future of work

Sinkhole of bureaucracy

Curated on March 26, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

First article in a Washington Post series “examining the failures at the heart of troubled federal systems” by David A. Fahrenthold: “The trucks full of paperwork come every day, turning off a country road north of Pittsburgh and descending through a gateway into the earth. Underground, they stop at a metal door decorated with an American flag.

Behind the door, a room opens up as big as a supermarket, full of five-drawer file cabinets and people in business casual. About 230 feet below the surface, there is easy-listening music playing at somebody’s desk.
This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.
Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.
But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.

The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.
This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system.
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977….”
See also Data mining. The old-fashioned way: View the full graphic.

Charities Try New Ways to Test Ideas Quickly and Polish Them Later

Curated on March 26, 2014November 28, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Gose in the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “A year ago, a division of TechSoup Global began working on an app to allow donors to buy a hotel room for victims of domestic violence when no other shelter is available. Now that app is a finalist in a competition run by a foundation that combats human trafficking—and a win could mean a grant worth several hundred thousand dollars. The app’s evolution—adding a focus on sex slaves to the initial emphasis on domestic violence—was hardly accidental.
Caravan Studios, the TechSoup division that created the app, has embraced a new management approach popular in Silicon Valley known as “lean start-up.”
The principles, which are increasingly popular among nonprofits, emphasize experimentation over long-term planning and urge groups to get products and services out to clients as early as possible so the organizations can learn from feedback and make changes.
When the app, known as SafeNight, was still early in the design phase, Caravan posted details about the project on its website, including applications for grants that Caravan had not yet received. In lean-start-up lingo, Caravan put out a “minimal viable product” and hoped for feedback that would lead to a better app.
Caravan soon heard from antitrafficking organizations, which were interested in the same kind of service. Caravan eventually teamed up with the Polaris Project and the State of New Jersey, which were working on a similar app, to jointly create an app for the final round of the antitrafficking contest. Humanity United, the foundation sponsoring the contest, plans to award $1.8-million to as many as three winners later this month.
Marnie Webb, CEO of Caravan, which is building an array of apps designed to curb social problems, says lean-start-up principles help Caravan work faster and meet real needs.
“The central idea is that any product that we develop will get better if it lives as much of its life as possible outside of our office,” Ms. Webb says. “If we had kept SafeNight inside and polished it and polished it, it would have been super hard to bring on a partner because we would have invested too much.”….
Nonprofits developing new tech tools are among the biggest users of lean-start-up ideas.
Upwell, an ocean-conservation organization founded in 2011, scans the web for lively ocean-related discussions and then pushes to turn them into full-fledged movements through social-media campaigns.
Lean principles urge groups to steer clear of “vanity metrics,” such as site visits, that may sound impressive but don’t reveal much. Upwell tracks only one number—“social mentions”—the much smaller group of people who actually say something about an issue online.
After identifying a hot topic, Upwell tries to assemble a social-media strategy within 24 hours—what it calls a “minimum viable campaign.”
“We do the least amount of work to get something out the door that will get results and information,” says Rachel Dearborn, Upwell’s campaign director.
Campaigns that don’t catch on are quickly scrapped. But campaigns that do catch on get more time, energy, and money from Upwell.
After Hurricane Sandy, in 2012, a prominent writer on ocean issues and others began pushing the idea that revitalizing the oyster beds near New York City could help protect the shore from future storm surges. Upwell’s “I (Oyster) New York” campaign featured a catchy logo and led to an even bigger spike in attention.

‘Build-Measure-Learn’

Some organizations that could hardly be called start-ups are also using lean principles. GuideStar, the 20-year-old aggregator of financial information about charities, is using the lean approach to develop tools more quickly that meet the needs of its users.
The lean process promotes short “build-measure-learn” cycles, in which a group frequently updates a product or service based on what it hears from its customers.
GuideStar and the Nonprofit Finance Fund have developed a tool called Financial Scan that allows charities to see how they compare with similar groups on various financial measures, such as their mix of earned revenue and grant funds.
When it analyzed who was using the tool, GuideStar found heavy interest from both foundations and accounting firms, says Evan Paul, GuideStar’s senior director of products and marketing.
In the future, he says, GuideStar may create three versions of Financial Scan to meet the distinct interests of charities, foundations, and accountants.
“We want to get more specific about how people are using our data to make decisions so that we can help make those decisions better and faster,” Mr. Paul says….

