Alex Bigelow, Steven Drucker, Danyel Fisher, and Miriah Meyer at Microsoft Research: “In recent years many popular data visualizations have emerged that are created largely by designers whose main area of expertise is not computer science. Designers generate these visualizations using a handful of design tools and environments. To better inform the development of tools intended for designers working with data, we set out to understand designers’ challenges and perspectives. We interviewed professional designers, conducted observations of designers working with data in the lab, and observed designers working with data in team settings in the wild. A set of patterns emerged from these observations from which we extract a number of themes that provide a new perspective on design considerations for visualization tool creators, as well as on known engineering problems.”
Cluster mapping
“The U.S. Cluster Mapping Project is a national economic initiative that provides open, interactive data to understand regional clusters and support business, innovation and policy in the United States. It is based at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, with support from a number of partners and a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.
Research
The project provides a robust cluster mapping database grounded in the leading academic research. Professor Michael Porter pioneered the comprehensive mapping of clusters in the U.S. economy in the early 2000s. The research team from Harvard, MIT, and Temple used the latest Census and industry data to develop a new algorithm to define cluster categories that cover the entire U.S. economy. These categories enable comparative analyses of clusters across any region in the United States….
Impact
Research on the presence of regional clusters has recently oriented economic policy toward addressing the needs of clusters and mobilizing their potential. Four regional partners in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, and South Carolina produced a set of case studies that discuss how regions have organized economic policy around clusters. These cases form the core of a resource library that aims to disseminate insights and strengthen the community of practice in cluster-based economic development. The project will also take an international scope to benefit cross-border industries in North America and inform collective global dialogue around cluster-based economic development.”
Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts
Paper by Rob Kitchin in the Journal “Big Data and Society”: This article examines how the availability of Big Data, coupled with new data analytics, challenges established epistemologies across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, and assesses the extent to which they are engendering paradigm shifts across multiple disciplines. In particular, it critically explores new forms of empiricism that declare ‘the end of theory’, the creation of data-driven rather than knowledge-driven science, and the development of digital humanities and computational social sciences that propose radically different ways to make sense of culture, history, economy and society. It is argued that: (1) Big Data and new data analytics are disruptive innovations which are reconfiguring in many instances how research is conducted; and (2) there is an urgent need for wider critical reflection within the academy on the epistemological implications of the unfolding data revolution, a task that has barely begun to be tackled despite the rapid changes in research practices presently taking place. After critically reviewing emerging epistemological positions, it is contended that a potentially fruitful approach would be the development of a situated, reflexive and contextually nuanced epistemology”
Technological Innovations and Future Shifts in International Politics
Paper by Askar Akaev and Vladimir Pantin in International Studies Quaterly: “How are large technological changes and important shifts in international politics interconnected? It is shown in the article that primary technological innovations, which take place in each Kondratieff cycle, change the balance of power between the leading states and cause shifts in international politics. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the genesis and initial development of the cluster of new technologies takes place in periods of crisis and depression. Therefore, the authors forecast that the period 2013–2020 will be marked by the advancement of important technological innovations and massive geopolitical shifts in many regions of the world.”
Blueprint on "The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care"
The GovLab Press Release: NHS England and The Governance Lab at NYU (The GovLab) have today launched a blueprint – The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care – for accelerating the use of open data in health and care settings.
The availability of open data can empower citizens and help care providers, patients and researchers make better decisions, spur new innovations and identify efficiencies. The report was commissioned by NHS England and written by The GovLab, part of New York University and world leaders in the field of open data usage. It puts forward a proposal for how the health and care system can maximise the impact of sharing open data through establishing priorities and clear ways of measuring benefits.
Tim Kelsey, National Director for Patients and Information for NHS England, said:
“There’s an urgent need for the NHS to use better information and evidence to guide decision-making and investment. We know with scientific and medical research, the rate of discovery is accelerated by better access to data. This report will kick off a conversation about how we can use open data in the NHS to build a meaningful evidence base to support better investment in health and care services. Over the coming months, I’m keen to hear the views of colleagues on how we can take this forward and build an evidence base to improve outcomes for patients.”
Stefaan Verhulst, Co-founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the GovLab:
“The blueprint lays out a detailed plan to start a conversation about how to gather the evidence needed to understand and assess the shape and size of the impact of open health data. It is important to pay a comparable level of attention to an analysis of open data’s potential benefits, as well as potential risks.”
