Piece by André Victor dos Santos Barrence and Cesar A. Hidalgo: “The current Internet paradigm in which one can search about anything and retrieve information is absolutely empowering. We can browse files, websites and indexes and effortlessly reach good amount of information. Google, for instance, was explicitly built on a library analogy available to everyone. However, it is a world where information that should be easily accessible is still hidden in unfriendly databases, and that the best-case scenario is finding few snippets of information embedded within the paragraphs of a report. But is this the way it should be? Or is this just the world we are presently stuck with?
The last decade has been particularly marked by an increasing hype on big data and analytics, mainly fueled by those who are interested in writing narratives on the topic but not necessarily coding about it, even when data itself is not the problem.
Let’s take the case of governments. Governments have plenty of data and in many cases it is actually public (at least in principle). Governments “know” how many people work in every occupation, in every industry and in every location; they know their salaries, previous employers and education history. From a pure data perspective all that is embedded in tax, social security records or annual registrations. From a more pragmatic perspective, it is still inaccessible and hidden even when it is legally open the public. We live in a world where the data is there, but where the statistics and information are not.
The state government of Minas Gerais in Brazil (3rd economy the country, territory larger than France and 20 millions inhabitants) made an important step in that direction by releasing DataViva.info, a platform that opens data for exports and occupations for the entire formal sector of the Brazilian economy through more than 700 million interactive visualizations. Instead of poorly designed tables and interfaces, it guides users to answer questions or freely discover locations, industries and occupations in Brazil that are of interest to them. DataViva allows users to explore simple questions such as the evolution of exports in the last decade for each of the 5,567 municipalities in the country, or highly specific queries, for instance, the average salaries paid to computer scientists working in the software development industry in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas.
DataViva’s visualizations are built on the idea that the industrial and economic activity development of locations is highly path dependent. This means that locations are more likely to be successful at developing industries and activities that are related to the ones already existing, since it indicates the existence of labor inputs, and other capabilities, that are specific and that can often be redeployed to a few related industries and activities. Thus, it informs the processes by which opportunities can be explored and prospective pathways for greater prosperity.
The idea that information is key for the functioning of economies is at least as old as Friedrich Hayek’s seminal paper The Use of Knowledge in Society from 1945. According to Hayek, prices help coordinate economic activities by providing information about the wants and needs of goods and services. Yet, the price information can only serve as a signal as long as people know those prices. Maybe the salaries for engineers in the municipality of Betim (Minas Gerais) are excellent and indicate a strong need for them? But who would have known how many engineers are there in Betim and what are their average salaries?
But the remaining question is: why is Minas Gerais making all of this public data easily available? More than resorting to the contemporary argument of open government Minas understands this is extremely valuable information for investors searching for business opportunities, entrepreneurs pursuing new ventures or workers looking for better career prospects. Lastly, the ultimate goal of DataViva is to provide a common ground for open discussions, moving away from the information deprived idea of central planning and into a future where collaborative planning might become the norm. It is a highly creative attempt to renew public governance for the 21st century.
Despite being a relatively unknown state outside of Brazil, by releasing a platform as DataViva, Minas is providing a strong signal about where in world governments are really pushing forward innovation rather than simply admiring and copying solutions that used to come from trendsetters in the developed world. It seems like real innovation isn’t necessarily taking place in Washington, Paris or London anymore.”
Power to the people: how open data is improving health service delivery
The Guardian: “…What’s really interesting is how this data can be utilised by citizens to enable them to make more informed choices and demand improved services in sectors such as health. A growing community of technologists and social activists is emerging across Africa, supported by a burgeoning network of technology innovation hubs. They’re beginning to explore the ways in which data can be utilised to improve health outcomes.
In Northern Uganda, the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army conflict displaced two million people, leaving the social infrastructure in tatters. In 2008, the government launched a Peace, Recovery and Development Plan, but progress has been limited. There are insufficient health centres to serve the population, a severe shortage of staff, drugs and equipment, and corruption is widespread.
Cipesa – an organisation that uses communication technologies to support poverty reduction and development – and Numec, a local media organisation, have launched the iParticipate project. A multimedia platform is being populated with baseline data outlining the current status of the health service across three districts….
