GitHub and Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New site: “Make government better, together. Stories of open source, open data, and open government.
This site is an open source effort to showcase best practices of open sourcing government. See something that you think could be better? Want to submit your own story? Simply fork the project and submit a pull request.
…

Ready to get started on GitHub? Here are some ideas that are easy to get your feet wet with.

Feedback Repository

GitHub’s about connecting with developers. Whether you’re an API publishing pro, or just getting started, creating a “feedback” repository can go a long way to connect your organization with the community. Get feedback from current and potential data consumers by creating a specific repository for them to contribute ideas and suggestions for types of data or other information they’d like to see opened. Here’s how:

  1. Create a new repository
    • Choose your organization as the Owner
    • Name the repository “feedback” or similar
    • Click the checkbox to automatically create a README.md file
  2. Set up your Readme
    • Click README.md within your newly created repository
    • Click Edit
    • Introduce yourself, describe why you’ve joined GitHub, what you’re hoping to do and what you’d like to learn from the development community. Encourage them to leave feedback through issues on the repository.

Sample text for your README.md:

# City of Gotham Feedback
We've just joined GitHub and want to know what data would be interesting to our development community?
Leave us comments via issues!

Open source a Dataset

Open sourcing a dataset can be as simple as uploading a .csv to GitHub and letting people know about it. Rather than publishing data as a zip file on your website or an FTP server, you can add the files through the GitHub.com web interface, or via the GitHub for Windows or GitHub for Mac native clients. Create a new repository to store your datasets – in many cases, it’s as easy as drag, drop, sync.
GitHub can host any file type (although open, non-binary files like .csvs tend to work best). Plus, GitHub supports rendering certain open data formats interactively such as the popular geospacial .geojson format. Once uploaded, citizens can view the files, and can even open issues or submit pull requests with proposed fixes.

Explore Open Source Civic Apps

There are many open source applications freely available on GitHub that were built just for government. Check them out, and see if it fits a need. Here are some examples:

  • Adopt-a – This open source web app was created for the City of Boston in 2011 by Code for America fellows. It allows residents to “adopt” a hydrant and make sure it’s clear of snow in the winter so that emergency crews can locate them when needed. It has since been adopted in Chicago (for sidewalks), Seattle (for storm drains), and Honolulu (for tsunami sirens).
  • StreetMix – Another creation of Code for America fellows (2013) this website, www.streetmix.net, allows anyone to create street sections in a way that is not only beautiful but educational, too. No downloading, no installing, no paying – make and save your creations right at the website. Great for internal or public community planning meetings.
  • We The People – We The People, the White House’s petitions application hosted at petitions.whitehouse.gov is a Drupal module to allow citizens to submit and digitally sign petitions.

Open source something small

Chances are you’ve got something small you can open source. Check in with your web or new media team, and see if they’ve got something they’ve been dying to share or blog about, no matter how small. It can be snippet of analytics code, or maybe a small script used internally. It doesn’t even have to be code.
Post your website’s privacy policy, comment moderation policy, or terms of service and let the community weigh in before your next edit. No matter how small it is, getting your first open source project going is a great first step.

Improve an existing project

Does you agency use an existing open source project to conduct its own business? Open an issue on the project’s repository with a feature request or a bug you spot. Better yet, fork the project, and submit your improvements. Even if it’s one or two lines of code, such examples are great to blog about to showcase your efforts.
Don’t forget, this site is an open source project, too. Making an needed edit is another great way to get started.”

Five Ways to Make Government Procurement Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Headd at Civic Innovations:  “Nothing in recent memory has focused attention on the need for wholesale reform of the government IT procurement system more than the troubled launch of healthcare.gov.
There has been a myriad of blog posts, stories and articles written in the last few weeks detailing all of the problems that led to the ignominious launch of the website meant to allow people to sign up for health care coverage.
Though the details of this high profile flop are in the latest headlines, the underlying cause has been talked about many times before – the process by which governments contract with outside parties to obtain IT services is broken…
With all of this in mind, here are – in no particular order – five suggested changes that can be adopted to improve the government procurement process.
Raise the threshold on simplified / streamlined procurement
Many governments use a separate, more streamlined process for smaller projects that do not require a full RFP (in the City of Philadelphia, professional services projects that do not exceed $32,000 annually go through this more streamlined bidding process). In Philadelphia, we’ve had great success in using these smaller projects to test new ideas and strategies for partnering with IT vendors. There is much we can learn from these experiments, and a modest increase to enable more experimentation would allow governments to gain valuable new insights.
Narrowing the focus of any enhanced thresholds for streamlined budding to web-based projects would help mitigate risk and foster a quicker process for testing new ideas.
Identify clear standards for projects
Having a clear set of vendor-agnostic IT standards to use when developing RFPs and in performing work can make a huge difference in how a project turns out. Clearly articulating standards for:

  • The various components that a system will use.
  • The environment in which it will be housed.
  • The testing it must undergo prior to final acceptance.

