Open Data Institute and Professor Nigel Shadbolt (@Nigel_Shadbolt) interviewed by by Alex Howard (@digiphile): “…there are some clear learnings. One that I’ve been banging on about recently has been that yes, it really does matter to turn the dial so that governments have a presumption to publish non-personal public data. If you would publish it anyway, under a Freedom of Information request or whatever your local legislative equivalent is, why aren’t you publishing it anyway as open data? That, as a behavioral change. is a big one for many administrations where either the existing workflow or culture is, “Okay, we collect it. We sit on it. We do some analysis on it, and we might give it away piecemeal if people ask for it.” We should construct publication process from the outset to presume to publish openly. That’s still something that we are two or three years away from, working hard with the public sector to work out how to do and how to do properly.
We’ve also learned that in many jurisdictions, the amount of [open data] expertise within administrations and within departments is slight. There just isn’t really the skillset, in many cases. for people to know what it is to publish using technology platforms. So there’s a capability-building piece, too.
One of the most important things is it’s not enough to just put lots and lots of datasets out there. It would be great if the “presumption to publish” meant they were all out there anyway — but when you haven’t got any datasets out there and you’re thinking about where to start, the tough question is to say, “How can I publish data that matters to people?”
The data that matters is revealed in the fact that if we look at the download stats on these various UK, US and other [open data] sites. There’s a very, very distinctive parallel curve. Some datasets are very, very heavily utilized. You suspect they have high utility to many, many people. Many of the others, if they can be found at all, aren’t being used particularly much. That’s not to say that, under that long tail, there isn’t large amounts of use. A particularly arcane open dataset may have exquisite use to a small number of people.
The real truth is that it’s easy to republish your national statistics. It’s much harder to do a serious job on publishing your spending data in detail, publishing police and crime data, publishing educational data, publishing actual overall health performance indicators. These are tough datasets to release. As people are fond of saying, it holds politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s easy to build a site that’s full of stuff — but does the stuff actually matter? And does it have any economic utility?”
there are some clear learnings. One that I’ve been banging on about recently has been that yes, it really does matter to turn the dial so that governments have a presumption to publish non-personal public data. If you would publish it anyway, under a Freedom of Information request or whatever your local legislative equivalent is, why aren’t you publishing it anyway as open data? That, as a behavioral change. is a big one for many administrations where either the existing workflow or culture is, “Okay, we collect it. We sit on it. We do some analysis on it, and we might give it away piecemeal if people ask for it.” We should construct publication process from the outset to presume to publish openly. That’s still something that we are two or three years away from, working hard with the public sector to work out how to do and how to do properly.
We’ve also learned that in many jurisdictions, the amount of [open data] expertise within administrations and within departments is slight. There just isn’t really the skillset, in many cases. for people to know what it is to publish using technology platforms. So there’s a capability-building piece, too.
One of the most important things is it’s not enough to just put lots and lots of datasets out there. It would be great if the “presumption to publish” meant they were all out there anyway — but when you haven’t got any datasets out there and you’re thinking about where to start, the tough question is to say, “How can I publish data that matters to people?”
The data that matters is revealed in the fact that if we look at the download stats on these various UK, US and other [open data] sites. There’s a very, very distinctive parallel curve. Some datasets are very, very heavily utilized. You suspect they have high utility to many, many people. Many of the others, if they can be found at all, aren’t being used particularly much. That’s not to say that, under that long tail, there isn’t large amounts of use. A particularly arcane open dataset may have exquisite use to a small number of people.
The real truth is that it’s easy to republish your national statistics. It’s much harder to do a serious job on publishing your spending data in detail, publishing police and crime data, publishing educational data, publishing actual overall health performance indicators. These are tough datasets to release. As people are fond of saying, it holds politicians’ feet to the fire. It’s easy to build a site that’s full of stuff — but does the stuff actually matter? And does it have any economic utility?
The Next Great Internet Disruption: Authority and Governance
An essay by David Bollier and John Clippinger as part of their ongoing work of ID3, the Institute for Data-Driven Design : “As the Internet and digital technologies have proliferated over the past twenty years, incumbent enterprises nearly always resist open network dynamics with fierce determination, a narrow ingenuity and resistance….But the inevitable rearguard actions to defend old forms are invariably overwhelmed by the new, network-based ones. The old business models, organizational structures, professional sinecures, cultural norms, etc., ultimately yield to open platforms.