Download the full report: thegovlab.org/nhs
Humanitarians in the sky
Patrick Meier in the Guardian: “Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capture images faster, cheaper, and at a far higher resolution than satellite imagery. And as John DeRiggi speculates in “Drones for Development?” these attributes will likely lead to a host of applications in development work. In the humanitarian field that future is already upon us — so we need to take a rights-based approach to advance the discussion, improve coordination of UAV flights, and to promote regulation that will ensure safety while supporting innovation.
It was the unprecedentedly widespread use of civilian UAVs following typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that opened my eyes to UAV use in post-disaster settings. I was in Manila to support the United Nations’ digital humanitarian efforts and came across new UAV projects every other day.
One team was flying rotary-wing UAVs to search for survivors among vast fields of debris that were otherwise inaccessible. Another flew fixed-wing UAVs around Tacloban to assess damage and produce high-quality digital maps. Months later, UAVs are still being used to support recovery and preparedness efforts. One group is working with local mayors to identify which communities are being overlooked in the reconstruction.
Humanitarian UAVs are hardly new. As far back as 2007, the World Food Program teamed up with the University of Torino to build humanitarian UAVs. But today UAVs are much cheaper, safer, and easier to fly. This means more people own personal UAVs. The distinguishing feature between these small UAVs and traditional remote control airplanes or helicopters is that they are intelligent. Most can be programmed to fly and land autonomously at designated locations. Newer UAVs also have on-board, flight-stabilization features that automatically adapt to changing winds, automated collision avoidance systems, and standard fail-safe mechanisms.
While I was surprised by the surge in UAV projects in the Philippines, I was troubled that none of these teams were aware of each other and that most were apparently not sharing their imagery with local communities. What happens when even more UAV teams show up following future disasters? Will they be accompanied by droves of drone journalists and “disaster tourists” equipped with personal UAVs? Will we see thousands of aerial disaster pictures and videos uploaded to social media rather than in the hands of local communities? What are the privacy implications? And what about empowering local communities to deploy their own UAVs?
There were many questions but few answers. So I launched the humanitarian UAV network (UAViators) to bridge the worlds of humanitarian professionals and UAV experts to address these questions. Our first priority was to draft a code of conduct for the use of UAVs in humanitarian settings to hold ourselves accountable while educating new UAV pilots before serious mistakes are made…”
Measuring Governance: What’s the point?
Alan Hudson at Global Integrity: “Over the last 10-15 years, the fact that governance – the institutional arrangements and relationships that shape how effectively things get done – plays a central role in shaping countries’ development trajectories has become widely acknowledged (see for instance the World Bank’s World Development Report of 2011). This acknowledgement has developed hand-in-hand with determined efforts to measure various aspects of governance.
This emphasis on governance and the efforts made to measure its patterns and understand its dynamics is very welcome. There’s no doubt that governance matters and measuring “governance” and its various dimensions can play a useful role in drawing attention to problems and opportunities, in monitoring compliance with standards, in evaluating efforts to support reform, and in informing decisions about what reforms to implement and how.
But in my experience, discussions about governance and its measurement sometimes gloss over a number of key questions (for a similar argument see the early sections of Matt Andrews’ piece on “Governance indicators can make sense”). These include questions about: what is being measured – “governance” is a multi-faceted and rather woolly concept (see Francis Fukuyama’s 2013 piece on “What is Governance?” and various responses); who is going to use the data that is generated; how that data might have an impact; and what results are being sought.
I’ve noticed this most recently in discussions about the inclusion of “governance” in the post-2015 development framework of goals, targets and indicators. From what I’ve seen, the understandable enthusiasm for ensuring that governance gains a place in the post-2015 framework can lead to discussions that: skate over the fact that the evidence that particular forms of governance – often labelled as “Good Governance” – lead to better development outcomes is patchy; fail to effectively grapple with the fact that a cookie-cutter approach to governance is unlikely to work across diverse contexts; pay little attention given to the ways in which the data generated might actually be used to make a difference; and, give scant consideration to the needs of those who might use the data, particularly citizens and citizens’ groups.
