Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to principles that include releasing government data as open data—that is, free public data in forms that can be readily used. Hundreds of businesses are using open data to create jobs and build economic value. Up to now, however, most of this activity has taken place in developed countries, with the United States and United Kingdom in the lead. The use of open data faces more obstacles in developing countries, but has growing promise there, as well.”
The Data Revolution in Policy-Making
at the Open Institute: “There continues to be a great deal of dialogue and debate on what the data revolution from the report of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda is all about. However, some have raised concerns that the emerging narrative around opening up data, strengthening national statistics offices or building capacity for e-government may not be revolutionary enough. In thinking through this it becomes clear that revolutions are highly contextual events. The Arab spring happened due to the unique factors of the cultural and social-economic environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A similar ‘spring’ may not happen in the same way in sub-Sahara Africa due to the peculiarities of the region. Attempting to replicate it is therefore an exercise in futility for those hoping for regime change.
We have just published a think piece on the role of public participation in policy making and how a data revolution could play out in that space. None of the ideas are revolutionary. They have been proposed and piloted in various countries to various extents over time. For instance, in some contexts strengthening and safe guarding the autonomy of the national statistics office may not seem revolutionary to some, in some countries it may be unprecedented (this is not part of the report). And that is okay. Nation states should be allowed, in their efforts to build capable and developmental institutions, to interpret the revolution for themselves.
In sub-Sahara Africa the availability of underlying data used to develop public policy is almost non-existent. Even when citizens are expected to participate in the formulation process and implementation of the policies, the data is still difficult to find. This neuters public participation and is a disservice to open government. Therefore making this detailed data and the accompanying rationale publicly available would be a revolutionary change in both culture and policy on access to information and potentially empower citizens to participate.
The data revolution is an opportunity to mainstream statistics into public discourse on public policy in ways that citizens can understand and engage with. I hope African countries will be willing to put an effort in translating the data revolution into an African revolution. If not, there’s a risk we shall continue singing about a revolution and never actually have one.
Download the ThinkPiece here”
Privacy and Open Government
Paper by Teresa Scassa in Future Internet: “The public-oriented goals of the open government movement promise increased transparency and accountability of governments, enhanced citizen engagement and participation, improved service delivery, economic development and the stimulation of innovation. In part, these goals are to be achieved by making more and more government information public in reusable formats and under open licences. This paper identifies three broad privacy challenges raised by open government. The first is how to balance privacy with transparency and accountability in the context of “public” personal information. The second challenge flows from the disruption of traditional approaches to privacy based on a collapse of the distinctions between public and private sector actors. The third challenge is that of the potential for open government data—even if anonymized—to contribute to the big data environment in which citizens and their activities are increasingly monitored and profiled.”
The Emerging Power of Big Data
New America Foundation Report on the Chicago experience of using big data: “Big data is transforming the commercial marketplace but it also has the potential to reshape government affairs and urban development. In a new report from the Emerging Leaders Program at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, Lincoln S. Ellis, a founding member of the World Economic Roundtable, and other authors from the Emerging Leaders Program, explore how big data can be used by mega-cities to meet the challenges they face in an age of resource constraints to improve the lives of their residents.
Using Chicago as a case study, the report examines how the explosion of data availability enables cities to do more with less—to improve government services, fund much needed transportation, provide better education, and guarantee public safety. And do more with less is what many cities have had to do over the past five years because many cities have had to cut their budgets and reduce the number of public employees in the post-financial crisis economy. It is also what they will need to continue to do in the future.
“Unfortunately, resource constraints are a consistent feature of the post-crisis global landscape,” argues Ellis. “Happily, so too is the renaissance in productivity gains garnered by our ability to leverage technology and information to achieve our most important public purposes in a smarter and more efficient way.”
Click here to view the report as a PDF.”
Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target
New Report commissioned by Omydiar Network on the Business Case for Open Data: “Economic analysis has confirmed the significant contribution to economic growth and productivity achievable through an open data agenda. Governments, the private sector, individuals and communities all stand to benefit from the innovation and information that will inform investment, drive the creation of new industries, and inform decision making and research. To mark a step change in the way valuable information is created and reused, the G20 should release information as open data.
In May 2014, Omidyar Network commissioned Lateral Economics to undertake economic analysis on the potential of open data to support the G20’s 2% growth target and illustrate how an open data agenda can make a significant contribution to economic growth and productivity. Combining all G20 economies, output could increase by USD 13 trillion cumulatively over the next five years. Implementation of open data policies would thus boost cumulative G20 GDP by around 1.1 percentage points (almost 55%) of the G20’s 2% growth target over five years.
