Climaps

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Climaps: “This website presents the results of the EU research project EMAPS, as well as its process: an experiment to use computation and visualization to harness the increasing availability of digital data and mobilize it for public debate. To do so, EMAPS gathered a team of social and data scientists, climate experts and information designers. It also reached out beyond the walls of Academia and engaged with the actors of the climate debate.

The climate is changing. Efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions have so far been ineffective or, at least, insufficient. As the impacts of global warming are emerging, our societies experience an unprecedented pressure. How to live with climate change without giving up fighting it? How to share the burden of adaptation among countries, regions and communities? How to be fair to all human and non-human beings affected by such a planetary transition? Since our collective life depends on these questions, they deserve discussion, debate and even controversy. To provide some help to navigate in the uncharted territories that lead to our future, here is an electronic atlas. It proposes a series of maps and stories related to climate adaptation issues. They are not exhaustive or error-proof. They are nothing but sketches of the new world in which we will have to live. Such a world remains undetermined and its atlas can be but tentative…(More)”

Will Organization Design Be Affected By Big Data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Giles Slinger and Rupert Morrison in the Journal of Organization Design: “Computing power and analytical methods allow us to create, collate, and analyze more data than ever before. When datasets are unusually large in volume, velocity, and variety, they are referred to as “big data.” Some observers have suggested that in order to cope with big data (a) organizational structures will need to change and (b) the processes used to design organizations will be different. In this article, we differentiate big data from relatively slow-moving, linked people data. We argue that big data will change organizational structures as organizations pursue the opportunities presented by big data. The processes by which organizations are designed, however, will be relatively unaffected by big data. Instead, organization design processes will be more affected by the complex links found in people data.”

Gamifying Cancer Research Crowdsources the Race for the Cure

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Brick at PSFK: “Computer time and human hours are among of the biggest obstacles in the face of progress in the fight against cancer. Researchers have terabytes of data, but only so many processors and people with which to analyze it. Much like the SETI program (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), it’s likely that big answers are already in the information we’ve collected. They’re just waiting for somebody to find them.
Reverse the Odds, a free mobile game from Cancer Research UK, accesses the combined resources of geeks and gamers worldwide. It’s a simple app game, the kind you play in line at the bank or while waiting at the dentist’s office, in which you complete mini puzzles and buy upgrades to save an imaginary world.
Each puzzle of the game is a repurposing of cancer data. Players find patterns in the data — the exact kind of analysis grad students and volunteers in a lab look for — and the results get compiled by Cancer Research UK for use in finding a cure. Errors are expected and accounted for because the thousands of players expected will round out the occasional mistake….(More)”

Just say no to digital hoarding

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “We have become a nation of digital hoarders. We save everything, even stuff that we know, deep down, we’ll never need or be able to find. We save every e-mail, every photo, every file, every text message and every video clip. If we don’t have enough space on our mobile devices, we move it to a different storage device, maybe even a hard drive or a flash drive. Or, better yet, we just move it to “the cloud.”….
If this were simply a result of the exponential growth of information — the “information overload” — that would be one thing. That’s what technology is supposed to do for us – provide new ways of creating, storing and manipulating information. Innovation, from this perspective, can be viewed as technology’s frantic quest to keep up with society’s information needs.
But digital hoarding is about something much different – it’s about hoarding data for the sake of data. When Apple creates a new “Burst Mode” on the iPhone 5s, enabling you to rapidly save a series of up to 10 photos in succession – and you save all of them – is that not an example of hoarding? When you save every e-book, every movie and every TV season that you’ve “binge-watched” on your tablet or other digital device — isn’t that another symptom of being a digital hoarder? In the analog era, you would have donated used books to charity, hosted a garage sale to get rid of old albums you never listen to, or simply dumped these items in the trash.
You may not think you are a digital hoarder. You may think that the desire to save each and every photo, e-mail or file is something relatively harmless. Storage is cheap and abundant, right? You may watch a reality TV show such as “Hoarders” and think to yourself, “That’s not me.” But maybe it is you. (Especially if you still have those old episodes of “Hoarders” on your digital device.)
Unlike hoarding in the real world — where massive stacks of papers, books, clothing and assorted junk might physically obstruct your ability to move and signal to others that you need help – there are no obvious outward signs of being a digital hoarder. And, in fact, owning the newest, super-slim 128GB tablet capable of hoarding more information than anyone else strikes many as being progressive. However, if you are constantly increasing the size of your data plan or buying new digital devices with ever more storage capacity, you just might be a digital hoarder…
In short, innovation should be about helping us transform data into information. “Search” was perhaps the first major innovation that helped us transform data into information. The “cloud” is currently the innovation that has the potential to organize our data better and more efficiently, keeping it from clogging up our digital devices. The next big innovation may be “big data,” which claims that it can make sense of all the new data we’re creating. This may be either brilliant — helping us find the proverbial needle in the digital haystack — or disastrous — encouraging us to build bigger and bigger haystacks in the hope that there’s a needle in there somewhere… (More).”