In my view, a failure to address these issues risks inadvertently weakening the case for paying attention to, and measuring, aspects of governance. As the Overseas Development Institute’s excellent report on “Governance targets and indicators for post-2015” put it, in diplomatic language: “including something as a target or indicator does not automatically lead to its improvement and the prize is not just to find governance targets and indicators that can be ‘measured’. Rather, it may be important to reflect on the pathways through which set targets and indicators are thought to lead to better outcomes and on the incentives that might be generated by different measurement approaches.” (See my working document on “Fiscal Governance and Post-2015” for additional thoughts on the inclusion of governance in the post-2015 framework, including notes toward a theory of change).
More broadly, beyond the confines of the post-2015 debate, the risk – and arguably, in many cases, the reality – is that by paying insufficient attention to some key issues, we end up with a lot of data on various aspects of “governance”, but that that data doesn’t get used as much as it might, isn’t very useful for informing context-specific efforts to improve governance, and has limited impact.
To remedy this situation, I’d suggest that any effort to measure aspects of “governance” or to improve the availability, quality, use and impact of governance data (as the Governance Data Alliance is doing – with a Working Group on Problem Statements and Theories of Change) should answer up-front a series of simple questions:
- Outcomes: What outcome(s) are you interested in? Are you interested in improving governance for its own sake, because you regard a particular type of governance as intrinsically valuable, and/or because you think, for instance, that improving governance will help to improve service delivery and accelerate progress against poverty? (See Nathaniel Heller’s post on “outputs versus outcomes in open government”)
- Theory: If your interest is not solely based on the intrinsic value you attach to “governance”, which aspects of “governance” do you think matter in terms of the outcomes – e.g. service delivery and/or reduced poverty – that you’re interested in? What’s the theory of change that links governance to development outcomes? Without such a theory, it’s difficult to decide what to measure!
- Data: In what ways do you think that data about the aspects of governance that you think are important – for intrinsic or extrinsic reasons – will be used to help to drive progress towards the type of governance that you value? To what use might the data be put, by whom, to do what? Or, from the perspective of data-users, what information do they need to take action to improve governance?
Organizations that are involved in generating governance data no doubt spend time considering these questions. But nonetheless, I think there would be value in making that thinking – and information about whether and how the data gets used, and with what effect – explicit….”
The Trend towards “Smart Cities”
Chien-Chu Chen in the International Journal of Automation and Smart Technology (AUSMT): “Looking back over the past century, the steady pace of development in many of the world’s cities has resulted in a situation where a high percentage of these cities are now faced with the problem of aging, decrepit urban infrastructure; a considerable number of cities are having to undertake large-scale infrastructure renewal projects. While creating new opportunities in the area of infrastructure, ongoing urbanization is also creating problems, such as excessive consumption of water, electric power and heat energy, environmental pollution, increased greenhouse gas emissions, traffic jams, and the aging of the existing residential housing stock, etc. All of these problems present a challenge to cities’ ability to achieve sustainable development. In response to these issues, the concept of the “smart city” has grown in popularity throughout the world. The aim of smart city initiatives is to make the city a vehicle for “smartification” through the integration of different industries and sectors. As initiatives of this kind move beyond basic automation into the realm of real “smartification,” the smart city concept is beginning to take concrete form….”
Closing the Feedback Loop: Can Technology Bridge the Accountability Gap
(WorldBank) Book edited by Björn-Sören Gigler and Savita Bailur: “This book is a collection of articles, written by both academics and practitioners as an evidence base for citizen engagement through information and communication technologies (ICTs). In it, the authors ask: how do ICTs empower through participation, transparency and accountability? Specifically, the authors examine two principal questions: Are technologies an accelerator to closing the “accountability gap” – the space between the supply (governments, service providers) and demand (citizens, communities, civil society organizations or CSOs) that requires bridging for open and collaborative governance? And under what conditions does this occur? The introductory chapters lay the theoretical groundwork for understanding the potential of technologies to achieving intended goals. Chapter 1 takes us through the theoretical linkages between empowerment, participation, transparency and accountability. In Chapter 2, the authors devise an informational capability framework, relating human abilities and well-being to the use of ICTs. The chapters to follow highlight practical examples that operationalize ICT-led initiatives. Chapter 3 reviews a sample of projects targeting the goals of transparency and accountability in governance to make preliminary conclusions around what evidence exists to date, and where to go from here. In chapter 4, the author reviews the process of interactive community mapping (ICM) with examples that support general local development and others that mitigate natural disasters. Chapter 5 examines crowdsourcing in fragile states to track aid flows, report on incitement or organize grassroots movements. In chapter 6, the author reviews Check My School (CMS), a community monitoring project in the Philippines designed to track the provision of services in public schools. Chapter 7 introduces four key ICT-led, citizen-governance initiatives in primary health care in Karnataka, India. Chapter 8 analyzes the World Bank Institute’s use of ICTs in expanding citizen project input to understand the extent to which technologies can either engender a new “feedback loop” or ameliorate a “broken loop”. The authors’ analysis of the evidence signals ICTs as an accelerator to closing the “accountability gap”. In Chapter 9, the authors conclude with the Loch Ness model to illustrate how technologies contribute to shrinking the gap, why the gap remains open in many cases, and what can be done to help close it. This collection is a critical addition to existing literature on ICTs and citizen engagement for two main reasons: first, it is expansive, covering initiatives that leverage a wide range of technology tools, from mobile phone reporting to crowdsourcing to interactive mapping; second, it is the first of its kind to offer concrete recommendations on how to close feedback loops.”