Recommendations
Importantly, open data cuts across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption. This memo suggests an open data thread that runs across all G20 priorities. The more data is opened, the more it can be used, reused, repurposed and built on—in combination with other data—for everyone’s benefit.
We call on G20 economies to sign up to the Open Data Charter.
The G20 should ensure that data released by G20 working groups and themes is in line with agreed open data standards. This will lead to more accountable, efficient, effective governments who are going further to expose inadequacy, fight corruption and spur innovation.
Data is a national resource and open data is a ‘win-win’ policy. It is about making more of existing resources. We know that the cost of opening data is smaller than the economic returns, which could be significant. Methods to respect privacy concerns must be taken into account. If this is done, as the public and private sector share of information grows, there will be increasing positive returns.
The G20 opportunity
This November, leaders of the G20 Member States will meet in Australia to drive forward commitments made in the St Petersburg G20 Leaders Declaration last September and to make firm progress on stimulating growth. Actions across the G20 will include increasing investment, lifting employment and participation, enhancing trade and promoting competition.
The resulting ‘Brisbane Action Plan’ will encapsulate all of these commitments with the aim of raising the level of G20 output by at least 2% above the currently projected level over the next five years. There are major opportunities for cooperative and collective action by G20 governments.
Governments should intensify the release of existing public sector data – both government and publicly funded research data. But much more can be done to promote open data than simply releasing more government data. In appropriate circumstances, governments can mandate public disclosure of private sector data (e.g. in corporate financial reporting).
Recommendations for action
- G20 governments should adopt the principles of the Open Data Charter to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
- G20 governments should adopt specific open data targets under each G20 theme, as illustrated below, such as releasing open data related to beneficial owners of companies, as well revenues from extractive industries
- G20 governments should consider harmonizing licensing regimes across the G20
- G20 governments should adopt metrics for measuring the quantity and quality of open data publication, e.g. using the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Certificates as a bottom-up mechanism for driving the adoption of common standards.
Illustrative G20 examples
Fiscal and monetary policy
Governments possess rich real time data that is not open or accessed by government macro-economic managers. G20 governments should:
- Open up models that lie behind economic forecasts and help assess alternative policy settings;
- Publish spending and contractual data to enable comparative shopping by government between government suppliers.
Anti corruption
Open data may directly contribute to reduced corruption by increasing the likelihood corruption will be detected. G20 governments should:
- Release open data related to beneficial owners of companies as well as revenues from extractive industries,
- Collaborate on harmonised technical standards that permit the tracing of international money flows – including the tracing of beneficial owners of commercial entities, and the comparison and reconciliation of transactions across borders.
Trade
Obtaining and using trade data from multiple jurisdictions is difficult. Access fees, specific licenses, and non-machine readable formats all involve large transaction costs. G20 governments should:
- Harmonise open data policies related to trade data.
- Use standard trade schema and formats.
Employment
Higher quality information on employment conditions would facilitate better matching of employees to organizations, producing greater job-satisfaction and improved productivity. G20 governments should:
- Open up centralised job vacancy registers to provide new mechanisms for people to find jobs.
- Provide open statistical information about the demand for skills in particular areas to help those supporting training and education to hone their offerings.
Energy
Open data will help reduce the cost of energy supply and improve energy efficiency. G20 governments should:
- Provide incentives for energy companies to publish open data from consumers and suppliers to enable cost savings through optimizing energy plans.
- Release energy performance certifications for buildings
- Publish real-time energy consumption for government buildings.
Infrastructure
Current infrastructure asset information is fragmented and inefficient. Exposing current asset data would be a significant first step in understanding gaps and providing new insights. G20 governments should:
- Publish open data on governments’ infrastructure assets and plans to better understand infrastructure gaps, enable greater efficiency and insights in infrastructure development and use and analyse cost/benefits.
- Publish open infrastructure data, including contracts via Open Contracting Partnership, in a consistent and harmonised way across G20 countries…”
In Defense of Transit Apps
Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: “The civic technology community has a love-hate relationship with transit apps.
We love to, and often do, use the example of open transit data and the cottage industry of civic app development it has helped spawn as justification for governments releasing open data. Some of the earliest, most enduring and most successful civic applications have been built on transit data and there literally hundreds of different apps available.
The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), which has helped to encourage the release of transit data from dozens and dozens of transportation authorities across the country, is used as the model for the development of other open data standards. I once described work being done to develop a data standard for locations dispensing vaccinations as “GTFS for flu shots.”
