The digital revolution liberating Latin American people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Luis Alberto Moreno in the Financial Times: “Imagine a place where citizens can deal with the state entirely online, where all health records are electronic and the wait for emergency care is just seven minutes. Singapore? Switzerland? Try Colima, Mexico.

Pessimists fear the digital revolution will only widen social and economic disparities in the developing world — particularly in Latin America, the world’s most unequal region. But Colima, though small and relatively prosperous, shows how some of the region’s governments are harnessing these tools to modernise services, improve quality of life and share the benefits of technology more equitably.

In the past 10 years, this state of about 600,000 people has transformed the way government works, going completely digital. Its citizens can carry out 62 procedures online, from applying for permits to filing crime reports. No internet at home? Colima offers hundreds of free WiFi hotspots.

Colombia and Peru are taking broadband to remote corners of their rugged territories. Bogotá has subsidised the ex­pansion of its fibre optic network, which now links virtually every town in the country. Peru is expanding a programme that aims to bring WiFi to schools, hospitals and other public buildings in each of its 25 regions. The Colombian plan, Vive Digital, fosters internet adoption among all its citizens. Taxes on computers, tablets and smartphones have been scrapped. Low-income families have been given vouchers to sign up for broadband. In five years, the percentage of households connected to the internet jumped from 16 per cent to 50 per cent. Among small businesses it soared from 7 per cent to 61 per cent .

Inexpensive devices and ubiquitous WiFi, however, do not guarantee widespread usage. Diego Molano Vega, an architect of Vive Digital, found that many programs designed for customers in developed countries were ill suited to most Colombians. “There are no poor people in Silicon Valley,” he says. Latin American governments should use their purchasing power to push for development of digital services easily adopted by their citizens and businesses. Chile is a leader: it has digitised hundreds of trámites — bureaucratic procedures involving endless forms and queues. In a 4,300km-longcountry of mountains, deserts and forests, this enables access to all sorts of services through the internet. Entrepreneurs can now register businesses online for free in a single day.

In Chile, entrepreneurs can now register new businesses online for free in a single day…

Technology can be harnessed to boost equity in education. Brazil’s Mato Grosso do Sul state launched a free online service to prepare high school students for a tough national exam in which a good grade is a prerequisite for admission to federal universities. On average the results of the students who used the service were 31 per cent higher than those of their peers, prompting 10 other states to adopt the system.

Digital tools can also help raise competitiveness in business. Uruguay’s livestock information system keeps track of the country’s cattle. The publicly financed electronic registry ensures every beast can be traced, making it easier to monitor outbreaks of diseases….(More)”

 

Collaborative Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Mitsuru Kodama on “Developing Health Support Ecosystems…With the development of the aging society and the increased importance of emergency risk management in recent years, a large number of medical care challenges – advancing medical treatments, care & support, pharmacological treatments, greater health awareness, emergency treatments, telemedical treatment and care, the introduction of electronic charts, and rising costs – are emerging as social issues throughout the whole world. Hospitals and other medical institutions must develop and maintain superior management to achieve systems that can provide better medical care, welfare and health while enabling “support innovation.” Key medical care, welfare and health industries play a crucial role in this, but also of importance are management innovation models that enable “collaborative innovation” by closely linking diverse fields such as ICT, energy, electric equipment, machinery and transport.

Looking across different industries, Collaborative Innovation offers new knowledge and insights on the extraordinary value and increasing necessity of collaboration across different organizations in improving the health and lives of people. It breaks new ground with its research theme of building “health support ecosystems,” focusing on protecting people through collaborative innovation. This book opens up new, wide-ranging interdisciplinary academic research domains combining the humanities with science across various areas including general business administration, economics, information technology, medical informatics and drug information science….(More)”