When we look back on the past twenty years of Internet history, we can more fully appreciate the prescience of David P. Reed’s seminal 1999 paper on “Group Forming Networks” (GFNs). “Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2). But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. When users have tools for “free and responsible association for common purposes,” he found, the value of the network soars exponentially to 2n – a fantastically large number. This is the Group Forming Network. Reed predicted that “the dominant value in a typical network tends to shift from one category to another as the scale of the network increases.…”
What is really interesting about Reed’s analysis is that today’s world of GFNs, as embodied by Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other Web 2.0 technologies, remains highly rudimentary. It is based on proprietary platforms (as opposed to open source, user-controlled platforms), and therefore provides only limited tools for members of groups to develop trust and confidence in each other. This suggests a huge, unmet opportunity to actualize greater value from open networks. Citing Francis Fukuyama’ book Trust, Reed points out that “there is a strong correlation between the prosperity of national economies and social capital, which [Fukuyama] defines culturally as the ease with which people in a particular culture can form new associations.”
The Value of Open Data – Don’t Measure Growth, Measure Destruction
David Eaves: “…And that is my main point. The real impact of open data will likely not be in the economic wealth it generates, but rather in its destructive power. I think the real impact of open data is going to be in the value it destroys and so in the capital it frees up to do other things. Much like Red Hat is fraction of the size of Microsoft, Open Data is going to enable new players to disrupt established data players.
What do I mean by this?
Take SeeClickFix. Here is a company that, leveraging the Open311 standard, is able to provide many cities with a 311 solution that works pretty much out of the box. 20 years ago, this was a $10 million+ problem for a major city to solve, and wasn’t even something a small city could consider adopting – it was just prohibitively expensive. Today, SeeClickFix takes what was a 7 or 8 digit problem, and makes it a 5 or 6 digit problem. Indeed, I suspect SeeClickFix almost works better in a small to mid-sized government that doesn’t have complex work order software and so can just use SeeClickFix as a general solution. For this part of the market, it has crushed the cost out of implementing a solution.
Another example. And one I’m most excited. Look at CKAN and Socrata. Most people believe these are open data portal solutions. That is a mistake. These are data management companies that happen to have simply made “sharing (or “open”) a core design feature. You know who does data management? SAP. What Socrata and CKAN offer is a way to store, access, share and engage with data previously gathered and held by companies like SAP at a fraction of the cost. A SAP implementation is a 7 or 8 (or god forbid, 9) digit problem. And many city IT managers complain that doing anything with data stored in SAP takes time and it takes money. CKAN and Socrata may have only a fraction of the features, but they are dead simple to use, and make it dead simple to extract and share data. More importantly they make these costly 7 and 8 digital problems potentially become cheap 5 or 6 digit problems.
On the analysis side, again, I do hope there will be big wins – but what I really think open data is going to do is lower the costs of creating lots of small wins – crazy numbers of tiny efficiencies….
Don’t look for the big bang, and don’t measure the growth in spending or new jobs. Rather let’s try to measure the destruction and cumulative impact of a thousand tiny wins. Cause that is where I think we’ll see it most.”
Data-Driven Public Transport Planning
David Talbot in MIT Technology Review: “Researchers at IBM, using movement data collected from millions of cell-phone users in Ivory Coast in West Africa, have developed a new model for optimizing an urban transportation system….
While the results were preliminary, they point to the new ways that urban planners can use cell-phone data to design infrastructure, says Francesco Calabrese, a researcher at IBM’s research lab in Dublin, and a coauthor of a paper on the work. “This represents a new front with a potentially large impact on improving urban transportation systems,” he says. “People with cell phones can serve as sensors and be the building blocks of development efforts.”
The IBM work was done as part of a research challenge dubbed Data for Development, in which the telecom giant Orange released 2.5 billion call records from five million cell-phone users in Ivory Coast. The records were gathered between December 2011 and April 2012. The data release is the largest of its kind ever done. The records were cleaned to prevent anyone identifying the users, but they still include useful information about these users’ movements. The IBM paper is one of scores being aired later this week at a conference at MIT.”
