Antti Herala, Jussi Kasurinen, and Erno Vanhala in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research: “The main concept of open data and its application is simple; access to the publicly-funded data provides greater returns from the public investment and can generate wealth through the downstream use of outputs, such as traffic information or weather forecast services. However, even though open data and data sharing as concepts are forty years old with the open data initiative reaching ten, the practical actions and applications have tended to stay on the superficial level, and significant progress or success stories are... (More >)
The Modern Research Data Portal: a design pattern for networked, data-intensive science
Kyle Chard et al in PeerJ Computer Science: “We describe best practices for providing convenient, high-speed, secure access to large data via research data portals. We capture these best practices in a new design pattern, the Modern Research Data Portal, that disaggregates the traditional monolithic web-based data portal to achieve orders-of-magnitude increases in data transfer performance, support new deployment architectures that decouple control logic from data storage, and reduce development and operations costs. We introduce the design pattern; explain how it leverages high-performance data enclaves and cloud-based data management services; review representative examples at research laboratories and universities, including... (More >)
Rights-Based and Tech-Driven: Open Data, Freedom of Information, and the Future of Government Transparency
Beth Noveck at the Yale Human Rights and Development Journal: “Open data policy mandates that government proactively publish its data online for the public to reuse. It is a radically different approach to transparency than traditional right-to-know strategies as embodied in Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation in that it involves ex ante rather than ex post disclosure of whole datasets. Although both open data and FOIA deal with information sharing, the normative essence of open data is participation rather than litigation. By fostering public engagement, open data shifts the relationship between state and citizen from a monitorial to... (More >)
Extracting crowd intelligence from pervasive and social big data
Introduction by Leye Wang, Vincent Gauthier, Guanling Chen and Luis Moreira-Matias of Special Issue of the Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing: “With the prevalence of ubiquitous computing devices (smartphones, wearable devices, etc.) and social network services (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), humans are generating massive digital traces continuously in their daily life. Considering the invaluable crowd intelligence residing in these pervasive and social big data, a spectrum of opportunities is emerging to enable promising smart applications for easing individual life, increasing company profit, as well as facilitating city development. However, the nature of big data also poses fundamental challenges... (More >)
Appropriating technology for accountability
Research report by Rosie McGee with Duncan Edwards, Colin Anderson, Hannah Hudson and Francesca Feruglio: “Making All Voices Count was a programme designed to solve the ‘grand challenge’ of creating more effective democratic governance and accountability around the world. Conceived in an era of optimism about the use of tech to open up government and allow more fluid communication between citizens and governments, it used funding from four donors to support the development and spread of innovative ideas for solving governance problems – many of them involving tools and platforms based on mobile phone and web technologies. Between 2013... (More >)
The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society
Brad Smith at the Microsoft Blog: “Today Microsoft is releasing a new book, The Future Computed: Artificial Intelligence and its role in society. The two of us have written the foreword for the book, and our teams collaborated to write its contents. As the title suggests, the book provides our perspective on where AI technology is going and the new societal issues it has raised. On a personal level, our work on the foreword provided an opportunity to step back and think about how much technology has changed our lives over the past two decades and to consider the... (More >)
On democracy
Sophie in ‘t Veld (European Parliament) in a Special Issue of Internet Policy Review on Political micro-targeting edited by Balazs Bodo, Natali Helberger and Claes de Vreese: “Democracy is valuable and vulnerable, which is reason enough to remain alert for new developments that can undermine her. In recent months, we have seen enough examples of the growing impact of personal data in campaigns and elections. It is important and urgent for us to publicly debate this development. It is easy to see why we should take action against extremist propaganda of hatemongers aiming to recruit young people for violent... (More >)
Data-Intensive Approaches To Creating Innovation For Sustainable Smart Cities
Science Trends: “Located at the complex intersection of economic development and environmental change, cities play a central role in our efforts to move towards sustainability. Reducing air and water pollution, improving energy efficiency while securing energy supply, and minimizing vulnerabilities to disruptions and disturbances are interconnected and pose a formidable challenge, with their dynamic interactions changing in highly complex and unpredictable manners…. The Beijing City Lab demonstrates the usefulness of open urban data in mapping urbanization with a fine spatiotemporal scale and reflecting social and environmental dimensions of urbanization through visualization at multiple scales. The basic principle of open... (More >)
When census taking is a recipe for controversy
Anjana Ahuja in the Financial Times: “Population counts are important tools for development, but also politically fraught…The UN describes a census as “among the most complex and massive peacetime exercises a nation undertakes”. Given that social trends, migration patterns and inequalities can be determined from questions that range from health to wealth, housing and even religious beliefs, censuses can also be controversial. So it is with the next one in the US, due to be conducted in 2020. The US Department of Justice has proposed that participants should be quizzed on their citizenship status. Vanita Gupta, president of the... (More >)
Why the deliberative democracy framework doesn’t quite work for me
Essay by Peter Levine: “In some ways, I came of age in the field of deliberative democracy. I had an internship at the Kettering Foundation when I was a college sophomore (when the foundation defined itself more purely in deliberative terms than it does today). By that time, I had already taken a philosophy seminar on the great deliberative theorist Jürgen Habermas. In the three decades since then, I’ve served on the boards of Kettering, Everyday Democracy, and AmericaSPEAKS. I wrote a book with “deliberative democracy” in its subtitle and co-edited The Deliberative Democracy Handbook with John Gastil. I... (More >)