Transforming City Governments for Successful Smart Cities

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New book edited by Rodríguez-Bolívar, Manuel Pedro: “There has been much attention paid to the idea of Smart Cities as researchers have sought to define and characterize the main aspects of the concept, including the role of creative industries in urban growth, the importance of social capital in urban development, and the role of urban sustainability. This book develops a critical view of the Smart City concept, the incentives and role of governments in promoting the development of Smart Cities and the analysis of experiences of e-government projects addressed to enhance Smart Cities. This book further analyzes the perceptions of stakeholders, such as public managers or politicians, regarding the incentives and role of governments in Smart Cities and the critical analysis of e-government projects to promote Smart Cities’ development, making the book valuable to academics, researchers, policy-makers, public managers, international organizations and technical experts in understanding the role of government to enhance Smart Cities’ projects….(More)”

Democratising the Data Revolution

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Jonathan Gray at Open Knowledge: “What will the “data revolution” do? What will it be about? What will it count? What kinds of risks and harms might it bring? Whom and what will it serve? And who will get to decide?

Today we are launching a new discussion paper on “Democratising the Data Revolution”, which is intended to advance thinking and action around civil society engagement with the data revolution. It looks beyond the disclosure of existing information, towards more ambitious and substantive forms of democratic engagement with data infrastructures.1

It concludes with a series of questions about what practical steps institutions and civil society organisations might take to change what is measured and how, and how these measurements are put to work.

You can download the full PDF report here, or continue to read on in this blog post.

What Counts?

How might civil society actors shape the data revolution? In particular, how might they go beyond the question of what data is disclosed towards looking at what is measured in the first place? To kickstart discussion around this topic, we will look at three kinds of intervention: changing existing forms of measurement, advocating new forms of measurement and undertaking new forms of measurement.

Changing Existing Forms of Measurement

Rather than just focusing on the transparency, disclosure and openness of public information, civil society groups can argue for changing what is measured with existing data infrastructures. One example of this is recent campaigning around company ownership in the UK. Advocacy groups wanted to unpick networks of corporate ownership and control in order to support their campaigning and investigations around tax avoidance, tax evasion and illicit financial flows.

While the UK company register recorded information about “nominal ownership”, it did not include information about so-called “beneficial ownership”, or who ultimately benefits from the ownership and control of companies. Campaigners undertook an extensive programme of activities to advocate for changes and extensions to existing data infrastructures – including via legislation, software systems, and administrative protocols.2

Advocating New Forms of Measurement

As well as changing or recalibrating existing forms of measurement, campaigners and civil society organisations can make the case for the measurement of things which were not previously measured. For example, over the past several decades social and political campaigning has resulted in new indicators about many different issues – such as gender inequality, health, work, disability, pollution or education.3 In such cases activists aimed to establish a given indicator as important and relevant for public institutions, decision makers, and broader publics – in order to, for example, inform policy development or resource allocation.

Undertaking New Forms of Measurement

Historically, many civil society organisations and advocacy groups have collected their own data to make the case for action on issues that they work on – from human rights abuses to endangered species….(More)”

Defining Public Engagement: A four-level approach.

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Della Rucker’s Chapter 2 for an Online Public Engagement Book: “….public engagement typically means presenting information on an project or draft plan and addressing questions or comments. For planners working on long-range issues, such as a comprehensive plan, typical public engagement actions may include feedback questions, such as “what should this area look like?” or “what is your vision for the future of the neighborhood?” Such questions, while inviting participants to take a more active role in the community decision-making than the largely passive viewer/commenter in the first example, still places the resident in a peripheral role: that of an information source, functionally similar to the demographic data and GIS map layers that the professionals use to develop plans.

In a relatively small number of cases, planners and community advocates have found more robust and more direct means of engaging residents in decision -making around the future of their communities. Public engagement specialists, often originating from a community development or academic background, have developed a variety of methods, such as World Cafe and the Fishbowl, that are designed to facilitate more meaningful sharing of information among community residents, often as much with the intent of building connectivity and mutual understanding among residents of different backgrounds as for the purpose of making policy decisions.