Lean Start-Up: a Glossary of Terms for a Hot New Management Approach

Build-Measure-Learn

Instead of spending considerable time developing a product or service for a big rollout, organizations should consider using a continuous feedback loop: “build” a program or service, even if it is not fully fleshed out; “measure” how clients are affected; and “learn” by improving the program or going in a new direction. Repeat the cycle.

Minimum Viable Product

An early version of a product or service that may be lacking some features. This approach allows an organization to obtain feedback from clients and quickly determine the usefulness of a product or service and how to improve it.

Get Out of the Building

To determine whether a product or service is needed, talk to clients and share your ideas with them before investing heavily.

A/B Testing

Create two versions of a product or service, show them to different groups, and see which performs best.

Failing Fast

By quickly realizing that a product or service isn’t viable, organizations save time and money and gain valuable information for their next effort.

Pivot

Making a significant change in strategy when the early testing of a minimum viable product shows that the product or service isn’t working or isn’t needed.

Vanity Metrics

Measures that seem to provide a favorable picture but don’t accurately capture the impact of a product. An example might be a tally of website page views. A more meaningful measure—or an “actionable metric,” in the lean lexicon—might be the number of active users of an online service.
Sources: The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries; The Ultimate Dictionary of Lean for Social Good, a publication by Lean Impact”

Statistics and Open Data: Harvesting unused knowledge, empowering citizens and improving public services

Curated on March 21, 2014January 25, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

House of Commons Public Administration Committee (Tenth Report):
“1. Open data is playing an increasingly important role in Government and society. It is data that is accessible to all, free of restrictions on use or redistribution and also digital and machine-readable so that it can be combined with other data, and thereby made more useful. This report looks at how the vast amounts of data generated by central and local Government can be used in open ways to improve accountability, make Government work better and strengthen the economy.

2. In this inquiry, we examined progress against a series of major government policy announcements on open data in recent years, and considered the prospects for further development. We heard of government open data initiatives going back some years, including the decision in 2009 to release some Ordnance Survey (OS) data as open data, and the Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) which makes OS data available for free to the public sector. The 2012 Open Data White Paper ‘Unleashing the Potential’ says that transparency through open data is “at the heart” of the Government’s agenda and that opening up would “foster innovation and reform public services”. In 2013 the report of the independently-chaired review by Stephan Shakespeare, Chief Executive of the market research and polling company YouGov, of the use, re-use, funding and regulation of Public Sector Information urged Government to move fast to make use of data. He criticised traditional public service attitudes to data before setting out his vision:

3. This was followed by publication in October 2013 of a National Action Plan which sets out the Government’s view of the economic potential of open data as well as its aspirations for greater transparency.

4. This inquiry is part of our wider programme of work on statistics and their use in Government. A full description of the studies is set out under the heading “Statistics” in the inquiries section of our website, which can be found at www.parliament.uk/pasc. For this inquiry we received 30 pieces of written evidence and took oral evidence from 12 witnesses. We are grateful to all those who have provided evidence and to our Specialist Adviser on statistics, Simon Briscoe, for his assistance with this inquiry.”

