Curated findings and actionable knowledge at the intersection of technology, innovation, and governance
OECD Data Beta: “Find, compare and share the latest OECD data: charts, maps, tables and related publications …”
OECD Data Lab: “The OECD Data Lab is your chance to participate in shaping the future of how OECD data is presented online.
We invite you to explore our data tools and visualisations and give us your thoughts…”
Uber Blogpost: “Since day one, Uber’s mission has been to improve city life by connecting people with safe, reliable, hassle-free rides through the use of technology. As we have grown, so has our ability to share information that can serve a greater good. By sharing data with municipal partners we can help cities become more liveable, resilient, and innovative.
Today, Boston joins Uber in a first-of-its-kind partnership to help expand the city’s capability to solve problems by leveraging data provided by Uber. The data will provide new insights to help manage urban growth, relieve traffic congestion, expand public transportation, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions….
Uber is committed to sharing data, compiled in a manner that protects the privacy of riders and drivers, that can help cities target solutions for their unique challenges. This initiative presents a new standard for the future development of our cities – in communities big or small we can bridge data and policy to build sophisticated solutions for a stronger society. For this effort, we will deliver anonymized trip-level data by ZIP Code Tabulation Area (ZCTA) which is the U.S. Census’ geographical representation of zip codes….
To date, most cities have not had access to granular data describing the flows and trends of private traffic. The data provided by Uber will help policymakers and city planners develop a more detailed understanding of where people in the city need to go and how to improve traffic flows and congestion to get them there, with data-driven decisions about:
This data can be utilized to help cities achieve their transportation and planning goals without compromising personal privacy. By helping cities understand the way their residents move, we can work together to make our communities stronger. Smart Cities can benefit from smart data and we will champion municipal efforts devoted to achieving data-driven urban growth, mobility and safety for communities (More).”
UK Government Service Design Manual: “…The service manual is here to help service managers and digital delivery teams across government make services so good that people prefer to use them. It’s made up of two things;
Typically, government services are built after long, costly procurement processes.
In this way of working, users are seldom – if ever – consulted about the service they’ll be using. The first time the public might see a service is when it goes live, by which time it’s too late to make any changes when it turns out to be unfit for purpose.
This way of working tends to encourage the creation of overly prescriptive policy, which then forms the basis of the requirements document. Instead, teams need to constantly iterate against user feedback.
This means building and testing in small chunks, working quickly to deliver improvements to a service. Teams will work out how to best meet the needs of users, releasing code regularly and working in an agile way. This new approach allows closer working between policy and delivery teams and as a result, the development of more responsive policy, two aims of the Civil Service Reform plan….
When you’re confident about the basics of service design and the requirement of the standard, you can start exploring the advice and guidance in the manual.
You can explore the manual by phase of delivery, specific roles, or by topic…(More).”
New paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Beth S. Noveck, Jillian Raines, and Antony Declercq as part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series: “The growth and globalization of the Internet over the past 40 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Virtually all sectors, from development to healthcare to education to politics, have been transformed. Yet developments in how the Internet is governed have not kept pace with this rapid technological innovation. Figuring out how to evolve the Internet’s governance in ways that are effective and legitimate is essential to ensure its continued potential. Flexible and innovative decision-making mechanisms are needed in order to enable disparate governance actors to address and respond effectively as changes in the network occur. This paper seeks to address the need to develop an effective and legitimate Internet governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches. It draws on the lessons of open governance, adopting innovative techniques to facilitate coordination, information sharing, and evidence generation by and across increasingly diverse and global groups of Internet actors, and calls for creating practical tools to support such an effective, legitimate and evolving Internet governance ecosystem. Although no right answer or single model for how to manage all issues of relevance to the Internet is suggested within this paper, the proposed framework intends to allow for diverse experiments in distributed governance approaches to learn what works and what does not. (More)“
New report by the Worldbank: “Data provide critical inputs in designing effective development policy recommendations, supporting their implementation, and evaluating results. In this new report “Big Data in Action for Development,” the World Bank Group collaborated with Second Muse, a global innovation agency, to explore big data’s transformative potential for socioeconomic development. The report develops a conceptual framework to work with big data in the development sector and presents a variety of case studies that lay out big data’s innovations, challenges, and opportunities.”