Finally, a small but growing number of strategies have begun to emerge that place the work of making community decisions directly in the hands of private residents. Participatory -based budgeting allocates the decision about how to use a portion of a community’s budget to a citizen — based process, and participants work collaboratively through a process that determines what projects or initiatives will be funded in then coming budget cycle. And in the collection of tactics generally known as tactical urbanism or [other names], residents directly intervene in the physical appearance or function of the community by building and placing street furniture, changing parking spaces or driving lanes to pedestrian use, creating and installing new signs, or making other kinds of physical, typically temporary, changes — sometimes with, and sometimes without, the approval of the local government. The purposes of tactical urbanist interventions are twofold: they physically demonstrate the potential impact that more permanent features would have on the community’s transportation and quality of life, and they give residents a concrete and immediate opportunity to impact their environs.

The direct impacts of either participatory budgeting or tactical urbanism intiatives tend to be limited — the amount of budget available for a participatory-based budgeting initiative is usually a fraction of the total budget, and the physical area impacted by a tactical urbanism event is generally limited to a few blocks. Anecdotal evidence from both types of activity, however, seems to indicate an increased understanding of community needs and an increased sense of agency -of having the power to influence one’s community’s future — among participants.

Online public engagement methods have the potential to facilitate a wide variety of public engagement, from making detailed project information more readily available to enabling crowdsourced decision-making around budget and policy choices. However, any discussion of online public engagement methods will soon run up against the same basic challenge: when we use that term, what kind of engagement — what kind of participant experience — are we talking about?

We could divide public participation tasks according to one of several existing organization systems, or taxonomies. The two most commonly used in public engagement theory and practice derive from Sherry R. Arnestein’s 1969 academic paper, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation,” and the International Association of Public Participation’s Public Participation Spectrum.

Although these two taxonomies reflect the same basic idea — that one’s options in selecting public engagement activities range along a spectrum from generally less to more active engagement on the part of the public — they divide and label the classifications differently. …From my perspective, both of these frameworks capture the central issue of recognizing more to less intensive public engagement options, but the number of divisions and the sometimes abstract wording appears to have made it difficult for these insights to find widespread use outside of an academic context. Practitioners who need to think though these options seem to have some tendency to become tangled in the fine-grained differentiations, and the terminology can both make these distinctions harder to think about and lead to mistaken assumption that one is doing higher-level engagement that is actually the case. Among commercial online public engagement platform providers, blog posts claiming that their tool addresses the whole Spectrum appear on a relatively regular basis, even when the tool in questions is designed for feedback, not decision -making.

For these reasons, this book will use the following framework of engagement types, which is detailed enough to demarcate what I think are the most crucial differentiations while at the same time keeping the framework simple enough to use in routine process planning.

The four engagement types we will talk about are: Telling; Asking; Discussing; Deciding…(More)”

Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World

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Speech by Carlos Moedas, EU Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation: “On 25 April this year, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 hit Nepal. To get real-time geographical information, the response teams used an online mapping tool called Open Street Map. Open Street Map has created an entire online map of the world using local knowledge, GPS tracks and donated sources, all provided on a voluntary basis. It is open license for any use.

Open Street Map was created by a 24 year-old computer science student at University College London in 2004, has today 2 million users and has been used for many digital humanitarian and commercial purposes: From the earthquakes in Haiti and Nepal to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

This story is one of many that demonstrate that we are moving into a world of open innovation and user innovation. A world where the digital and physical are coming together. A world where new knowledge is created through global collaborations involving thousands of people from across the world and from all walks of life.

Ladies and gentlemen, over the next two days I would like us to chart a new path for European research and innovation policy. A new strategy that is fit for purpose for a world that is open, digital and global. And I would like to set out at the start of this important conference my own ambitions for the coming years….