Table of Contents:

Summary
1 Introduction
2 Improving accountability through open data
3 Open Data and Economic Growth
4 Improving Government through open data
5 Moving faster to make a reality of open data
6 A strategic approach to open data?
Conclusion
Conclusions and recommendations

Building a More Open Government

Curated on March 20, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Corinna Zarek at the White House: “It’s Sunshine Week again—a chance to celebrate transparency and participation in government and freedom of information. Every year in mid-March, we take stock of our progress and where we are headed to make our government more open for the benefit of citizens.
In December, 2013, the Administration announced 23 ambitious commitments to further open up government over the next two years in U.S. Government’s second Open Government National Action Plan. Those commitments are now all underway or in development, including:
·         Launching an improved Data.gov: The updated Data.gov debuted in January, 2014, and continues to grow with thousands of updated or new government data sets being proactively made available to the public.
·         Increasing public collaboration: Through crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other methods, Federal agencies continue to expand the ways they collaborate with the public. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for instance, recently launched its third Asteroid Grand Challenge, a broad call to action, seeking the best and brightest ideas from non-traditional partners to enhance and accelerate the work NASA is already doing for planetary defense.
·         Improving We the People: The online petition platform We the People gives the public a direct way to participate in their government and is currently incorporating improvements to make it easier for the public to submit petitions and signatures.”

New Field Guide Explores Open Data Innovations in Disaster Risk and Resilience

Curated on March 20, 2014October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Worldbank: “From Indonesia to Bangladesh to Nepal, community members armed with smartphones and GPS systems are contributing to some of the most extensive and versatile maps ever created, helping inform policy and better prepare their communities for disaster risk.
In Jakarta, more than 500 community members have been trained to collect data on thousands of hospitals, schools, private buildings, and critical infrastructure. In Sri Lanka, government and academic volunteers mapped over 30,000 buildings and 450 km of roadways using a collaborative online resource called OpenStreetMaps.
These are just a few of the projects that have been catalyzed by the Open Data for Resilience Initiative (OpenDRI), developed by the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). Launched in 2011, OpenDRI is active in more than 20 countries today, mapping tens of thousands of buildings and urban infrastructure, providing more than 1,000 geospatial datasets to the public, and developing innovative application tools.
To expand this work, the World Bank Group has launched the OpenDRI Field Guide as a showcase of successful projects and a practical guide for governments and other organizations to shape their own open data programs….
The field guide walks readers through the steps to build open data programs based on the OpenDRI methodology. One of the first steps is data collation. Relevant datasets are often locked because of proprietary arrangements or fragmented in government bureaucracies. The field guide explores tools and methods to enable the participatory mapping projects that can fill in gaps and keep existing data relevant as cities rapidly expand.

GeoNode: Mapping Disaster Damage for Faster Recovery
One example is GeoNode, a locally controlled and open source cataloguing tool that helps manage and visualize geospatial data. The tool, already in use in two dozen countries, can be modified and easily be integrated into existing platforms, giving communities greater control over mapping information.
GeoNode was used extensively after Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) swept the Philippines with 300 km/hour winds and a storm surge of over six meters last fall. The storm displaced nearly 11 million people and killed more than 6,000.
An event-specific GeoNode project was created immediately and ultimately collected more than 72 layers of geospatial data, from damage assessments to situation reports. The data and quick analysis capability contributed to recovery efforts and is still operating in response mode at Yolandadata.org.
InaSAFE: Targeting Risk Reduction
A sister project, InaSAFE, is an open, easy-to-use tool for creating impact assessments for targeted risk reduction. The assessments are based on how an impact layer – such as a tsunami, flood, or earthquake – affects exposure data, such as population or buildings.
With InaSAFE, users can generate maps and statistical information that can be easily disseminated and even fed back into projects like GeoNode for simple, open source sharing.
The initiative, developed in collaboration with AusAID and the Government of Indonesia, was put to the test in the 2012 flood season in Jakarta, and its successes provoked a rapid national rollout and widespread interest from the international community.
Open Cities: Improving Urban Planning & Resilience
The Open Cities project, another program operating under the OpenDRI platform, aims to catalyze the creation, management and use of open data to produce innovative solutions for urban planning and resilience challenges across South Asia.
In 2013, Kathmandu was chosen as a pilot city, in part because the population faces the highest mortality threat from earthquakes in the world. Under the project, teams from the World Bank assembled partners and community mobilizers to help execute the largest regional community mapping project to date. The project surveyed more than 2,200 schools and 350 health facilities, along with road networks, points of interest, and digitized building footprints – representing nearly 340,000 individual data nodes.”