In the same region, Wougnet is training women to use information technologies to tackle social challenges. Local officials and community members have formed voluntary social accountability committees and been trained in the use of an online platform to capture and store information relating to poor governance and corruption in the health sector, often via mobile phones.
The platform strengthened campaign efforts which resulted in the construction of a health centre in Aloni Parish. In Amuru district, five health workers were arrested following reports highlighting negligence.
In the village of Bagega in Nigeria, 400 children died and thousands suffered significant health problems as the result of lead poisoning caused by poor mining practices. The government pledged $5.3m (£3.23m) for remediation, but the funds never reached the affected region.
A local organisation, Follow the Money, created an infographic highlighting the government’s commitments and combined this with real life testimonies and photographs showing the actual situation on the ground. Within 48 hours of a targeted Twitter campaign, the president committed to releasing funds to the village and, in February this year, children started receiving long overdue medical attention.
All these initiatives depend on access to critical government data and an active citizens who feel empowered to effect change in their own lives and communities. At present, it’s often hard to access data which is sufficiently granular, particularly at district or local level. For citizens to be engaged with information from government, it also needs to be accessible in ways that are simple to understand and linked to campaigns that impact their daily lives.
Tracking expenditure can also operate across borders. Donors are beginning to open up aid data by publishing to the IATI registry. This transparency by donor governments should improve the effectiveness of aid spending and contribute towards improved health outcomes.
It’s hard to draw general conclusions about how technology can contribute towards improving health outcomes, particularly when context is so critical and the field is so new. Nonetheless, some themes are emerging which can maximise the chances of an intervention’s success.
It can at times be challenging to encourage citizens to report for an array of reasons, including a lack of belief in their ability to effect change, cultural norms, a lack of time and both perceived and real risks. Still, participation seems to increase when citizens receive feedback from reports submitted and when mechanisms are in place that enable citizens to take collective action. On-the-ground testimonies and evidence can also help shift public opinion and amplify critical messages.
Interventions are dramatically strengthened when integrated into wider programmes, implemented by organisations that have established a strong relationship with the communities in which they work. They need to be backed by at least one strong civil society organisation that can follow up on any reports, queries or challenges which may arise. Where possible, engagement from government and local leaders can make a real difference. Identifying champions within government can also significantly improve responsiveness.”
What do you know?
Article in the Financial Times by Eric Openshaw John Hagel: “Talent holds the key to company performance. From business units to Finance to IT, getting the right skills to the right place at the right time is a constant challenge. Now consider that workplace technologies are becoming obsolete faster, and the useful life of many skills is shorter. Workers at all levels need to be able to learn and relearn rapidly to adapt to and anticipate changing demands. Recruitment and retention initiatives can’t address the need, nor can standardised training programs and knowledge management.
New technologies offer an opportunity to rethink both talent development and traditional knowledge management and integrate learning directly into the daily work experience. Virtual platforms enable workers to connect with each other to solve problems across distributed work settings and beyond organisational boundaries.
The preponderance of sensors and advanced analytics today make it more possible than ever to collect and share individual’s real-time performance in a variety of settings. Sensors and the integration of social platforms into work allows for knowledge and experiences to be captured automatically, as they occur, rather than depending on compliance and coerced participation to populate reputation profiles and knowledge management databases. These technologies support rich, context-specific learning and participation driven by momentum as users discover and create value.
Training programs and knowledge management have a place, but they may not deliver the skilled workers needed to the right place and time in a rapidly changing environment. Pre-developed content quickly becomes obsolete or lacks the context to make it relevant to the individual. Perhaps more importantly, classroom training and knowledge databases tend to focus on the commonalities between work, the standard processes and practices, when in fact workers spend most of their days dealing with the exceptions that don’t fit into the standard processes and systems, whether it’s a one-off shipping request or a customer who can’t make your software work with their hardware. Workers typically get better at handling the non-standard aspects of their work through on-the-job experience…
In a recent paper, we detailed nine principles that help to create the type of environment that fosters learning and improvement. The following three principles demonstrate how technology can play an important role in enabling this on-the-job learning and in amplifying the learning, especially across a virtual workforce.
Real-time feedback for individuals and teams. For workers to improve performance and learn what works or doesn’t work, they need to have a context-specific understanding of what is expected and how they are doing relative to others, in the moment rather than three- or six-months down the line.