Open innovation is about involving far more actors in the innovation process, from researchers, to entrepreneurs, to users, to governments and civil society. We need open innovation to capitalise on the results of European research and innovation. This means creating the right ecosystems, increasing investment, and bringing more companies and regions into the knowledge economy. I would like to go further and faster towards open innovation….

I am convinced that excellent science is the foundation of future prosperity, and that openness is the key to excellence. We are often told that it takes many decades for scientific breakthroughs to find commercial application.

Let me tell you a story which shows the opposite. Graphene was first isolated in the laboratory by Profs. Geim and Novoselov at the University of Manchester in 2003 (Nobel Prizes 2010). The development of graphene has since benefitted from major EU support, including ERC grants for Profs. Geim and Novoselov. So I am proud to show you one of the new graphene products that will soon be available on the market.

This light bulb uses the unique thermal dissipation properties of graphene to achieve greater energy efficiencies and a longer lifetime that LED bulbs. It was developed by a spin out company from the University of Manchester, called Graphene Lighting, as is expected to go on sale by the end of the year.

But we must not be complacent. If we look at indicators of the most excellent science, we find that Europe is not top of the rankings in certain areas. Our ultimate goal should always be to promote excellence not only through ERC and Marie Skłodowska-Curie but throughout the entire H2020.

For such an objective we have to move forward on two fronts:

First, we are preparing a call for European Science Cloud Project in order to identify the possibility of creating a cloud for our scientists. We need more open access to research results and the underlying data. Open access publication is already a requirement under Horizon 2020, but we now need to look seriously at open data…

When innovators like LEGO start fusing real bricks with digital magic, when citizens conduct their own R&D through online community projects, when doctors start printing live tissues for patients … Policymakers must follow suit…(More)”

Introducing the Governance Data Alliance

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“The overall assumption of the Governance Data Alliance is that governance data can contribute to improved sustainable economic and human development outcomes and democratic accountability in all countries. The contribution that governance data will make to those outcomes will of course depend on a whole range of issues that will vary across contexts; development processes, policy processes, and the role that data plays vary considerably. Nevertheless, there are some core requirements that need to be met if data is to make a difference, and articulating them can provide a framework to help us understand and improve the impact that data has on development and accountability across different contexts.

We also collectively make another implicit (and important) assumption: that the current state of affairs is vastly insufficient when it comes to the production and usage of high-quality governance data. In other words, the status quo needs to be significantly improved upon. Data gathered from participants in the April 2014 design session help to paint that picture in granular terms. Data production remains highly irregular and ad hoc; data usage does not match data production in many cases (e.g. users want data that don’t exist and do not use data that is currently produced); production costs remain high and inconsistent across producers despite possibilities for economies of scale; and feedback loops between governance data producers and governance data users are either non-existent or rarely employed. We direct readers to http://dataalliance.globalintegrity.org for a fuller treatment of those findings.

Three requirements need to be met if governance data is to lead to better development and accountability outcomes, whether those outcomes are about core “governance” issues such as levels of inclusion, or about service delivery and human development outcomes that may be shaped by the quality of governance. Those requirements are:

  • The availability of governance data.
  • The quality of governance data, including its usability and salience.
  • The informed use of governance data.

(Or to use the metaphor of markets, we face a series of market failures: supply of data is inconsistent and not uniform; user demand cannot be efficiently channeled to suppliers to redirect their production to address those deficiencies; and transaction costs abound through non-existent data standards and lack of predictability.)

If data are not available about those aspects of governance that are expected to have an impact on development outcomes and democratic accountability, no progress will be made. The risk is that data about key issues will be lacking, or that there will be gaps in coverage, whether country coverage, time periods covered, or sectors, or that data sets produced by different actors may not be comparable. This might come about for reasons including the following: a lack of knowledge – amongst producers, and amongst producers and users – about what data is needed and what data is available; high costs, and limited resources to invest in generating data; and, institutional incentives and structures (e.g. lack of autonomy, inappropriate mandate, political suppression of sensitive data, organizational dysfunction – relating, for instance, to National Statistical Offices) that limit the production of governance data….

