PSFK: “As cities around the world grow in size, one of the major challenges will be how to make city services and infrastructure more adaptive and responsive in order to keep existing systems running efficiently, while expanding to accommodate greater need. In our Future Of Cities report, PSFK Labs investigated the key trends and pressing issues that will play a role in shaping the evolution of urban environments over the next decade. A major theme identified in the report is Sensible Cities, which is bringing intelligence to the city and its citizens through the free flow of information and... (More >)
GitHub and Government
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... (More >)
Free Software Ties the Internet of Things Together
Rachel Metz in MIT Technology Review: “OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities. If you buy several Internet-connected home gadgets—say, a “smart” thermostat, “smart” door lock, and “smart” window blinds—you’ll likely have to control each one with a separate app, meaning it exists in its own little silo. That’s not how Elier Ramirez does it. In his home, an iPad app controls his lights, ceiling fans, and TV and stereo. Pressing a single button within the app can shut off all his lights and gadgets when he leaves. Ramirez can... (More >)
Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response
New Report by John Crowley for the Wilson Center: “Leaders in disaster response are finding it necessary to adapt to a new reality. Although community actions have always been the core of the recovery process, collective action from the grassroots has changed response operations in ways that few would have predicted. Using new tools that interconnect over expanding mobile networks, citizens can exchange information via maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect, analyze, and act on that information. Sometimes, community-sourced intelligence may be fresher and more accurate than the information given to the responders who... (More >)
Special issue of FirstMonday: "Making data — Big data and beyond"
Introduction by Rasmus Helles and Klaus Bruhn Jensen: “Data are widely understood as minimal units of information about the world, waiting to be found and collected by scholars and other analysts. With the recent prominence of ‘big data’ (Mayer–Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), the assumption that data are simply available and plentiful has become more pronounced in research as well as public debate. Challenging and reflecting on this assumption, the present special issue considers how data are made. The contributors take big data and other characteristic features of the digital media environment as an opportunity to revisit classic issues concerning... (More >)
The move toward 'crowdsourcing' public safety
PhysOrg: “Earlier this year, Martin Dias, assistant professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, presented research for the National Law Enforcement Telecommunications System in which he examined Nlets’ network and how its governance and technology helped enable inter-agency information sharing. This work builds on his research aimed at understanding design principles for this public safety “social networks” and other collaborative networks. We asked Dias to discuss how information sharing around public safety has evolved in recent years and the benefits and challenges of what he describes as “crowdsourcing public safety.” … What is “crowdsourcing public safety” and why are... (More >)
Twitter Datastream Used to Predict Flu Outbreaks
arXivBlog: “The rate at which people post flu-related tweets could become a powerful tool in the battle to spot epidemics earlier, say computer scientists. Back in 2008, Google launched its now famous flu trends website. It works on the hypothesis that people make more flu-related search queries when they are suffering from the illness than when they are healthy. So counting the number of flu-related search queries in a given country gives a good indication of how the virus is spreading. The predictions are pretty good. The data generally closely matches that produced by government organisations such as the... (More >)
Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet
MIT Technology Review: “Data analytics are being used to implement a subtle form of discrimination, while anonymous data sets can be mined to reveal health data and other private information, a Microsoft researcher warned this morning at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference. Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, argued that these problems could be addressed with new legal approaches to the use of personal data. In a new paper, she and a colleague propose a system of “due process” that would give people more legal rights to understand how data analytics are used in determinations made against them,... (More >)
More Top-Down Participation, Please! Institutionalized empowerment through open participation
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... (More >)
AskThem
“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... (More >)