At virtual call-centre LiveOps, the independent agents see customer and program-specific metrics on an online dashboard. These metrics define the level of performance necessary for agents to remain eligible to take calls for a program and are continuously updated, providing real-time feedback after each call so that agents can see how they are doing relative to their peer group and where they can improve. This level of performance data transparency creates a meritocracy, as agents are compared to their peers and rewarded based on their relative performance.
Smart capture and share. In any work setting, a great deal of information is generated and exchanged in meetings, conversations, instant messages, and email. Easy access to that information helps foster collaboration, solve problems, and improve business processes. At SAP Community Network (SCN), intelligent cataloguing of insights from discussion forums, tagged for searchability, helps make the right information available at the right time to those who need it without requiring the burdensome documentation associated with typical knowledge management. Other users can search for solutions in the context of the original problem posed, as well as through related discussions that may have led to an ultimate solution. Instead of days of internal debate or experimentation, the typical time to receive a response is 17 minutes.
Helping workers make relevant connections. In a typical organisation, physical or virtual, it can be difficult to know who everyone is and what their experience, expertise, and interests are, and the typical knowledge and resource management tools that require individuals to maintain profiles rarely see the level of continuing compliance and participation to make them useful. Instead, workers tend to fall back on relationships. They seek help and learn from those already known to them.
Now, virtual platforms, such as the one used by Odesk, a global online workplace, automatically generate detailed, up-to-date profiles. These profiles include the contractor’s cumulative and historical ratings and hourly wages for each completed project as well as the scores for any tests or certifications. The same type of automatic, action-based reputation profiles can be used internally to facilitate assessing and connecting with the right co-workers for the job at hand…”
The value and challenges of public sector information
A paper by M. Henninger in Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: “The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of public sector information (PSI), what it is, its history and evolution, what constitutes its corpus of documents and the issues and challenges it presents to society, its institutions and to those who use and manage it. The paper, by examining the literatures of the law, political science, civil society, economics and information and library science explores the inherent tensions of access to and use of PSI—pragmatism vs. idealism; openness vs. secrecy; commerce vs. altruism; property vs. commons; public good vs. private good. It focusses on open government data (OGD)—a subset of what is popularly referred to as ‘big data’—its background and development since much of the current debate of its use concerns its commercial value for both the private sector and the public sector itself. In particular it looks at the information itself which, driven by technologies of networks, data mining and visualisation gives value in industrial and economic terms, and in its ability to enable new ideas and knowledge.”
Creative Common’s Next Generation Licenses — Version 4.0
Diane Peters: “We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.
We had ambitious goals in mind when we embarked on the versioning process coming out of the 2011 CC Global Summit in Warsaw. The new licenses achieve all of these goals, and more. The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.
Among other exciting new features are improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that allows those who violate the license inadvertently to regain their rights automatically if the violation is corrected in a timely manner.
You can find highlights of the most significant improvements on our website, track the course of the public discussion and evolution of the license drafts on the 4.0 wiki page, and view a recap of the central policy decisions made over the course of the versioning process.
The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.
With the 4.0 licenses published, we will be turning our attention to official translations of the legal code in partnership with our affiliate network and larger community. Translations of our new deeds are also underway, with a significant number already completed.”
Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics
New book by Stephen Wendel :” A new wave of products is helping people change their behavior and daily routines, whether it’s exercising more (Jawbone Up), taking control of their finances (HelloWallet), or organizing their email (Mailbox). This practical guide shows you how to design these types of products for users seeking to take action and achieve specific goals.
Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes.
Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes.
- Learn the three main strategies to help people change behavior
- Identify your target audience and the behaviors they seek to change
- Extract user stories and identify obstacles to behavior change
- Develop effective interface designs that are enjoyable to use
- Measure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve it
- Use practical examples from products like Nest, Fitbit, and Opower”
Making Europe's cities smarter
Press Release: “At a conference today hosted by the European Commission, city leaders, CEOs and civil society leaders discussed the actions outlined in the “Smart Cities Strategic Implementation Plan” and how to put them into practice. The Commission announced that it will launch an ‘Invitation for Smart City and Community Commitments’ in spring 2014 to mobilise work on the action plan’s priorities. The plan is part of Europe’s fifth “Innovation Partnership”.
Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas, in charge of transport, said: “I am very pleased to see transport operators, telecoms companies, vehicle manufacturers, city planners, energy companies and researchers all gathered in one room to discuss the future of our cities. The Smart Cities initiative is a great opportunity to make changes happen for less congestion and better business opportunities in our cities. We need to keep up the momentum and move from plan to action now.”
Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, said: “The future of infrastructure and city planning will be based on integrating ICT systems and using big data to make our cities better places to live and work. We need to base those new systems on open standards for hardware, software, data and services which this European Innovation Partnership will develop.”
Günther H. Oettinger, EU Commissioner for energy, said: “The European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities is about making investments in sustainable development in as many cities as possible. Creating equal partnerships between cities and companies based on synergies between ICT, energy and mobility will lead to projects that make a real difference in our everyday lives.”
The Commission intends to make available approximately EUR 200 million for Smart Cities and communities in the 2014-2015 budgets of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, to accelerate progress and enlarge the scale of roll-out of smart cities solutions. There will also be possibilities to access the European Structural and Investment Funds.
For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/”
Experts rank the top 10 global trends
Pew Research: “A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the 10 most important global trends, based on a poll of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government, and non-profits. Here are some data points that compare and contrast the public’s views around the world with the trends identified by the experts….
7. A lack of values in leadership – Between 2007 and 2012, confidence in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) national governments declined from 45% to 40% on average, making it difficult for national authorities to mobilize support for necessary reforms, according to a recent report by the OECD. In the U.S., public trust in government has fallen substantially since 1958 and is near an all-time low.…
9. The growing importance of megacities – Life is increasingly lived in the world’s urban centers. According to the United Nations Population Division, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. However, not all of the world’s regions are equally urban. Africa, for example, is predicted to reach 50 percent urbanization by 2035.
10. The rapid spread of misinformation online – One-third (30%) of the world’s youth have been active online for at least five years, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Social networking has also spread around the world. In 19 of 21 countries, about three-in-ten or more of those polled use sites such as Facebook, according to our survey last year.”
Policy making 2.0: From theory to practice
Paper by E. Ferro, EN Loukis, Y. Charalabidis, and M. Osella in Government Information Quarterly: “Government agencies are gradually moving from simpler towards more sophisticated and complex practices of social media use, which are characterized by important innovations at the technological, political and organizational level. This paper intends to provide two contributions to the current discourse about such advanced approaches to social media exploitation. The first is of practical nature and has to do with assessing the potential and the challenges of a centralized cross-platform approach to social media by government agencies in their policy making processes. The second contribution is of theoretical nature and consists in the development of a multi-dimensional framework for an integrated evaluation of such advanced practices of social media exploitation in public policy making from technological, political and organizational perspectives, drawing from theoretical constructs from different domains. The proposed framework is applied for the evaluation of a pilot consultation campaign conducted in Italy using multiple social media and concerning the large scale application of a telemedicine program.”
BBC throws weight behind open data movement
The Telegraph: “The BBC has signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) with the Europeana Foundation, the Open Data Institute, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, supporting free and open internet technologies…
The agreements will enable closer collaboration between the BBC and each of the four organisations on a range of mutual interests, including the release of structured open data and the use of open standards in web development, according to the BBC.
One aim of the agreement is to give clear technical standards and models to organisations who want to work with the BBC, and give those using the internet a deeper understanding of the technologies involved.
The MoUs also bring together several existing areas of research and provide a framework to explore future opportunities. Through this and other initiatives, the BBC hopes to become a catalyst for open innovation by publishing clear technical standards, models, expertise and – where feasible – data.
The BBC has been publishing linked open data for some time, most notably as part of the /programmes service, where machine-readable information about the programme schedule is made available online.
It also helped to deliver the Olympics Data Service, which underpinned 10,490 athlete pages on the BBC sport website during the 2012 Olympics….
“The BBC has been at the forefront of technological innovation around broadcasting and online for many years delivering the benefits of new technologies to licence fee payers, offering new services and products to audiences around the world, and creating public value in the digital economy,” said James Purnell, BBC Director of Strategy and Digital.”