Civic Jazz in the New Maker Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Techonomy: “Our civic innovation movement is about 6 years old.  It began when cities started opening up data to citizens, journalists, public-sector companies, non-profits, and government agencies.  Open data is an invitation: it’s something to go to work on— both to innovate and to create a more transparent environment about what works and what doesn’t.  I remember when we first opened data in SF and began holding conferences and hackathons. In short order we saw a community emerge with remarkable capacity to contribute to, tinker with, hack, explore and improve the city.

Early on this took the form of visualizing data, like crime patterns in Oakland. This was followed by engagement: “Look, the police are skating by and not enforcing prostitution laws. Lets call them on it!”   Civic hackathons brought together journalists, software developers, hardware people, and urbanists. I recall when artists teamed with the Arup engineering firm to build noise sensors and deployed them in the Tenderloin neighborhood (with absolutely no permission from anybody). Noise was an issue. How could you understand the problem unless you measured it?

Something as wonky as an API invited people in, at which point a sense of civic possibility and wonder set in. Suddenly whole swaths of the city were working on the city.  During the SF elections four years ago Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (which I chair) led a project with candidates, bureaucrats, and hundreds of volunteers for a summer-long set of hackathons and projects. We were stunned so many people would come together and collaborate so broadly. It was a movement, fueled by a sense of agency and informed by social media. Today cities are competing on innovation. It has become a movement.

All this has been accelerated by startups, incubators, and the economy’s whole open innovation conversation.  Remarkably, we now see capital from flowing in to support urban and social ventures where we saw none just a few years ago. The accelerator Tumml in SF is a premier example, but there are similar efforts in many cities.

This initial civic innovation movement was focused on apps and data, a relatively easy place to start. With such an approach you’re not contending for real estate or creating something that might gentrify neighborhoods. Today this movement is at work on how we design the city itself.  As millennials pour in and cities are where most of us live, enormous experimentation is at play. Ours is a highly interdisciplinary age, mixing new forms of software code and various physical materials, using all sorts of new manufacturing techniques.

Brooklyn is a great example.  A few weeks ago I met with Bob Bland, CEO of Manufacture New York. This ambitious 160,000 square foot public/private partnership is reimagining the New York fashion business. In one place it co-locates contract manufacturers, emerging fashion brands and advanced fashion research. Think wearables, sensors, smart fabrics, and the application of advanced manufacturing to fashion. By bringing all these elements under one roof, the supply chain can be compressed, sped-up, and products made more innovative.

New York City’s Economic Development office envisions a local urban supply chain that can offer a scalable alternative to the giant extended global one. In fashion it makes more and more sense for brands to be located near their suppliers. Social media speeds up fashion cycles, so we’re moving beyond predictable seasons and looks specified ahead of time. Manufacturers want to place smaller orders more frequently, so they can take less inventory risk and keep current with trends.

When you put so much talent in one space, creativity flourishes. In fashion, unlike tech, there isn’t a lot of IP protection. So designers can riff off each other’s idea and incorporate influences as artists do. What might be called stealing ideas in the software business is seen in fashion as jazz and a way to create a more interesting work environment.

A few blocks away is the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a mammoth facility at the center of New York’s emerging maker economy. …In San Francisco this urban innovation movement is working on the form of the city itself. Our main boulevard, Market Street, is to be reimagined, repaved, and made greener with far fewer private vehicles over the next two years. Our planning department, in concert with art organizations here, has made citizen-led urban prototyping the centerpiece of the planning process….(More)”

5 tech trends that will transform governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zac Bookman at the World Economic Forum: “…The public sector today looks a bit like the consumer industry of 1995 and the enterprise space in 2005: it is at the beginning of a large-scale digital metamorphosis. The net result will be years of saved time, better decisions and stronger communities.

Here are five trends that will define this transformation in the coming decade:

  1. Real-time operations

Many industries in the global economy already operate in real time. ….

Governments are different. They often access accurate data only on a monthly or quarterly basis, even though they make critical decisions every day. This will change with software deployments that help governments unleash and use current data to make more informed decisions about how they can allocate public resources effectively.

  1. Smarter cities  

Studies on human migration patterns indicate that more people are moving to cities. By 2025, an estimated 60% of the world’s population will live in an urban centre. High rates of urbanization will force cities to use their existing resources more efficiently. Networked infrastructures – including roads, phone lines, cable networks, satellites and the internet – will be important parts of the solution to this challenge….For example, MIT and Copenhagen recently collaborated on an electric-hybrid bike wheel that monitors pollution, road conditions and traffic. The wheel allows cities to monitor their environments at a level that was previously unfeasible with cheap sensors and manual labour, offering a quantum leap in networking capability without using further human or capital resources.

  1. Increased citizen engagement

Smart networks are wonderful things, but cities need to guard themselves against making efficiency a sacred cow. There is inherent tension between the ideals of democracy and efficiency, between the openness of platforms that encourage engagement and centralized systems. Rather than focus solely on making everything smart, cities will have to focus on slowing down and improving the quality of life.

These considerations will cause cities to increase citizen engagement. Transparency is a subset of this goal. Open data platforms, such as data.gov and data.gov.uk, host troves of machine-readable government information that allow communities to target and solve problems for which governments do not have the bandwidth. Crowdfunding platforms, such as neighbor.ly, allow citizens to participate in the civic process by enabling them to invest in local capital projects. These types of civic tech platforms will continue to grow, and they will be vital to the health of future democracies.

  1. 21st-century reporting software for governments

The information technology that powers government is notoriously antiquated. …

New reporting technology, such as the system from OpenGov, will automatically pull and display data from governments’ accounting systems. These capabilities empower employees to find information in seconds that would have previously taken hours, days or even weeks to find. They will expand inter-departmental collaboration on core functions, such as budgeting. And they will also allow governments to compare themselves with other governments. In the next decade, advanced reporting software will save billions of dollars by streamlining processes, improving decisions and offering intelligent insights across the expenditure spectrum.

  1. Inter-governmental communication

The internet was conceived as a knowledge-sharing platform. Over the past few decades, technologists have developed tools such as Google and Wikipedia to aid the flow of information on the web and enable ever greater knowledge sharing. Today, you can find nearly any piece of information in a matter of seconds. Governments, however, have not benefited from the rapid development of such tools for their industry, and most information sharing still occurs offline, over email, or on small chat forums. Tools designed specifically for government data will allow governments to embrace the inherent knowledge-sharing infrastructure of the internet….(More)”

Harnessing the Internet of Everything to Serve the Public Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Gill at Socrata: “…Thanks to sensor-based objects, big data is getting bigger, and that presents opportunities — and considerations — for government organizations.

Picture this: It’s a sunny summer’s day a few years from now, plants are in full bloom, and you’re strolling through a major city park. Unfortunately, your eyes are watering as the itchy beginnings of a pollen-induced allergy attack begin to compromise the experience.

Pulling out your phone, you consult a data visualization showing the park’s hour-by-hour pollen count densities. You then choose a new path, one with different vegetation and lighter pollen counts, and go about your way, barely noticing the egg-shaped nodes in the canopy monitoring everything from pollen to air quality to foot-traffic trends.

Welcome to the Internet of Everything, city edition.

….tapping into, and especially generating, IoT data streams is a natural fit for larger municipal governments who not only have the fiscal resources needed to put IoT data to work, they have an innate motivator: improving citizens’ lives.

Consider Chicago’s Array of Things project, an experimental network of modular sensor boxes installed around the city’s core. Think of it as an urban fitness-data tracker: The nodes collect real-time data on the city’s environment and infrastructure for research and public use, with the first units focusing on atmosphere, air quality, and environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and light.

From this data alone, the potential applications are exciting, such as using air, sound, and vibration data to monitor vehicle traffic, or infrared sensors to measure street temperature to guide salting responses during winter storms. The thinkers behind Array of Things can even envision a downtown where street lamp poles alert pedestrians to icy sidewalk patches and apps guide people to safe nocturnal walking routes.

This is all cool stuff, but “outcome” is the key word here, says McInnis, who recommends a bottom-up approach when assessing IoT opportunities. Instead of worrying whether you currently possess the technical infrastructure to harness IoT data, he says, first determine what you want to achieve, be it water quality monitoring or winter sidewalk safety, and then work from there — you may even already have IoT data streams that can be redeployed.

And as cities like Chicago are demonstrating, the Internet of Things not only has the potential to reshape how municipalities can harness a world of increasing object-driven data; it’s helping reshape how cities think about the nature of usable data.

In other words, all these new IoT data streams are actually like water, a natural resource. And just as water flows from many sources, government IoT data can also be collected, channeled, and processed like any utility — and serve as a powerful public good. …(More)”

How Startups Are Transforming the Smart City Movement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Shueh at GovTech: “Remember the 1990s visions of the future? Those first incantations of the sweeping “smart city,” so technologically utopian and Tomorrowland-ish in design? The concept and solutions were pitched by tech titans like IBM and Cisco, cost obscene amounts of money, and promised equally outlandish levels of innovation.

It was a drive — as idealistic as it was expedient — to spark a new industry that infused cities with data, analytics, sensors and clean energy. Two-and-a-half decades later, the smart city market has evolved. Its solutions are more pragmatic and its benefits more potent. Evidence brims inSingapore, where officials boast that they can predict traffic congestion an hour in advance with 90 percent accuracy. Similarly, in Chicago, the city has embraced analytics to estimate rodent infestations and prioritizerestaurant inspections. These of course are a few standouts, but as many know, the movement is highly diverse and runs its fingers through cities and across continents.

And yet what’s not as well-known is what’s happened in the last few years. The industry appears to be undergoing another metamorphosis, one that takes the ingenuity inspired by its beginnings and reimagines it with the help of do-it-yourself entrepreneurs….

Asked for a definition, Abrahamson centered his interpretation on tech that enhances quality of life. With the possible exception of health care, finance and education — systems large enough to merit their own categories, Abrahamson explains smart cities by highlighting investment areas at Urban.us. Specific areas are packaged as follows:

Mobility and Logistics: How cities move people and things to, from and within cities.

Built Environment: The public and private spaces in which citizens work and live.

Utilities: Critical resources including water, waste and energy.

Service Delivery: How local governments provide services ranging from public works to law enforcement….

Who’s Investing?

….Here is a sampling of a few types, with examples of their startup investments.

General Venture Capitalists

a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) – Mapillary and Moovit

Specialty Venture Capitalists

Fontinalis – Lyft, ParkMe, LocoMobi

Black Coral Capital – Digital Lumens, Clean Energy Collective, newterra

Govtech Fund – AmigoCloud, Mark43, MindMixer

Corporate Venture Capitalists

Google Ventures – Uber, Skycatch, Nest

Motorola Solutions Venture Capital – CyPhy Works and SceneDoc

BMW i Ventures – Life360 and ChargePoint

Impact/Social Investors

Omidyar Network – SeeClickFix and Nationbuilder

Knight Foundation – Public Stuff, Captricity

Kapor Capital – Uber, Via, Blocpower

1776 – Radiator Labs, Water Lens… (More)

Inside the fascinating, bizarre world of ‘Prepper Pinterest’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Caitlin Dewey in the Washington Post: “Pinterest, the aspirational candyland of women everywhere, has long been beloved by homebuyers, wedding-planners, moms, narcissists, and people who spend too much time on their hair.

Now you can add another, odder demographic to the list: “doomsday” preppers, whose rabid interest in all things DIY actually makes for a pretty comfortable cultural fit.