After the Protests

Curated on March 20, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeynep Tufekc in the New York Times on why social media is fueling a boom-and-bust cycle of political: “LAST Wednesday, more than 100,000 people showed up in Istanbul for a funeral that turned into a mass demonstration. No formal organization made the call. The news had come from Twitter: Berkin Elvan, 15, had died. He had been hit in the head by a tear-gas canister on his way to buy bread during the Gezi protests last June. During the 269 days he spent in a coma, Berkin’s face had become a symbol of civic resistance shared on social media from Facebook to Instagram, and the response, when his family tweeted “we lost our son” and then a funeral date, was spontaneous.

Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime. And whether these take place in Turkey, Egypt or Ukraine, pundits often speculate that the days of a ruling party or government, or at least its unpopular policies, must be numbered. Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.

This muted effect is not because social media isn’t good at what it does, but, in a way, because it’s very good at what it does. Digital tools make it much easier to build up movements quickly, and they greatly lower coordination costs. This seems like a good thing at first, but it often results in an unanticipated weakness: Before the Internet, the tedious work of organizing that was required to circumvent censorship or to organize a protest also helped build infrastructure for decision making and strategies for sustaining momentum. Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment….

But after all that, in the approaching local elections, the ruling party is expected to retain its dominance.

Compare this with what it took to produce and distribute pamphlets announcing the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Alabama State College, and a few students sneaked into the duplicating room and worked all night to secretly mimeograph 52,000 leaflets to be distributed by hand with the help of 68 African-American political, religious, educational and labor organizations throughout the city. Even mundane tasks like coordinating car pools (in an era before there were spreadsheets) required endless hours of collaborative work.

By the time the United States government was faced with the March on Washington in 1963, the protest amounted to not just 300,000 demonstrators but the committed partnerships and logistics required to get them all there — and to sustain a movement for years against brutally enforced Jim Crow laws. That movement had the capacity to leverage boycotts, strikes and demonstrations to push its cause forward. Recent marches on Washington of similar sizes, including the 50th anniversary march last year, also signaled discontent and a desire for change, but just didn’t pose the same threat to the powers that be.

Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change. That’s one reason the same-sex marriage movement, which uses online and offline visibility as a key strategy, has been so successful, and it’s also why authoritarian governments try to ban social media.

During the Gezi protests, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called Twitter and other social media a “menace to society.” More recently, Turkey’s Parliament passed a law greatly increasing the government’s ability to censor online content and expand surveillance, and Mr. Erdogan said he would consider blocking access to Facebook and YouTube. It’s also telling that one of the first moves by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia before annexing Crimea was to shut down the websites of dissidents in Russia.
Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.”

How Open Data Policies Unlock Innovation

Curated on March 18, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Cashman at Socrata: “Several trends made the Web 2.0 world we now live in possible. Arguably, the most important of these has been the evolution of online services as extensible technology platforms that enable users, application developers, and other collaborators to create value that extends far beyond the original offering itself.

The Era of ‘Government-as-a-Platform’

The same principles that have shaped the consumer web are now permeating government. Forward-thinking public sector organizations are catching on to the idea that, to stay relevant and vital, governments must go beyond offering a few basic services online. Some have even come to the realization that they are custodians of an enormously valuable resource: the data they collect through their day-to-day operations. By opening up this data for public consumption online, innovative governments are facilitating the same kind of digital networks that consumer web services have fostered for years. The era of government as a platform is here, and open data is the catalyst.

The Role of Open Data Policy in Unlocking Innovation in Government

The open data movement continues to transition from an emphasis on transparency to measuring the civic and economic impact of open data programs. As part of this transition, governments are realizing the importance of creating a formal policy to define strategic goals, describe the desired benefits, and provide the scope for data publishing efforts over time. When well executed, open data policies yield a clear set of benefits. These range from spurring slow-moving bureaucracies into action to procuring the necessary funding to sustain open data initiatives beyond a single elected official’s term.