Lindsay Clark in ComputerWeekly: “Open data, a movement which promises access to vast swaths of information held by public bodies, has started getting its hands dirty, or rather its feet.
Before a spade goes in the ground, construction and civil engineering projects face a great unknown: what is down there? In the UK, should someone discover anything of archaeological importance, a project can be halted – sometimes for months – while researchers study the site and remove artefacts….
During an open innovation day hosted by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), open data services and technology firm Democrata proposed analytics could predict the likelihood of unearthing an archaeological find in any given location. This would help developers understand the likely risks to construction and would assist archaeologists in targeting digs more accurately. The idea was inspired by a presentation from the Archaeological Data Service in the UK at the event in June 2014.
The proposal won support from the STFC which, together with IBM, provided a nine-strong development team and access to the Hartree Centre’s supercomputer – a 131,000 core high-performance facility. For natural language processing of historic documents, the system uses two components of IBM’s Watson – the AI service which famously won the US TV quiz show Jeopardy. The system uses SPSS modelling software, the language R for algorithm development and Hadoop data repositories….
The proof of concept draws together data from the University of York’s archaeological data, the Department of the Environment, English Heritage, Scottish Natural Heritage, Ordnance Survey, Forestry Commission, Office for National Statistics, the Land Registry and others….The system analyses sets of indicators of archaeology, including historic population dispersal trends, specific geology, flora and fauna considerations, as well as proximity to a water source, a trail or road, standing stones and other archaeological sites. Earlier studies created a list of 45 indicators which was whittled down to seven for the proof of concept. The team used logistic regression to assess the relationship between input variables and come up with its prediction….”
18F Blog: “Clear, organized, and easy access to information is critical to supporting team growth and promoting the kind of culture change that 18F, the U.S. Digital Service, and fellow Innovators and Early Adopters aim to produce throughout federal IT development. As a small step towards that goal, we’d like to announce the 18F Hub, a Jekyll-based documentation platform that aims to help development teams organize and easily share their information, and to enable easy exploration of the connections between team members, projects, and skill sets. It’s still very much alpha-stage software, but over time, we’ll incrementally improve it until it serves as the go-to place for all our team’s working information, whether that information is integrated into the Hub directly or provided as links to other sources. It also serves as a lightweight tool that other teams can experiment with and deploy with a minimum of setup.
While we at 18F strongly believe in the value of transparency and collaboration across government, the details of our team, our projects, and our activities aren’t the real reason we’re launching the Hub: the exposure of our domain knowledge, working models and processes through tangible artifacts that people can adapt to their own environments is… (More).
New paper by Amanda Clarke and Helen Margetts in Policy and Internet: “Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to “open up” government operations to citizens. New forms of “big data” analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens’ behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain “closed” and under-exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).”
Morten Jerven in The Guardian: “In August, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon named his independent expert advisory group, 24 experts tasked with providing recommendations on how best to use data to deliver the sustainable development goals….On 6 November, those recommendations were published in a report entitled A world that counts, a cleverly crafted motivational manifesto, but by no means a practical roadmap on how to apply a “data revolution” to the future development agenda.
I have previously written about this in more detail, but essentially, the report’s key weakness is that it conflates several terms, and assumes automatic relationships between things such as “counting” and “knowing”.
Using four Venn diagrams, I’ve tried to illustrate some of the main misconceptions.
The report strongly suggests that everything that matters can be counted. We know that this is not true. If the guiding principle for the sustainable development goals is to make decisions as if everything can be counted, the end result will be very misleading.
The “data revolution” hype is just one of many places where the difference between statistics and data is misunderstood. Data is not the same as numbers. Data literally mean ‘what is given’, so when we speak of data we are talking about observations – quantitative or qualitative, or even figurative – that can be used to get information.
To keep talking about data when we mean statistics may sound better, but it only leads to confusion. The report (pdf) calls on the UN to establish “a process whereby key stakeholders create a Global Consensus on Data”. What is that supposed to mean? That statement is meaningless if you exchange the word “data” with “observations”, “knowledge” or ‘evidence’. It can, however, make sense if you talk about “statistics”.
International organisations do have a natural role when it comes to developing global standards for official statistics. Reaching a global consensus on how observations and evidence constitute knowledge is futile.