristband using polymers treated with charged nanoparticles of carbon such that the polymers swell in the presence of certain chemical vapors, changing the resistance of a circuit.”

Opening Health Data: What Do Researchers Want? Early Experiences With New York's Open Health Data Platform.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin, Erika G. PhD, MPH; Helbig, Natalie PhD, MPA; and Birkhead, Guthrie S. MD, MPH in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice: “Governments are rapidly developing open data platforms to improve transparency and make information more accessible. New York is a leader, with currently the only state platform devoted to health. Although these platforms could build public health departments’ capabilities to serve more researchers, agencies have little guidance on releasing meaningful and usable data.

Objective: Structured focus groups with researchers and practitioners collected stakeholder feedback on potential uses of open health data and New York’s open data strategy….

Results: There was low awareness of open data, with 67% of researchers reporting never using open data portals prior to the workshop. Participants were interested in data sets that were geocoded, longitudinal, or aggregated to small area granularity and capabilities to link multiple data sets. Multiple environmental conditions and barriers hinder their capacity to use health data for research. Although open data platforms cannot address all barriers, they provide multiple opportunities for public health research and practice, and participants were overall positive about the state’s efforts to release open data.

Conclusions: Open data are not ideal for some researchers because they do not contain individually identifiable data, indicating a need for tiered data release strategies. However, they do provide important new opportunities to facilitate research and foster collaborations among agencies, researchers, and practitioners.”

Delivering a Customer-Focused Government Through Smarter IT

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Cobert, Steve VanRoekel, and Todd Park at the White House: “As technology changes, government must change with it to address new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. This Administration has made important strides in modernizing government so that it serves its constituents more effectively and efficiently, but we know there is much more to do.
Last year, a group of digital and technology experts from the private sector helped us fix HealthCare.gov – a turnaround that enabled millions of Americans to sign up for quality health insurance. This effort also reminded us why the President’s commitment to bringing more of the nation’s top information technology (IT) talent into government is so critical to delivering the best possible results for our customers – the American people.
A core part of the President’s Management Agenda is improving the value we deliver to citizens through Federal IT. That’s why, today, the Administration is formally launching the U.S. Digital Service. The Digital Service will be a small team made up of our country’s brightest digital talent that will work with agencies to remove barriers to exceptional service delivery and help remake the digital experience that people and businesses have with their government…
The Digital Service will also collaborate closely with 18F, an exciting new unit of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA). GSA’s 18F houses a growing group of talented developers and digital professionals who are designing and building the actual digital platforms and providing services across the government….
Leveraging Best Practices with the Digital Services Playbook
To help the Digital Service achieve its mission, today the Administration is releasing the initial version of a Digital Services Playbook that lays out best practices for building effective digital services like web and mobile applications and will serve as a guide for agencies across government. To increase the success of government digital service projects, this playbook outlines 13 key “plays” drawn from private and public-sector best practices that, if followed together, will help federal agencies deliver services that work well for users and require less time and money to develop and operate.
The technologies used to create digital services are changing rapidly. The Playbook is designed to encourage the government to adopt the best of these advances into our own work. To further strengthen this important tool, we encourage folks across the public and private sectors to provide feedback on the Playbook, so we can strengthen this important tool.
Using Agile Processes to Procure Digital Services with the TechFAR Handbook
To ensure government has the right tech tools to do its job, the Administration is also today launching the TechFAR Handbook, a guide that explains how agencies can execute key plays in the Playbook in ways consistent with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), which governs how the government must buy services from the private sector….
Stay informed — sign up here to monitor the latest news from the U.S. Digital Service.“

How you can help build a more agile government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at GovFresh: “Earlier this year, I began doing research work with CivicActions on agile development in government — who was doing it, how and what the needs were to successfully get it deployed.
After the Healthcare.gov launch mishaps, calls for agile practices as the panacea to all of government IT woes reached a high. While agile as the ultimate solution oversimplifies the issue, we’ve evolved as a profession (both software development and public service) that moving towards an iterative approach to operations is the way of the future.
My own formal introduction with agile began with my work with CivicActions, so the research coincided with an introductory immersion into how government is using it. Having been involved with startups for the past 15 years, iterative development is the norm, however, the layer of project management processes has forced me to be a better professional overall.
What I’ve found through many discussions and interviews is that you can’t just snap your fingers and execute agile within the framework of government bureaucracy. There are a number of issues — from procurement to project management training to executive-level commitment to organizational-wide culture change — that hinder its adoption. For IT, launching a new website or app is this easy part. Changing IT operational processes and culture is often overlooked or avoided, especially for a short-term executive, because they reach into the granular organizational challenges most people don’t want to bother with.
After talking with a number of agile government and private sector practitioners, it was clear there was enthusiasm around how it could be applied to fundamentally change the way government works. Beyond just execution from professional project management professionals, everyone I spoke with talked about how deploying agile gives them a stronger sense of public service.
What came from these discussions is the desire to have a stronger community of practitioners and those interested in deploying it to better support one another.
To meet that need, a group of federal, state, local government and private sector professionals have formed Agile for Gov, a “community-powered network of agile government professionals.”…