Open government: getting beyond impenetrable online data
Jed Miller in The Guardian: “Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously closed a long letter by apologising that he hadn’t had time to make it shorter. Unfortunately, his pithy point about “download time” is regularly attributed to Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, probably because the public loves writers more than it loves statisticians. Scientists may make things provable, but writers make them memorable.
The World Bank confronted a similar reality of data journalism earlier this month when it revealed that, of the 1,600 bank reports posted online on from 2008 to 2012, 32% had never been downloaded at all and another 40% were downloaded under 100 times each.
Taken together, these cobwebbed documents represent millions of dollars in World Bank funds and hundreds of thousands of person-hours, spent by professionals who themselves represent millions of dollars in university degrees. It’s difficult to see the return on investment in producing expert research and organising it into searchable web libraries when almost three quarters of the output goes largely unseen.
The World Bank works at a scale unheard of by most organisations, but expert groups everywhere face the same challenges. Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
Even those who brave the progress bar find too often that urgent, incisive findings about poverty, health, discrimination, conflict or social change are presented in prose written by and for high-level experts, rendering it impenetrable to almost everyone else. Information isn’t just trapped in pdfs; it’s trapped in PhDs.
Governments and NGOs are beginning to realise that digital strategy means more than posting a document online, but what will it take for these groups to change not just their tools, but their thinking? It won’t be enough to partner with WhatsApp or hire GrumpyCat.
I asked strategists from the development, communications and social media fields to offer simple, “Tweetable” suggestions for how the policy community can become better communicators.
For nonprofits and governments that still publish 100-page pdfs on their websites and do not optimise the content to share in other channels such as social: it is a huge waste of time and ineffective. Stop it now.
– Beth Kanter, author and speaker. Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
Treat text as #opendata so infomediaries can mash it up and make it more accessible (see, for example federalregister.gov) and don’t just post and blast: distribute information in a targeted way to those most likely to be interested.
– Beth Noveck, director at the Governance Lab and former director at White House Open Government Initiative
Don’t be boring. Sounds easy, actually quite hard, super-important.
– Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy
Surprise me. Uncover the key finding that inspired you, rather than trying to tell it all at once and show me how the world could change because of it.
– Jay Golden, co-founder of Wakingstar Storyworks
For the Bank or anyone who is generating policy information they actually want people to use, they must actually write it for the user, not for themselves. As Steve Jobs said, ‘Simple can be harder than complex’.
– Kristen Grimm, founder and president at Spitfire Strategies
The way to reach the widest audience is to think beyond content format and focus on content strategy.
– Laura Silber, director of public affairs at Open Society Foundations
Open the door to policy work with short, accessible pieces – a blog post, a video take, infographics – that deliver the ‘so what’ succinctly.
– Robert McMahon, editor at Council on Foreign Relations
Policy information is more usable if it’s linked to corresponding actions one can take, or if it helps stir debate. Also, whichever way you slice it, there will always be a narrow market for raw policy reports … that’s why explainer sites, listicles and talking heads exist.
– Ory Okolloh, director of investments at Omidyar Network and former public policy and government relations manager at Google Africa
Ms Okolloh, who helped found the citizen reporting platform Ushahidi, also offered a simple reminder about policy reports: “‘Never gets downloaded’ doesn’t mean ‘never gets read’.” Just as we shouldn’t mistake posting for dissemination, we shouldn’t confuse popularity with influence….”