Four Types of Open Data Policies

There are four main types of policy levers currently in use regarding open data: executive orders, non-binding resolutions, new laws, new regulations, and codified laws. Each of these tools has specific advantages and potential limitations.

Executive Orders

The prime example of an open data executive order in action is President Barack Obama’s Open Data Initiative. While this executive order was short – only four paragraphs on two pages – the real policy magic was a mandate-by-reference that required all U.S. federal agencies to comply with a detailed set of time-bound actions. All of these requirements are publicly viewable on a GitHub repository – a free hosting service for open source software development projects – which is revolutionary in and of itself. Detailed discussions on government transparency took place not in closed-door boardrooms, but online for everyone to see, edit, and improve.

Non-Binding Resolutions

A classic example of a non-binding resolution can be found by doing an online search for the resolution of Palo Alto, California. Short and sweet, this town squire-like exercise delivers additional attention to the movement inside and outside of government. The lightweight policy tool also has the benefit of lasting a bit longer than any particular government official. Although, in recognition of the numerous resolutions that have ever come out of any small town, resolutions are only as timeless as people’s memory.

Internal Regulations

The New York State Handbook on Open Data is a great example of internal regulations put to good use. Originating from the Office of Information Technology Resources, the handbook is a comprehensive, clear, and authoritative guide on how open data is actually supposed to work. Also available on GitHub, the handbook resembles the federal open data project in many ways.

Codified Laws

The archetypal example of open data law comes from San Francisco.
Interestingly, what started as an “Executive Directive” from Mayor Gavin Newsom later turned into legislation and brought with it the power of stronger department mandates and a significant budget. Once enacted, laws are generally hard to revise. However, in the case of San Francisco, the city council has already revised the law two times in four years.
At the federal government level, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or DATA Act, was introduced in both the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 2061) and the U.S. Senate (S. 994) in 2013. The act mandates the standardization and publication of a wide of variety of the federal government’s financial reports as open data. Although the Housed voted to pass the Data Act, it still awaits a vote in the Senate.

The Path to Government-as-a-Platform

Open data policies are an effective way to motivate action and provide clear guidance for open data programs. But they are not a precondition for public-sector organizations to embrace the government-as-a-platform model. In fact, the first step does not involve technology at all. Instead, it involves government leaders realizing that public data belongs to the people. And, it requires the vision to appreciate this data as a shared resource that only increases in value the more widely it is distributed and re-used for analytics, web and mobile apps, and more.
The consumer web has shown the value of open data networks in spades (think Facebook). Now, it’s government’s turn to create the next web.”