…can go a long way to reduce the risk an uncertainly inherent in IT projects.
It’s worth noting that most governments probably already have a set of IT standards that are usually made part of any IT solicitation. But these standards documents can quickly become out of date – they must undergo constant review and refinement. In addition, many of the people writing these standards may confuse a specific vendor product or platform with a true standard.
Require open source
Requiring that IT projects be open source during development or after completion can be an effective way to reduce risk on an IT project and enhance transparency. This is particularly true of web-based projects.
In addition, government RFPs should encourage the use of existing open source tools – leveraging existing software components that are in use in similar projects and maintained by an active community – to foster external participation by vendors and volunteers alike. When governments make the code behind their project open source, they enable anyone that understands software development to help make them better.
Develop a more robust internal capacity for IT project management and implementation
Governments must find ways to develop the internal capacity for developing, implementing and managing technology projects.
Part of the reason that governments make use of a variety of different risk mitigation provisions in public bidding is that there is a lack of people in government with hands on experience building or maintaining technology. There is a dearth of makers in government, and there is a direct relationship between the perceived risk that governments take on with new technology projects and the lack of experienced technologists working in government.
Governments need to find ways to develop a maker culture within their workforces and should prioritize recruitment from the local technology and civic hacking communities.
Make contracting, lobbying and campaign contribution data public as open data
One of the more disheartening revelations to come out of the analysis of healthcare.gov implementation is that some of the firms that were awarded work as part of the project also spent non-trivial amounts of money on lobbying. It’s a good bet that this kind of thing also happens at the state and local level as well.
This can seriously undermine confidence in the bidding process, and may cause many smaller firms – who lack funds or interest in lobbying elected officials – to simply throw up their hands and walk away.
In the absence of statutory or regulatory changes to prevent this from happening, governments can enhance the transparency around the bidding process by working to ensure that all contracting data as well as data listing publicly registered lobbyists and contributions to political campaigns is open.
Ensuring that all prospective participants in the public bidding process have confidence that the process will be fair and transparent is essential to getting as many firms to participate as possible – including small firms more adept at agile software development methodologies. More bids typically equates to higher quality proposals and lower prices.
None of the changes list above will be easy, and governments are positioned differently in how well they may achieve any one of them. Nor do they represent the entire universe of things we can do to improve the system in the near term – these are items that I personally think are important and very achievable.
One thing that could help speed the adoption of these and other changes is the development of robust communication framework between government contracting and IT professionals in different cities and different states. I think a “Municipal Procurement Academy” could go a long way toward achieving this.”

More Top-Down Participation, Please! Institutionalized empowerment through open participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michelle Ruesch and Oliver Märker in DDD: “…this is not another article on the empowering potential of bottom-up digital political participation. Quite the contrary: It instead seeks to stress the empowering potential of top-down digital political participation. Strikingly, the democratic institutionalization of (digital) political participation is rarely considered when we speak about power in the context of political participation. Wouldn’t it be true empowerment though if the right of citizens to speak their minds were directly integrated into political and administrative decision-making processes?

Institutionalized political participation

Political participation, defined as any act that aims to influence politics in some way, can be initiated either by citizens, referred to as “bottom-up” participation, or by government, often referred to as “top-down” participation.  For many, the word “top-down” instantly evokes negative connotations, even though top-down participatory spaces are actually the foundation of democracy. These are the spaces of participation offered by the state and guaranteed by democratic constitutions. For a long time, top-down participation could be equated with formal democratic participation such as elections, referenda or party politics. Today, however, in states like Germany we can observe a new form of top-down political participation, namely government-initiated participation that goes beyond what is legally required and usually makes extensive use of digital media.
Like many other Western states, Germany has to cope with decreasing voter turnout and a lack of trust in political parties. At the same time, according to a recent study from 2012, two-thirds of eligible voters would like to be more involved in political decisions. The case of “Stuttgart 21” served as a late wake-up call for many German municipalities. Plans to construct a new train station in the center of the city of Stuttgart resulted in a petition for a local referendum, which was rejected. Protests against the train station culminated in widespread demonstrations in 2010, forcing construction to be halted. Even though a referendum was finally held in 2011 and a slight majority voted in favor of the train station, the Stuttgart 21 case has since been cited by Chancellor Angela Merkel and others as an example of the negative consequences of taking decisions without consulting with citizens early on. More and more municipalities and federal ministries in Germany have therefore started acknowledging that the conventional democratic model of participation in elections every few years is no longer sufficient. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, for example, published a manual for “good participation” in urban development projects….