Primer on Crowdfunding
Primer by ValuationApp: “Crowdfunding can be defined as raising funds from the general public usually through internet platforms in order to support a project started by an individual or an organization….Crowdfunding is essentially a subset of Crowdsourcing; a process where organizations reach out to their customers and the general public, and outsource some of their functions to the public in order to get feedback, ideas and solutions. In crowdsourcing, the participants either work for free or for a very small amount…the first historically documented crowdfunding event was the completion of the Statue of Liberty in 1885, where the city reached out to the crowd through newspapers and part of the money required to build the statue was contributed by the citizens…
Several benefits of crowdfunding have been discussed in the previous sections, so in this section let’s cut right to the chase and present points in the most compact form. Through crowdfunding, individuals and organizations can:
- Reach out to a wide range of people all over the world.
- Raise large amounts of funds while simultaneously creating their own brand identity.
- Gain valuable feedback on the product/service/project they are raising the funds for.
- Turn funders into future customers.
- Stop depending on large investment from investors and thus enjoy minimum interference from the investors.
- Increase public awareness about their products and gain free word of mouth marketing on social media.”
Visual argumentation
Volta: “Visualising arguments helps people assemble their throughts and get to grip with complex problems according to The Argumentation Factory, based in Amsterdam. Their Argument Maps, constructed for government agencies, NGOs and commercial organizations, are designed to enable people to make better decisions and share and communicate information.
Dutch research organisation TNO, in association with The Argumentation Factory, have launched the European Shale Gas Argument Map detailing the pros and cons of the production of shale gas for EU member states with shale gas resources. Their map is designed to provide the foundation for an open discussion and help the user make a balaced assessment.”
Better Cities Competition
Announcement: Do you want to make our cities of the future better? Want to help improve quality of life in your home, your work and your public life? Have an idea how? Capture it in a short video and be in with a chance to win one of our amazing prizes!
As a part of Open Innovation 2.0: Sustainable Economy & Society collaboration Intel Labs Europe, Dublin City Council, Trinity College Dublin and European Commission Open Innovation and Strategy Policy Group are delighted to announce that the 2013 Better Cities competition is now open.
The theme of the competition is how to make our cities more socially and economically sustainable, through use of open data and information technology. Particular focus should be given to how citizens can engage and contribute to the innovation process.
Sanitation Hackathon
New York Times: “Because of the rapid spread of cellular phones, mobile technology has previously been used to address a variety of problems in the developing world, including access to financial services, health care information and education. But toilets were another matter….Building on a process that had previously been employed to address problems in supplying clean water to people in poor areas, the World Bank turned its attention to sanitation. Over six months last year, it solicited ideas from experts in the field, as well as software developers. The process culminated in early December with the actual hackathon — two days in which more than 1,000 developers gathered in 40 cities worldwide to work on their projects….After the event in Washington, the winners of the hackathon are set to travel to Silicon Valley for meetings with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who are interested in the issue. The World Bank does not plan to invest in the projects, but hopes that others might.”
See also http://www.sanitationhackathon.org/
Reinvent Regulation
Reinvent Roundtable that will take place on April 23, 2013 11:00 am PT : “Tim O’Reilly has some big ideas about how to dramatically modernize the entire notion of government regulation, particularly “algorithmic regulation” that harnesses computer power, much like top tech companies in Silicon Valley, to oversee the financial industry, which is using those same tools. This roundtable features some top talent from the Valley to apply their brains to figuring out how we could reinvent much more iterative regulation that constantly gets refined through analyzing data and processing feedback loops – much like Google refines its search techniques. In fact, we’ll have a top person from Google Search as well as someone from the US Treasury Department to work on these ideas. Watch Now →”
http://reinventors.net/roundtables/reinvent-regulation/
Work-force Science and Big Data
Steve Lohr from the New York Times: “Work-force science, in short, is what happens when Big Data meets H.R….Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.
Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before. In the past, studies of worker behavior were typically based on observing a few hundred people at most. Today, studies can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, an exponential leap ahead.
“The heart of science is measurement,” says Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. “We’re seeing a revolution in measurement, and it will revolutionize organizational economics and personnel economics.”
The data-gathering technology, to be sure, raises questions about the limits of worker surveillance. “The larger problem here is that all these workplace metrics are being collected when you as a worker are essentially behind a one-way mirror,” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group. “You don’t know what data is being collected and how it is used.”