What A Governance Data Alliance Should Do (Or, Making the Market Work)

During the several months of creative exploration around possibilities for a Governance Data Alliance, dozens of activities were identified as possible solutions (in whole or in part) to the challenges identified above. This note identifies what we believe to be the most important and immediate activities that an Alliance should undertake, knowing that other activities can and should be rolled into an Alliance work plan in the out years as the initiative matures and early successes (and failures) are achieved and digested.

A brief summary of the proposals that follow:

  1. Design and implement a peer-to-peer training program between governance data producers to improve the quality and salience of existing data.
  2. Develop a lightweight data standard to be adopted by producer organizations to make it easier for users to consume governance data.
  3. Mine the 2014 Reform Efforts Survey to understand who actually uses which governance data, currently, around the world.
  4. Leverage the 2014 Reform Efforts Survey “plumbing” to field customized follow-up surveys to better assess what data users seek in future governance data.
  5. Pilot (on a regional basis) coordinated data production amongst producer organizations to fill coverage gaps, reduce redundancies, and respond to actual usage and user preferences….(More) “

Exploring Open Energy Data in Urban Areas

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The Worldbank: “…Energy efficiency – using less energy input to deliver the same level of service – has been described by many as the ‘first fuel’ of our societies. However, lack of adequate data to accurately predict and measure energy efficiency savings, particularly at the city level, has limited the realization of its promise over the past two decades.
Why Open Energy Data?
Open Data can be a powerful tool to reduce information asymmetry in markets, increase transparency and help achieve local economic development goals. Several sectors like transport, public sector management and agriculture have started to benefit from Open Data practices. Energy markets are often characterized by less-than-optimal conditions with high system inefficiencies, misaligned incentives and low levels of transparency. As such, the sector has a lot to potentially gain from embracing Open Data principles.
The United States is a leader in this field with its ‘Energy Data’ initiative. This initiative makes data easy to find, understand and apply, helping to fuel a clean energy economy. For example, the Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) open application programming interface (API) has more than 1.2 million time series of data and is frequently visited by users from the private sector, civil society and media. In addition, the Green Button  initiative is empowering American citizens to have access to their own energy usage data, and OpenEI.org is an Open Energy Information platform to help people find energy information, share their knowledge and connect to other energy stakeholders.
Introducing the Open Energy Data Assessment
To address this data gap in emerging and developing countries, the World Bank is conducting a series of Open Energy Data Assessments in urban areas. The objective is to identify important energy-related data, raise awareness of the benefits of Open Data principles and improve the flow of data between traditional energy stakeholders and others interested in the sector.
The first cities we assessed were Accra, Ghana and Nairobi, Kenya. Both are among the fastest-growing cities in the world, with dynamic entrepreneurial and technology sectors, and both are capitals of countries with an ongoing National Open Data Initiative., The two cities have also been selected to be part of the Negawatt Challenge, a World Bank international competition supporting technology innovation to solve local energy challenges.
The ecosystem approach
The starting point for the exercise was to consider the urban energy sector as an ecosystem, comprised of data suppliers, data users, key datasets, a legal framework, funding mechanisms, and ICT infrastructure. The methodology that we used adapted the established World Bank Open Data Readiness Assessment (ODRA), which highlights valuable connections between data suppliers and data demand.  The assessment showcases how to match pressing urban challenges with the opportunity to release and use data to address them, creating a longer-term commitment to the process. Mobilizing key stakeholders to provide quick, tangible results is also key to this approach….(More) …See also World Bank Open Government Data Toolkit.”

The death of data science – and rise of the citizen scientist

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Rossi at Information Age: “The notion of data science was born from the recent idea that if you have enough data, you don’t need much (if any) science to divine the truth and foretell the future – as opposed to the long-established rigours of statistical or actuarial science, which most times require painstaking efforts and substantial time to produce their version of ‘the truth’. …. Rather than embracing this untested and, perhaps, doomed form of science, and aimlessly searching for unicorns (also known as data scientists) to pay vast sums to, many organisations are now embracing the idea of making everyone data and analytics literate.