Monitoring Arms Control Compliance With Web Intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Holden and Maynard Holliday at Commons Lab: “Traditional monitoring of arms control treaties, agreements, and commitments has required the use of National Technical Means (NTM)—large satellites, phased array radars, and other technological solutions. NTM was a good solution when the treaties focused on large items for observation, such as missile silos or nuclear test facilities. As the targets of interest have shrunk by orders of magnitude, the need for other, more ubiquitous, sensor capabilities has increased. The rise in web-based, or cloud-based, analytic capabilities will have a significant influence on the future of arms control monitoring and the role of citizen involvement.
Since 1999, the U.S. Department of State has had at its disposal the Key Verification Assets Fund (V Fund), which was established by Congress. The Fund helps preserve critical verification assets and promotes the development of new technologies that support the verification of and compliance with arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament requirements.
Sponsored by the V Fund to advance web-based analytic capabilities, Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with Recorded Future (RF), synthesized open-source data streams from a wide variety of traditional and nontraditional web sources in multiple languages along with topical texts and articles on national security policy to determine the efficacy of monitoring chemical and biological arms control agreements and compliance. The team used novel technology involving linguistic algorithms to extract temporal signals from unstructured text and organize that unstructured text into a multidimensional structure for analysis. In doing so, the algorithm identifies the underlying associations between entities and events across documents and sources over time. Using this capability, the team analyzed several events that could serve as analogs to treaty noncompliance, technical breakout, or an intentional attack. These events included the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China, the Shanghai pig die-off and the fungal meningitis outbreak in the United States last year.
h7n9-for-blog
 
For H7N9 we found that open source social media were the first to report the outbreak and give ongoing updates.  The Sandia RF system was able to roughly estimate lethality based on temporal hospitalization and fatality reporting.  For the Shanghai pig die-off the analysis tracked the rapid assessment by Chinese authorities that H7N9 was not the cause of the pig die-off as had been originally speculated. Open source reporting highlighted a reduced market for pork in China due to the very public dead pig display in Shanghai. Possible downstream health effects were predicted (e.g., contaminated water supply and other overall food ecosystem concerns). In addition, legitimate U.S. food security concerns were raised based on the Chinese purchase of the largest U.S. pork producer (Smithfield) because of a fear of potential import of tainted pork into the United States….
To read the full paper, please click here.”

The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging.  Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement.  This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams.  Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve.  Perhaps there can be different models.  For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services.  Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown.  There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government.    Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis.  For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”

App enables citizens to report water waste in drought regions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Rallying citizens to take a part in looking after the community they live in has become easier thanks to smartphones. In the past, the Creek Watch app has enabled anyone to help monitor their local water quality by sending data back to the state water board. Now Everydrop LA wants to use similar techniques to avoid drought in California, encouraging residents to report incidents of water wastage.
According to the team behind the app — which also created the CitySourced platform for engaging users in civic issues — even the smallest amount of water wastage can lead to meaningful losses over time. A faucet that drips just once a minute will lose over 2000 gallons of drinkable water each year. Using the Everydrop LA, citizens can report the location of leaking faucets and fire hydrants as well as occurrences of blatant water wastage. They can also see how much water is being wasted in their local area and learn about what they can do to cut their own water usage. In times when drought is a risk, the app notifies users to conserve. Cities and counties can use the data in their reports and learn more about how water wastage is affecting their jurisdiction.”

This Exercise App Tracks Trends on How We Move In Different Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Byrnes at CityLab: “An app designed to encourage exercise can also tell us a lot about the way different cities get from point A to B.
The app, called Human, runs in the background of your iPhone, automatically detecting activities like walking, cycling, running, and motorized transport. The point is to encourage you to exercise for at least 30 minutes a day.
Almost a year since Human launched (last August), its developers have released stunning visualization of all that movement: 7.5 million miles traveled by their app users so far.
On their site, you can look into the mobility data inside 30 different cities. Once you click on one, you’ll be greeted with a pie chart that shows the distribution of activity within that city lined up against a pie chart that shows the international average.
In the case of Amsterdam, its transportation clichés are verified. App users in the bike-loving city use two wheels way more than they use four. And they walk about as much as anywhere else:

Human then shows the paths traveled by their users. When it comes to Amsterdam, the results look almost exactly like the city’s entire street grid, no matter what physical activity is being shown: