Driving Solutions To Build Smarter Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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….

How Can This Data Help Cities?

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:

  • Vision Zero-related passenger safety policies
  • Traffic planning
  • Congestion reduction
  • Flow of residents across the City
  • Impact of events, disasters and other activities on City transportation
  • Identification of zoning changes and needs
  • Creation or reduction of parking
  • Facilitation of additional transportation solutions for marquee City initiatives

uber_SafeCities_BlogInfographic

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).”

Coop’s Citizen Sci Scoop: Try it, you might like it

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Response by Caren Cooper at PLOS: “Margaret Mead, the world-famous anthropologist said, “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The sentiment rings true for citizen science.
Yet, recent news in the citizen science world has been headlined “Most participants in citizen science projects give up almost immediately.” This was based on a study of participation in seven different projects within the crowdsourcing hub called Zooniverse. Most participants tried a project once, very briefly, and never returned.
What’s unusual about Zooniverse projects is not the high turnover of quitters. Rather, it’s unusual that even early quitters do some important work. That’s a cleverly designed project. An ethical principle of Zooniverse is to not waste people’s time. The crowdsourcing tasks are pivotal to advancing research. They cannot be accomplished by computer algorithms or machines. They require crowds of people, each chipping in a tiny bit. What is remarkable is that the quitters matter at all….
An Internet rule of thumb in that only 1% (or less) of users add new content to sites like Wikipedia. Citizen science appears to operate on this dynamic, except instead of a core group adding existing knowledge for the crowd to use, a core group is involved in making new knowledge for the crowd to use….
In citizen science, a crowd can be four or a crowd can be hundreds of thousands. A citizen scientist is not a person who will participate in any project. They are individuals – gamers, birders, stargazers, gardeners, weather bugs, hikers, naturalists, and more – with particular interests and motivations.
As my grandfather said, “Try it, you might like it.” It’s fabulous that millions are trying it. Sooner or later, when participants and projects find one another, a good match translates into a job well done….(More)”.

The Dawn of System Leadership

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, & John Kania at SSIReview: “…At no time in history have we needed such system leaders more. We face a host of systemic challenges beyond the reach of existing institutions and their hierarchical authority structures. Problems like climate change, destruction of ecosystems, growing scarcity of water, youth unemployment, and embedded poverty and inequity require unprecedented collaboration among different organizations, sectors, and even countries. Sensing this need, countless collaborative initiatives have arisen in the past decade—locally, regionally, and even globally. Yet more often than not they have floundered—in part because they failed to foster collective leadership within and across the collaborating organizations.
The purpose of this article is to share what we are learning about the system leaders needed to foster collective leadership. We hope to demystify what it means to be a system leader and to continue to grow as one….
Systemic change needs more than data and information; it needs real intelligence and wisdom. Jay Forrester, the founder of the system dynamics method that has shaped our approach to systems thinking, pointed out that complex non-linear systems exhibit “counterintuitive behavior.” He illustrated this by citing the large number of government interventions that go awry through aiming at short-term improvement in measurable problem symptoms but ultimately worsening the underlying problems—like increased urban policing that leads to short-term reductions in crime rates but does nothing to alter the sources of embedded poverty and worsens long-term incarceration rates.9 Another systems thinking pioneer, Russell Ackoff, characterized wisdom as the ability to distinguish the short-term from the long-term effects of an intervention.10 The question is, How does the wisdom to transcend pressures for low-leverage symptomatic interventions arise in practice?
System leaders like Baldwin and Winslow understand that collective wisdom cannot be manufactured or built into a plan created in advance. And it is not likely to come from leaders who seek to “drive” their predetermined change agenda. Instead, system leaders work to create the space where people living with the problem can come together to tell the truth, think more deeply about what is really happening, explore options beyond popular thinking, and search for higher leverage changes through progressive cycles of action and reflection and learning over time. Knowing that there are no easy answers to truly complex problems, system leaders cultivate the conditions wherein collective wisdom emerges over time through a ripening process that gradually brings about new ways of thinking, acting, and being…. (More)”.

The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Guardian: “We are lucky enough to live at a time in which a furious wave of innovation is breaking across the cities of the global south, spurred on both by the blistering pace of urbanisation, and by the rising popular demand for access to high-quality infrastructure that follows in its wake.
From Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and the literally destratifying cable cars of Caracas, to Nairobi’s “digital matatus” and the repurposed bus-ferries of Manila, the communities of the south are responsible for an ever-lengthening parade of social and technical innovations that rival anything the developed world has to offer for ingenuity and practical utility.
Nor is India an exception to this tendency. Transparent Chennai’s participatory maps and the work of the Mumbai-based practices CRIT and URBZ are better-known globally, but it is the tactics of daily survival devised by the unheralded multitude that really inspire urbanists. These techniques maximise the transactive capacity of the urban fabric, wrest the very last increment of value from the energy invested in the production of manufactured goods, and allow millions to eke a living, however precarious, from the most unpromising of circumstances. At a time of vertiginously spiralling economic and environmental stress globally, these are insights many of us in the developed north would be well advised to attend to – and by no means merely the poorest among us.
But, for whatever reason, this is not the face of urban innovation official India wants to share with the world – perhaps small-scale projects or the tactics of the poor simply aren’t dramatic enough to convey the magnitude and force of national ambition. We hear, instead, of schemes like Palava City, a nominally futuristic vision of digital technology minutely interwoven into the texture of everday urban life. Headlines were made around the planet this year when Narendra Modi’s government announced it had committed to building no fewer than 100 similarly “smart” cities….(More).”

Manual: Start building digital by default services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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.
Diagram showing old ways of building services
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.
Diagram showing the four main development phases of a digital by default service
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).”

The Fundamental Shortcoming With How We View Innovation

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David Dabscheck on “Why we should all be Chief Innovation Officers at work” at FastCompany:  “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years?” asked a fellow attendee at Innovation Enterprise’s recent Chief Innovation Officer Summit in New York.
It was a hard question to answer, particularly because I had no idea what a “CINO” was.
Even though I am literally a card-carrying member of the new religion of innovation, I hadn’t realized our high priests secured their own coveted C-suite acronym—CINOs for Chief INnovation Officer. Certainly this signals a function on the rise and was reinforced by the variety of industries represented over the two-day conference, including conservative ones that are more commonly associated with regulation than innovation, such as banking and healthcare. Indeed, Dr. Molly Coye, Chief Innovation Officer at UCLA Health, described how when she started in 2010 there were perhaps two or three similar positions, whereas today there are conferences purely for healthcare CINOs….
As even with vigorous C-suite support, innovation is often a misunderstood and misused concept because it presents psychological, as well as organizational challenges. The devil is not just in the details with innovation; he is dozing in our brains while simultaneously flipping off managers agonizing over their P&L statements.
What we need are conferences where people with “innovation” anywhere in their title cannot attend; where what is new is not the content, but those hearing it; where attendees learn that if innovation is what those people do “over there” it will never succeed “right here.” That is not to say those working in innovation do not also need more rigor within their approaches and genuinely appreciate why this word too often becomes a synonym for “expensive diversion.”
To return to the original question, the longevity of CINOs depends ironically on how effectively they make themselves redundant. They will succeed by helping employees view themselves as “innovative” exactly like they see themselves as “punctual” or “enthusiastic.” I am looking forward to the CINO conference where I am instead asked, “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years, as aren’t we all one already?”…(More).

The News We Need to Hear

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the New York Times: “When we began writing the column in late 2010 we hoped to show that serious reporting about responses to social problems could both provide useful insights for society and engage readers. We aimed to distinguish Fixes — an example of what we call solutions journalism — from uncritical “good news” reporting by examining approaches to social problems that show results and focusing on the specifics of how they work and what we can learn from them….

Journalists need better tools to find these stories systematically. Because the problems scream, but the solutions whisper, we often overlook them. We’re not good at letting society know when we are winning against problems; we are hamstrung by our techniques and our very sense of purpose. If winning means there is never another police killing of an unarmed black man, then it may also mean that the story goes away at its finest moment.

But it doesn’t have to. In our experience writing this column, we have found that it is almost always worthwhile to ask the question, Who’s doing it better?

Consider the immigration crisis in the United States. The news coverage focuses on the battle in Washington and the politics around tougher policing of the border. But immigration is at heart a local story that will continue to unfold in countless ways in the year ahead. Which cities or communities are doing a better job building or improving relations between new immigrants and their receiving communities? What are they doing and what can be learned from them?…

To be sure, journalism is not meant to be an obstacle to progress; it’s meant to describe the world accurately and circulate real-time information to help societies understand themselves and improve. But the news can influence human behavior in unintended ways. “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do,” wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion, in 1922.

It turns out, this isn’t just an armchair observation. Research now supports that our behavior is strongly influenced by what we imagine other people are doing — and it works in both directions, positive or negative. This is called “social norming.”… (More)”

Does Real-Time Feedback On Electricity Use Really Change Our Behavior?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jessica Leber at Co.Exist: “Is information power? Or more to the point, does information about our energy usage help us consume less power?
Even though there are a growing number of smart devices and systems on the market designed to give feedback about energy and water usage, in hopes of nudging us to cut back, studies have shown mixed evidence as to whether they actually work in changing long-term behavior.
In September 2010, the developer of a new LEED Gold apartment building in Manhattan approached Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions with the idea of studying whether they could reduce energy use by giving occupants devices that gave them real-time feedback on their electricity demand. They chose the Modlet, a device made by ThinkEco, that monitors energy use at each outlet, appliance by appliance.
The results of the study, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, show that getting people to change their behavior is more complicated than it seems….(More).”

The Black Box Society

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Frank Pasquale on “The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information”: “Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects the dots about what firms are doing with this information? The Black Box Society argues that we all need to be able to do so—and to set limits on how big data affects our lives.
Hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy. Even after billions of dollars of fines have been levied, underfunded regulators may have only scratched the surface of this troubling behavior….(More).”

Public-sector digitization: The trillion-dollar challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Cem Dilmegani, Bengi Korkmaz, and Martin Lundqvist from McKinsey: “Citizens and businesses now expect government information to be readily available online, easy to find and understand, and at low or no cost. Governments have many reasons to meet these expectations by investing in a comprehensive public-sector digital transformation. Our analysis suggests that capturing the full potential of govern­ment digitization could free up to $1 trillion annually in economic value worldwide, through improved cost and operational performance. Shared services, greater collaboration and inte­gra­tion, improved fraud management, and productivity enhancements enable system-wide efficiencies. At a time of increasing budgetary pressures, governments at national, regional, and local levels cannot afford to miss out on those savings.
Indeed, governments around the world are doing their best to meet citizen demand and capture benefits. More than 130 countries have online services. For example, Estonia’s 1.3 million residents can use electronic identification cards to vote, pay taxes, and access more than 160 services online, from unemployment benefits to property registration. Turkey’s Social Aid Infor­ma­tion System has consolidated multiple government data sources into one system to provide citizens with better access and faster decisions on its various aid programs. The United Kingdom’s gov.uk site serves as a one-stop information hub for all government departments. Such online services also provide greater access for rural populations, improve quality of life for those with physical infirmities, and offer options for those whose work and lifestyle demands don’t conform to typical daytime office hours.
However, despite all the progress made, most governments are far from capturing the full benefits of digitization. To do so, they need to take their digital transformations deeper, beyond the provision of online services through e-government portals, into the broader business of government itself. That means looking for opportunities to improve productivity, collabo­ration, scale, process efficiency, and innovation….
While digital transformation in the public sector is particularly challenging, a number of successful government initiatives show that by translating private-sector best practices into the public context it is possible to achieve broader and deeper public-sector digitization. Each of the six most important levers is best described by success stories….(More).”