Prepper Pinterest has exploded in the past year, according to the site itself: The total volume of prepper pins is up 87 percent, and repins of prepping posts have nearly tripled. Leading preppers on the platform, like Angela Paskett, Damian Brindle and Glenn Levy, have racked up tens of thousands of followers.

It’s the conclusive sign, perhaps, that the much-maligned prepper movement has finally gone mainstream — or that a particularly precious branch of it has, at least. One popular infographic, currently circulating among Pinterest’s prepper ranks, depicts a “luxury bomb shelter” complete with self-filtering bathtubs and scented oxygen tanks….

It may help that mainstream culture has, in the past 10 years, become more hospitable to the prepper ethic — thanks, in large part, to a trend that Jessica Grose once dubbed “the Pinterest effect.” Young women have revitalized the $29 billion craft industry, prodded along by ideas on Etsy, Pinterest and lifestyle blogs. Concerns about the origins of our food gave us farmers’ markets, first — followed by urban farms and “Modern Farmers” and backyard chicken coops….(More)”

 

Crowdsourced app helps the visually impaired cross the road

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Out of New York’s 12,000 intersections, less than 100 offer navigation tools to help visually impaired residents cross safely. Audible sign technology is available but the process of installing it across cities is slow — most only have it at about 10 percent of crossings. Offering an alternative,SeeLight is a crowdsourced app that makes all the necessary information about urban crossings available to blind and visually impaired users.

The app collates data from government agencies and uses crowdsourced information to fill in the existing gap. Users can help by timing the length of any walk signal and recording the direction of the crossing using the app, which will then store that information along with a GPS tag. They can also add a brief description, noting whether the intersection has tactile paving or a pedestrian crossing light. When a visually impaired person approaches a crossing, they can then use the app to assist them through voice navigation.

SeeLight is not the first app to crowdsource accessibility data — we recently wrote about AXS Map, which collects user reviews about how accessible places around the world are for users in wheelchairs. SeeLight is currently crowdfunding on Indiegogo to finance improvements to the current app, which is available now for free.  …(More)

Citizen Urban Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report by Anthony Townsend and Alissa Chisholm at the Cities of Data Project: “Over the coming decades, the world will continue to urbanize rapidly amidst an historic migration of computing power off the desktop, unleashing new opportunities for data collection that reveal how cities function. In a recent report, Making Sense of the Science of Cities (bit.ly/sciencecities) we described an emerging global research movement that seeks establish a new urban science built atop this new infrastructure of instruments. But will this new intellectual venture be an inclusive endeavor? What role is 1 there for the growing ranks of increasingly well-equipped and well-informed citizen volunteers and amateur investigators to work alongside professional scientists? How are researchers, activists and city governments exploring that potential today? Finally, what can be done to encourage and accelerate experimentation?

This report examines three case studies that provide insight into emerging models of citizen science, highlighting the possibilities of citizen-university-government collaborative research, and the important role of open data platforms to enable these partnerships….(More)”

Big data algorithms can discriminate, and it’s not clear what to do about it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “This program had absolutely nothing to do with race…but multi-variable equations.”

That’s what Brett Goldstein, a former policeman for the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and current Urban Science Fellow at the University of Chicago’s School for Public Policy, said about a predictive policing algorithm he deployed at the CPD in 2010. His algorithm tells police where to look for criminals based on where people have been arrested previously. It’s a “heat map” of Chicago, and the CPD claims it helps them allocate resources more effectively.

Chicago police also recently collaborated with Miles Wernick, a professor of electrical engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, to algorithmically generate a “heat list” of 400 individuals it claims have thehighest chance of committing a violent crime. In response to criticism, Wernick said the algorithm does not use “any racial, neighborhood, or other such information” and that the approach is “unbiased” and “quantitative.” By deferring decisions to poorly understood algorithms, industry professionals effectively shed accountability for any negative effects of their code.