What’s so great about top-down participation?

Semi-formal top-down participation processes have one major thing in common, regardless of the topic they address: Governmental institutions voluntarily open up a space for dialogue and thereby obligate themselves to take citizens’ concerns and ideas into account.
As a consequence, government-initiated participation offers the potential for institutionalized empowerment beyond elections. It grants the possibility of integrating participation into political and administrative decision-making processes….
Bottom-up participation will surely always be an important mobilizer of democratic change. Nevertheless, the provision of spaces of open participation by governments can aid in the institutionalization of citizens’ involvement in political decision-making. Had Stuttgart offered an open space of participation early in the train station construction process, maybe protests would never have escalated the way they did.
So is top-down participation the next step in the process of democratization? It could be, but only under certain conditions. Most importantly, top-down open participation requires a genuine willingness to abandon the old principle of doing business behind closed doors. This is not an easy undertaking; it requires time and endurance. Serious open participation also requires creating state institutions that ensure the relevance of the results by evaluating them and considering them in political decisions. We have formulated ten conditions that we consider necessary for the genuine institutionalization of open political participation [14]:

  • There needs to be some scope for decision-making. Top-down participation only makes sense when the results of the participation can influence decisions.
  • The government must genuinely aim to integrate the results into decision-making processes.
  • The limits of participation must be communicated clearly. Citizens must be informed if final decision-making power rests with a political body, for example.
  • The subject matter, rules and procedures need to be transparent.
  • Citizens need to be aware that they have the opportunity to participate.
  • Access to participation must be easy, the channels of participation chosen according to the citizens’ media habits. Using the Internet should not be a goal in itself.
  • The participatory space should be “neutral ground”. A moderator can help ensure this.
  • The set-up must be interactive. Providing information is only a prerequisite for participation.
  • Participation must be possible without providing real names or personal data.
  • Citizens must receive continuous feedback regarding how results are handled and the implementation process.”

AskThem

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“AskThem is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. AskThem is supported by a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative.
AskThem is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. It’s a not-for-profit tool for a stronger democracy, with open data for informed and engaged communities.
AskThem allows you to:

  • Find and ask questions to over 142,000 elected officials nationwide: federal, state and city levels of government.
  • Get signatures for your question or petition, have it delivered over email or Twitter, and push for a public response.
  • See questions from people near you, sign-on to questions you care about, and review answers from public figures.

It’s like a version of “We The People” for every elected official, from local city council members all the way up to U.S. senators. Enter your email above to be the first to ask a question when we launch and see previews of the site this Fall.
Elected officials: enter your email above and we’ll send you more information about signing up to answer questions on AskThem. It’s a free and non-partisan service to respond to your constituents in an open public forum and update them over email about your work. Or, be a leader in open-government and sign up now.
Issue-based organizations and media: sign up to help promote questions to government from people in your area. We’re working to launch with partnerships that build greater public accountability.
Previously known as the OpenGovernment.org project, AskThem is open-source and uses open government data – our code is available on GitHub – contributions welcome. For more development updates & discussion, join our low-traffic Google Group.
We’re a small non-profit organization actively seeking charitable funding support – help us launch this powerful new tool for public dialogue! Email us for a copy of our non-profit funding prospectus. If you can make a tax-exempt gift to support our work, please donate to PPF via OpenCongress. More background on the project is available on our Knight NewsChallenge proposal from March 2013.
Questions, feedback, ideas? Email David Moore, Executive Director of PPF – david at ppolitics.org, Twitter: @ppolitics; like our page on Facebook & follow @AskThemPPF on Twitter. Stay tuned!”