Personal Data for the Public Good

Curated on March 17, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Final report on “New Opportunities to Enrich Understanding of Individual and Population Health” of the health data exploration project: “Individuals are tracking a variety of health-related data via a growing number of wearable devices and smartphone apps. More and more data relevant to health are also being captured passively as people communicate with one another on social networks, shop, work, or do any number of activities that leave “digital footprints.”
Almost all of these forms of “personal health data” (PHD) are outside of the mainstream of traditional health care, public health or health research. Medical, behavioral, social and public health research still largely rely on traditional sources of health data such as those collected in clinical trials, sifting through electronic medical records, or conducting periodic surveys.
Self-tracking data can provide better measures of everyday behavior and lifestyle and can fill in gaps in more traditional clinical data collection, giving us a more complete picture of health. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Health Data Exploration (HDE) project conducted a study to better understand the barriers to using personal health data in research from the individuals who track the data about their own personal health, the companies that market self-track- ing devices, apps or services and aggregate and manage that data, and the researchers who might use the data as part of their research.
Perspectives
Through a series of interviews and surveys, we discovered strong interest in contributing and using PHD for research. It should be noted that, because our goal was to access individuals and researchers who are already generating or using digital self-tracking data, there was some bias in our survey findings—participants tended to have more educa- tion and higher household incomes than the general population. Our survey also drew slightly more white and Asian participants and more female participants than in the general population.
Individuals were very willing to share their self-tracking data for research, in particular if they knew the data would advance knowledge in the fields related to PHD such as public health, health care, computer science and social and behavioral science. Most expressed an explicit desire to have their information shared anonymously and we discovered a wide range of thoughts and concerns regarding thoughts over privacy.
Equally, researchers were generally enthusiastic about the potential for using self-tracking data in their research. Researchers see value in these kinds of data and think these data can answer important research questions. Many consider it to be of equal quality and importance to data from existing high quality clinical or public health data sources.
Companies operating in this space noted that advancing research was a worthy goal but not their primary business concern. Many companies expressed interest in research conducted outside of their company that would validate the utility of their device or application but noted the critical importance of maintaining their customer relationships. A number were open to data sharing with academics but noted the slow pace and administrative burden of working with universities as a challenge.
In addition to this considerable enthusiasm, it seems a new PHD research ecosystem may well be emerging. Forty-six percent of the researchers who participated in the study have already used self-tracking data in their research, and 23 percent of the researchers have already collaborated with application, device, or social media companies.
The Personal Health Data Research Ecosystem
A great deal of experimentation with PHD is taking place. Some individuals are experimenting with personal data stores or sharing their data directly with researchers in a small set of clinical experiments. Some researchers have secured one-off access to unique data sets for analysis. A small number of companies, primarily those with more of a health research focus, are working with others to develop data commons to regularize data sharing with the public and researchers.
SmallStepsLab serves as an intermediary between Fitbit, a data rich company, and academic research- ers via a “preferred status” API held by the company. Researchers pay SmallStepsLab for this access as well as other enhancements that they might want.
These promising early examples foreshadow a much larger set of activities with the potential to transform how research is conducted in medicine, public health and the social and behavioral sciences.
Opportunities and Obstacles
There is still work to be done to enhance the potential to generate knowledge out of personal health data:

Privacy and Data Ownership: Among individuals surveyed, the dominant condition (57%) for making their PHD available for research was an assurance of privacy for their data, and over 90% of respondents said that it was important that the data be anonymous. Further, while some didn’t care who owned the data they generate, a clear majority wanted to own or at least share owner- ship of the data with the company that collected it.
InformedConsent:Researchersareconcerned about the privacy of PHD as well as respecting the rights of those who provide it. For most of our researchers, this came down to a straightforward question of whether there is informed consent. Our research found that current methods of informed consent are challenged by the ways PHD are being used and reused in research. A variety of new approaches to informed consent are being evaluated and this area is ripe for guidance to assure optimal outcomes for all stakeholders.
Data Sharing and Access: Among individuals, there is growing interest in, as well as willingness and opportunity to, share personal health data with others. People now share these data with others with similar medical conditions in online groups like PatientsLikeMe or Crohnology, with the intention to learn as much as possible about mutual health concerns. Looking across our data, we find that individuals’ willingness to share is dependent on what data is shared, how the data will be used, who will have access to the data and when, what regulations and legal protections are in place, and the level of compensation or benefit (both personal and public).
Data Quality: Researchers highlighted concerns about the validity of PHD and lack of standard- ization of devices. While some of this may be addressed as the consumer health device, apps and services market matures, reaching the optimal outcome for researchers might benefit from strategic engagement of important stakeholder groups.

We are reaching a tipping point. More and more people are tracking their health, and there is a growing number of tracking apps and devices on the market with many more in development. There is overwhelming enthusiasm from individuals and researchers to use this data to better understand health. To maximize personal data for the public good, we must develop creative solutions that allow individual rights to be respected while providing access to high-quality and relevant PHD for research, that balance open science with intellectual property, and that enable productive and mutually beneficial collaborations between the private sector and the academic research community.”