But some in the civic technology community chafe at the overuse of transit apps as the example cited for the release of open data and engagement with outside civic hackers. Surely there are other examples we can point to that get at deeper, more fundamental problems with civic engagement and the operation of government. Is the best articulation of the benefits of open data and civic hacking a simple bus stop application?
Last week at Transparency Camp in DC, during a session I ran on open data, I was asked what data governments should focus on releasing as open data. I stated my belief that – at a minimum – governments should concentrate on The 3 B’s: Buses (transit data), Bullets (crime data) and Bucks (budget & expenditure data).
To be clear – transit data and the apps it helps generate are critical to the open data and civic technology movements. I think it is vital to exploring the role that transit apps have played in the development of the civic technology ecosystem and their impact on open data.
Story telling with transit data
Transit data supports more than just “next bus” apps. In fact, characterizing all transit apps this way does a disservice to the talented and creative people working to build things with transit data. Transit data supports a wide range of different visualizations that can tell an intimate, granular story about how a transit system works and how it’s operation impacts a city.
One inspiring example of this kind of app was developed recently by Mike Barry and Brian Card, and looked at the operation of MBTA in Boston. Their motive was simple:
We attempt to present this information to help people in Boston better understand the trains, how people use the trains, and how the people and trains interact with each other.
We’re able to tell nuanced stories about transit systems because the quality of data being released continues to expand and improve in quality. This happens because developers building apps in cities across the country have provided feedback to transit officials on what they want to see and the quality of what is provided.
Developers building the powerful visualizations we see today are standing on the shoulders of the people that built the “next bus” apps a few years ago. Without these humble apps, we don’t get to tell these powerful stories today.
Holding government accountable
Transit apps are about more than just getting to the train on time.
Support for transit system operations can run into the billions of dollars and affect the lives of millions of people in an urban area. With this much investment, it’s important that transit riders and taxpayers are able to hold officials accountable for the efficient operation of transit systems. To help us do this, we now have a new generation of transit apps that can examine things like the scheduled arrival and departure times of trains with their actual arrival and departure time.
Not only does this give citizens transparency into how well their transit system is being run, it offers a pathway for engagement – by knowing which routes are not performing close to scheduled times, transit riders and others can offer suggestions for changes and improvements.
A gateway to more open data
One of the most important things that transit apps can do is provide a pathway for more open data.
In Philadelphia, the city’s formal open data policy and the creation of an open data portal all followed after the efforts of a small group of developers working to obtain transit schedule data from the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA). This group eventually built the region’s first transit app.
This small group pushed SEPTA to make their data open, and the Authority eventually embraced open data. This, in turn, raised the profile of open data with other city leaders and directly contributed to the adoption of an open data policy by the City of Philadelphia several years later. Without this simple transit app and the push for more open transit data, I don’t think this would have happened. Certainly not as soon as it did.
And it isn’t just big cities like Philadelphia. In Syracuse, NY – a small city with no tradition of civic hacking and no formal open data program – a group at a local hackathon decided that they wanted to build a platform for government open data.
The first data source they selected to focus on? Transit data. The first app they built? A transit app…”
The Art and Science of Data-driven Journalism
Alex Howard for the Tow Center for digital journalism: “Journalists have been using data in their stories for as long as the profession has existed. A revolution in computing in the 20th century created opportunities for data integration into investigations, as journalists began to bring technology into their work. In the 21st century, a revolution in connectivity is leading the media toward new horizons. The Internet, cloud computing, agile development, mobile devices, and open source software have transformed the practice of journalism, leading to the emergence of a new term: data journalism. Although journalists have been using data in their stories for as long as they have been engaged in reporting, data journalism is more than traditional journalism with more data. Decades after early pioneers successfully applied computer-assisted reporting and social science to investigative journalism, journalists are creating news apps and interactive features that help people understand data, explore it, and act upon the insights derived from it. New business models are emerging in which data is a raw material for profit, impact, and insight, co-created with an audience that was formerly reduced to passive consumption. Journalists around the world are grappling with the excitement and the challenge of telling compelling stories by harnessing the vast quantity of data that our increasingly networked lives, devices, businesses, and governments produce every day. While the potential of data journalism is immense, the pitfalls and challenges to its adoption throughout the media are similarly significant, from digital literacy to competition for scarce resources in newsrooms. Global threats to press freedom, digital security, and limited access to data create difficult working conditions for journalists in many countries. A combination of peer-to-peer learning, mentorship, online training, open data initiatives, and new programs at journalism schools rising to the challenge, however, offer reasons to be optimistic about more journalists learning to treat data as a source. (Download the report)”
Reflections on How Designers Design With Data
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”