But do these algorithms discriminate, treating low-income and black neighborhoods and their inhabitants unfairly? It’s the kind of question many researchers are starting to ask as more and more industries use algorithms to make decisions. It’s true that an algorithm itself is quantitative – it boils down to a sequence of arithmetic steps for solving a problem. The danger is that these algorithms, which are trained on data produced by people, may reflect the biases in that data, perpetuating structural racism and negative biases about minority groups.

There are a lot of challenges to figuring out whether an algorithm embodies bias. First and foremost, many practitioners and “computer experts” still don’t publicly admit that algorithms can easily discriminate.More and more evidence supports that not only is this possible, but it’s happening already. The law is unclear on the legality of biased algorithms, and even algorithms researchers don’t precisely understand what it means for an algorithm to discriminate….

While researchers clearly understand the theoretical dangers of algorithmic discrimination, it’s difficult to cleanly measure the scope of the issue in practice. No company or public institution is willing to publicize its data and algorithms for fear of being labeled racist or sexist, or maybe worse, having a great algorithm stolen by a competitor.

Even when the Chicago Police Department was hit with a Freedom of Information Act request, they did not release their algorithms or heat list, claiming a credible threat to police officers and the people on the list. This makes it difficult for researchers to identify problems and potentially provide solutions.

Legal hurdles

Existing discrimination law in the United States isn’t helping. At best, it’s unclear on how it applies to algorithms; at worst, it’s a mess. Solon Barocas, a postdoc at Princeton, and Andrew Selbst, a law clerk for the Third Circuit US Court of Appeals, argued together that US hiring law fails to address claims about discriminatory algorithms in hiring.

The crux of the argument is called the “business necessity” defense, in which the employer argues that a practice that has a discriminatory effect is justified by being directly related to job performance….(More)”

What factors influence transparency in US local government?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Grichawat Lowatcharin and Charles Menifield at LSE Impact Blog: “The Internet has opened a new arena for interaction between governments and citizens, as it not only provides more efficient and cooperative ways of interacting, but also more efficient service delivery, and more efficient transaction activities. …But to what extent does increased Internet access lead to higher levels of government transparency? …While we found Internet access to be a significant predictor of Internet-enabled transparency in our simplest model, this finding did not hold true in our most extensive model. This does not negate that fact that the variable is an important factor in assessing transparency levels and Internet access. …. Our data shows that total land area, population density, percentage of minority, education attainment, and the council-manager form of government are statistically significant predictors of Internet-enabled transparency.  These findings both confirm and negate the findings of previous researchers. For example, while the effect of education on transparency appears to be the most consistent finding in previous research, we also noted that the rural/urban (population density) dichotomy and the education variable are important factors in assessing transparency levels. Hence, as governments create strategic plans that include growth models, they should not only consider the budgetary ramifications of growth, but also the fact that educated residents want more web based interaction with government. This finding was reinforced by a recent Census Bureau report indicating that some of the cities and counties in Florida and California had population increases greater than ten thousand persons per month during the period 2013-2014.

This article is based on the paper ‘Determinants of Internet-enabled Transparency at the Local Level: A Study of Midwestern County Web Sites’, in State and Local Government Review. (More)”

Mining Administrative Data to Spur Urban Revitalization

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Ben Green presented at the 21th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: “After decades of urban investment dominated by sprawl and outward growth, municipal governments in the United States are responsible for the upkeep of urban neighborhoods that have not received sufficient resources or maintenance in many years. One of city governments’ biggest challenges is to revitalize decaying neighborhoods given only limited resources. In this paper, we apply data science techniques to administrative data to help the City of Memphis, Tennessee improve distressed neighborhoods. We develop new methods to efficiently identify homes in need of rehabilitation and to predict the impacts of potential investments on neighborhoods. Our analyses allow Memphis to design neighborhood-improvement strategies that generate greater impacts on communities. Since our work uses data that most US cities already collect, our models and methods are highly portable and inexpensive to implement. We also discuss the challenges we encountered while analyzing government data and deploying our tools, and highlight important steps to improve future data-driven efforts in urban policy….(More)”