The Brave New World of Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brad Smith: “Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic foundations that fund them, today the terrain of good is disputed by social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks. Their tools of choice are markets, open data, innovation, hackathons, and disruption. They cross borders, social classes, and paradigms with the swipe of a touch screen. We seemed poised to unleash a whole new era of social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity.
As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be against it? It is virtually impossible to write an even mildly skeptical blog post about good without sounding well, bad — or at least a bit old-fashioned. For the record, I firmly believe there is much in the brave new world of good that is helping us find our way out of the tired and often failed models of progress and change on which we have for too long relied. Still, there are assumptions worth questioning and questions worth answering to ensure that the good we seek is the good that can be achieved.
…
Open Data
Second only to “good” in terms of marketing genius is the concept of “open data.” An offspring of previous movements such as “open source,” “open content,” and “open access,” open data in the Internet age has come to mean data that is machine-readable, free to access, and free to use, re-use, and re-distribute, subject to attribution. Fully open data goes way beyond posting your .pdf document on a Web site (as neatly explained by Tim Berners Lee’s five-star framework).
When it comes to government, there is a rapidly accelerating movement around the world that is furthering transparency by making vast stores of data open. Ditto on the data of international aid funders like the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The push has now expanded to the tax return data of nonprofits and foundations (IRS Forms 990). Collection of data by government has a business model; it’s called tax dollars. However, open data is not born pure. Cleaning that data, making it searchable, and building and maintaining reliable user interfaces is complex, time-consuming, and often expensive. That requires a consistent stream of income of the kind that can only come from fees, subscriptions, or, increasingly less so, government.
Foundation grants are great for short-term investment, experimentation, or building an app or two, but they are no substitute for a scalable business model. Structured, longitudinal data are vital to social, environmental, and economic progress. In a global economy where government is retreating from the funding of public goods, figuring how to pay for the cost of that data is one of our greatest challenges.”

Global Open Data Initiative moving forward

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
“The Global Open Data Initiative will serve as a guiding voice internationally on open data issues. Civil society groups who focus on open data have often been isolated to single national contexts, despite the similar challenges and opportunities repeating themselves in countries across the globe. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help share valuable resources, guidance and judgment, and to clarify the potential for government open data across the world.
Provide a leading vision for how governments approach open data. Open data commitments are among the most popular commitments for countries participating in the Open Government Partnership. The Global Open Data Initiative recommendations and resources will help guide open data initiatives and others as they seek to design and implement strong, effective open data initiatives and policies. Global Open Data Initiative resources will also help civil society actors who will be evaluating government initiatives.
Increase awareness of open data. Global Open Data Initiative will work to advance the understanding of open data issues, challenges, and resources by promoting best practices, engaging in online and offline dialogue, and supporting networking between organizations both new and familiar to the open data arena.
Support the development of the global open data community especially in civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have a key role to play as suppliers, intermediaries, and users of open data, though at present, relatively few organizations are engaging with open data and the opportunities it presents. Most CSOs lack the awareness, skills and support needed to be active users and providers of open data in ways that can help them meet their goals. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help CSOs, to engage with and use open data whether whatever area they work on – be it climate change, democratic rights, land governance or financial reform.
Our immediate focus is on two activities:

  1. To consult with members of the CSO community around the world about what they think is important in this area
  2. Develop a set of principles in collaboration with the CSO community to guide open government data policies and approaches and to help initiate, strengthen and further elevate conversations between governments and civil society.”

Towards an information systems perspective and research agenda on crowdsourcing for innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by A Majchrzak and A Malhotra in The Journal of Strategic Information Systems: “Recent years have seen an increasing emphasis on open innovation by firms to keep pace with the growing intricacy of products and services and the ever changing needs of the markets. Much has been written about open innovation and its manifestation in the form of crowdsourcing. Unfortunately, most management research has taken the information system (IS) as a given. In this essay we contend that IS is not just an enabler but rather can be a shaper that optimizes open innovation in general and crowdsourcing in particular. This essay is intended to frame crowdsourcing for innovation in a manner that makes more apparent the issues that require research from an IS perspective. In doing so, we delineate the contributions that the IS field can make to the field of crowdsourcing.

  • Reviews participation architectures supporting current crowdsourcing, finding them inadequate for innovation development by the crowd.

  • Identifies 3 tensions for explaining why a participation architecture for crowdsourced innovation is difficult.

  • Identifies affordances for the participation architectures that may help to manage the tension.

  • Uses the tensions and possible affordances to identify research questions for IS scholars.”

Defining Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: “Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. This is the summary of the full Open Definition which the Open Knowledge Foundation created in 2005 to provide both a succinct explanation and a detailed definition of open data.
As the open data movement grows, and even more governments and organisations sign up to open data, it becomes ever more important that there is a clear and agreed definition for what “open data” means if we are to realise the full benefits of openness, and avoid the risks of creating incompatibility between projects and splintering the community.

Open can apply to information from any source and about any topic. Anyone can release their data under an open licence for free use by and benefit to the public. Although we may think mostly about government and public sector bodies releasing public information such as budgets or maps, or researchers sharing their results data and publications, any organisation can open information (corporations, universities, NGOs, startups, charities, community groups and individuals).

Read more about different kinds of data in our one page introduction to open data
There is open information in transport, science, products, education, sustainability, maps, legislation, libraries, economics, culture, development, business, design, finance …. So the explanation of what open means applies to all of these information sources and types. Open may also apply both to data – big data and small data – or to content, like images, text and music!
So here we set out clearly what open means, and why this agreed definition is vital for us to collaborate, share and scale as open data and open content grow and reach new communities.