Expanding Opportunity through Open Educational Resources

Curated on March 17, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hal Plotkin and Colleen Chien at the White House: “Using advanced technology to dramatically expand the quality and reach of education has long been a key priority for the Obama Administration.
In December 2013, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) issued a report exploring the potential of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to expand access to higher education opportunities. Last month, the President announced a $2B down payment, and another $750M in private-sector commitments to deliver on the President’s ConnectEd initiative, which will connect 99% of American K-12 students to broadband by 2017 at no cost to American taxpayers.
This week, we are happy to be joining with educators, students, and technologists worldwide to recognize and celebrate Open Education Week.
Open Educational Resources (“OER”) are educational resources that are released with copyright licenses allowing for their free use, continuous improvement, and modification by others. The world is moving fast, and OER enables educators and students to access, customize, and remix high-quality course materials reflecting the latest understanding of the world and materials that incorporate state of the art teaching methods – adding their own insights along the way. OER is not a silver bullet solution to the many challenges that teachers, students and schools face. But it is a tool increasingly being used, for example by players like edX and the Kahn Academy, to improve learning outcomes and create scalable platforms for sharing educational resources that reach millions of students worldwide.
Launched at MIT in 2001, OER became a global movement in 2007 when thousands of educators around the globe endorsed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Educational Resources. Another major milestone came in 2011, when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and then-Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis unveiled the four-year, $2B Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program (TAACCCT). It was the first Federal program to leverage OER to support the development of a new generation of affordable, post-secondary educational programs that can be completed in two years or less to prepare students for careers in emerging and expanding industries….
Building on this record of success, OSTP and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) are exploring an effort to inspire and empower university students through multidisciplinary OER focused on one of the USAID Grand Challenges, such as securing clean water, saving lives at birth, or improving green agriculture. This effort promises to be a stepping stone towards leveraging OER to help solve other grand challenges such as the NAE Grand Challenges in Engineering or Grand Challenges in Global Health.
This is great progress, but there is more work to do. We look forward to keeping the community updated right here. To see the winning videos from the U.S. Department of Education’s “Why Open Education Matters” Video Contest, click here.”

Lean Urbanism

Curated on March 16, 2014November 28, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Radar: “Through an interesting confluence, I recently came across three different instances of the same question: what is the “minimum viable product” for urban renewal? Last Monday, I visited the O’Reilly Media office in the old Pfizer building in Brooklyn, and was struck by how unfinished space was side by side with finished, how the remnants of the old laboratory had not been removed but rather just incorporated into the existing space. It is a kind of urban office-steading, pioneering a gritty frontier, as opposed to a more standard style of development in which the building is stripped, upgraded, and then opened to tenants, perhaps with a bit more character than an all-new building but with substantially the same sanitized promise. I posted photos and some reflections on Google+.
The next day, I sat in on a webinar with Carol Coletta of the Knight Foundation and Andres Duany of the Project for Lean Urbanism. Duany’s idea is for “pink zones,” where, for purposes of exploratory redevelopment, red tape might be thinned out. The goal is to find what regulations really matter — and which don’t — and to start fresh to see if we can achieve urban renewal at lower cost.
When I told Jen Pahlka about the webinar, she pointed me to a TEDx talk by Jason Roberts on ”tactical urbanism.” While Duany is engaged in trying to work with cities to create lighter weight regulatory regimes for redevelopment, Jason and his compatriots just do it. They flout regulations and then invite city officials in to see the difference it makes. The whole talk is great, but if it’s too long, watch from about seven minutes in, for an account of how Jason and crew reconstructed a block with popup shops, plants, and outdoor seating, to show what it could become. Particularly striking is the schedule of fees the city of Dallas charges for improvements that, if anything, the city should be paying to people who are willing to improve the neighborhood….
The exploration of what the startup community has come to call “lean” is critical for our rethinking of government as well. It breaks the stalemate between “government is too big and intrusive” and “but look at how many market failures there are — government must intervene,” and instead asks both government and citizens to perform experiments, to learn what works, and to make it easier to do the things that do work for us as a society.”