This leads me to what my column is really meant to focus on: the rise of the citizen scientist. 

The citizen scientist is not a new idea, having seen action in the space and earth sciences world for decades now, and has really come into its own as we enter the age of open data.

Cometh the hour

Given the exponential growth of open data initiatives across the world – the UK remains the leader, but has growing competition from all locations – the need for citizen scientists is now paramount. 

As governments open up vast repositories of new data of every type, the opportunity for these same governments (and commercial interests) to leverage the passion, skills and collective know-how of citizen scientists to help garner deeper insights into the scientific and civic challenges of the day is substantial. 

They can then take this knowledge and the collective energy of the citizen scientist community to develop common solution sets and applications to meet the needs of all their constituencies without expending much in terms of financial resources or suffering substantial development time lags. 

This can be a windfall of benefits for every level or type of government found around the world. The use of citizen scientists to tackle so-called ‘grand challenge’ problems has been a driving force behind many governments’ commitment to and investment in open data to date. 

There are so many challenges in governing today that it would be foolish not to employ these very capable resources to help tackle them. 

The benefits manifested from this approach are substantial and well proven. Many are well articulated in the open data success stories to date. 

Additionally, you only need to attend a local ‘hack fest’ to see how engaged citizen scientists can be of any age, gender and race, and feel the sense of community that these events foster as everyone focuses on the challenges at hand and works diligently to surmount them using very creative approaches. 

As open data becomes pervasive in use and matures in respect to the breadth and richness of the data sets being curated, the benefits returned to both government and its constituents will be manifold. 

The catalyst to realising these benefits and achieving return on investment will be the role of citizen scientists, which are not going to be statisticians, actuaries or so-called data gurus, but ordinary people with a passion for science and learning and a desire to contribute to solving the many grand challenges facing society at large….(More)

Citizen-Driven Innovation : A Guidebook for City Mayors and Public Administrators

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Guidebook by Eskelinen, Jarmo; Garcia Robles, Ana; Lindy, Ilari; Marsh, Jesse; Muente-Kunigami, Arturo:  “… aims to bring citizen-driven innovation to policy makers and change agents around the globe, by spreading good practice on open and participatory approaches as applied to digital service development in different nations, climates, cultures, and urban settings. The report explores the concept of smart cities through a lens that promotes citizens as the driving force of urban innovation. Different models of smart cities are presented, showing how citizen-centric methods have been used to mobilize resources to respond to urban innovation challenges in a variety of situations, objectives, and governance structures. The living lab approach strengthens these processes as one of the leading methods for agile development or the rapid prototyping of ideas, concepts, products, services, and processes in a highly decentralized and user-centric manner. By adopting these approaches and promoting citizen-driven innovation, cities around the world are aiming to alleviate the demand for services, increase the quality of delivery, and promote local entrepreneurship. This guidebook is structured into seven main sections: an introductory section describes the vision of a humanly smart city, in order to give an idea of the kind of result that can be attained from opening up and applying citizen-driven innovation methods. Chapter one getting started helps mayors launch co-design initiatives, exploring innovation processes founded on trust and verifying the benefits of opening up. Chapter two, building a strategy identifies the key steps for building an innovation partnership and together defining a sustainable city vision and scenarios for getting there. Chapter three, co-designing solutions looks at the process of unpacking concrete problems, working creatively to address them, and following up on implementation. Chapter four, ensuring sustainability describes key elements for long-term viability: evaluation and impact assessment, appropriate institutional structuring, and funding and policy support. Chapter five, joining forces suggests ways to identify a unique role for participation in international networks and how to best learn from cooperation. Finally, the report provides a starter pack with some of the more commonly used tools and methods to support the kinds of activities described in this guidebook….(More)”