What is Open?

The full Open Definition provides a precise definition of what open data is. There are 2 important elements to openness:

  • Legal openness: you must be allowed to get the data legally, to build on it, and to share it. Legal openness is usually provided by applying an appropriate (open) license which allows for free access to and reuse of the data, or by placing data into the public domain.
  • Technical openness: there should be no technical barriers to using that data. For example, providing data as printouts on paper (or as tables in PDF documents) makes the information extremely difficult to work with. So the Open Definition has various requirements for “technical openness,” such as requiring that data be machine readable and available in bulk.”…

The Solution Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan from Deloitte: “Where tough societal problems persist, citizens, social enterprises, and yes, even businesses, are relying less and less on government-only solutions. More likely, they are crowd funding, ride-sharing, app- developing or impact- investing to design lightweight solutions for seemingly intractable problems. No challenge is too daunting, from malaria in Africa to traffic congestion in California.
These wavemakers range from edgy social enterprises growing at a clip of 15% a year, to mega-foundations that are eclipsing development aid, to Fortune 500 companies delivering social good on the path to profit. The collective force of these new problem solvers is creating dynamic and rapidly evolving markets for social good. They trade solutions instead of dollars to fill the gap between what government can provide and what citizens need. By erasing public-private sector boundaries, they are unlocking trillions of dollars in social benefit and commercial value.
The Solution Revolution explores how public and private are converging to form the Solution Economy. By examining scores of examples, Eggers and Macmillan reveal the fundamentals of this new – globally prevalent – economic and social order. The book is designed to help guide those willing to invest time, knowledge or capital toward sustainable, social progress.”

Mobile phone data are a treasure-trove for development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul van der Boor and Amy Wesolowski in SciDevNet: “Each of us generates streams of digital information — a digital ‘exhaust trail’ that provides real-time information to guide decisions that affect our lives. For example, Google informs us about traffic by using both its ‘My Location’ feature on mobile phones and third-party databases to aggregate location data. BBVA, one of Spain’s largest banks, analyses transactions such as credit card payments as well as ATM withdrawals to find out when and where peak spending occurs.This type of data harvest is of great value. But, often, there is so much data that its owners lack the know-how to process it and fail to realise its potential value to policymakers.
Meanwhile, many countries, particularly in the developing world, have a dearth of information. In resource-poor nations, the public sector often lives in an analogue world where piles of paper impede operations and policymakers are hindered by uncertainty about their own strengths and capabilities.Nonetheless, mobile phones have quickly pervaded the lives of even the poorest: 75 per cent of the world’s 5.5 billion mobile subscriptions are in emerging markets. These people are also generating digital trails of anything from their movements to mobile phone top-up patterns. It may seem that putting this information to use would take vast analytical capacity. But using relatively simple methods, researchers can analyse existing mobile phone data, especially in poor countries, to improve decision-making.
Think of existing, available data as low-hanging fruit that we — two graduate students — could analyse in less than a month. This is not a test of data-scientist prowess, but more a way of saying that anyone could do it.
There are three areas that should be ‘low-hanging fruit’ in terms of their potential to dramatically improve decision-making in information-poor countries: coupling healthcare data with mobile phone data to predict disease outbreaks; using mobile phone money transactions and top-up data to assess economic growth; and predicting travel patterns after a natural disaster using historical movement patterns from mobile phone data to design robust response programmes.
Another possibility is using call-data records to analyse urban movement to identify traffic congestion points. Nationally, this can be used to prioritise infrastructure projects such as road expansion and bridge building.
The information that these analyses could provide would be lifesaving — not just informative or revenue-increasing, like much of this work currently performed in developed countries.
But some work of high social value is being done. For example, different teams of European and US researchers are trying to estimate the links between mobile phone use and regional economic development. They are using various techniques, such as merging night-time satellite imagery from NASA with mobile phone data to create behavioural fingerprints. They have found that this may be a cost-effective way to understand a country’s economic activity and, potentially, guide government spending.
Another example is given by researchers (including one of this article’s authors) who have analysed call-data records from subscribers in Kenya to understand malaria transmission within the country and design better strategies for its elimination. [1]
In this study, published in Science, the location data of the mobile phones of more than 14 million Kenyan subscribers was combined with national malaria prevalence data. After identifying the sources and sinks of malaria parasites and overlaying these with phone movements, analysis was used to identify likely transmission corridors. UK scientists later used similar methods to create different epidemic scenarios for the Côte d’Ivoire.”