The Free 'Big Data' Sources Everyone Should Know

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernard Marr at Linkedin Pulse: “…The moves by companies and governments to put large amounts of information into the public domain have made large volumes of data accessible to everyone….here’s my rundown of some of the best free big data sources available today.

Data.gov

The US Government pledged last year to make all government data available freely online. This site is the first stage and acts as a portal to all sorts of amazing information on everything from climate to crime. To check it out, click here.

US Census Bureau

A wealth of information on the lives of US citizens covering population data, geographic data and education. To check it out, click here. To check it out, click here.

European Union Open Data Portal

As the above, but based on data from European Union institutions. To check it out, click here.

Data.gov.uk

Data from the UK Government, including the British National Bibliography – metadata on all UK books and publications since 1950. To check it out, click here.

The CIA World Factbook

Information on history, population, economy, government, infrastructure and military of 267 countries. To check it out, click here.

Healthdata.gov

125 years of US healthcare data including claim-level Medicare data, epidemiology and population statistics. To check it out, click here.

NHS Health and Social Care Information Centre

Health data sets from the UK National Health Service. To check it out, click here.

Amazon Web Services public datasets

Huge resource of public data, including the 1000 Genome Project, an attempt to build the most comprehensive database of human genetic information and NASA’s database of satellite imagery of Earth. To check it out, click here.

Facebook Graph

Although much of the information on users’ Facebook profile is private, a lot isn’t – Facebook provide the Graph API as a way of querying the huge amount of information that its users are happy to share with the world (or can’t hide because they haven’t worked out how the privacy settings work). To check it out, click here.

Gapminder

Compilation of data from sources including the World Health Organization and World Bank covering economic, medical and social statistics from around the world. To check it out, click here.

Google Trends

Statistics on search volume (as a proportion of total search) for any given term, since 2004. To check it out, click here.

Google Finance

40 years’ worth of stock market data, updated in real time. To check it out, click here.

Google Books Ngrams

Search and analyze the full text of any of the millions of books digitised as part of the Google Books project. To check it out, click here.

National Climatic Data Center

Huge collection of environmental, meteorological and climate data sets from the US National Climatic Data Center. The world’s largest archive of weather data. To check it out, click here.

DBPedia

Wikipedia is comprised of millions of pieces of data, structured and unstructured on every subject under the sun. DBPedia is an ambitious project to catalogue and create a public, freely distributable database allowing anyone to analyze this data. To check it out, click here.

Topsy

Free, comprehensive social media data is hard to come by – after all their data is what generates profits for the big players (Facebook, Twitter etc) so they don’t want to give it away. However Topsy provides a searchable database of public tweets going back to 2006 as well as several tools to analyze the conversations. To check it out, click here.

Likebutton

Mines Facebook’s public data – globally and from your own network – to give an overview of what people “Like” at the moment. To check it out, click here.

New York Times

Searchable, indexed archive of news articles going back to 1851. To check it out, click here.

Freebase

A community-compiled database of structured data about people, places and things, with over 45 million entries. To check it out, click here.

Million Song Data Set

Metadata on over a million songs and pieces of music. Part of Amazon Web Services. To check it out, click here.”
See also Bernard Marr‘s blog at Big Data Guru

How to Fingerprint a City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frank Jacobs at BigThink: “Thanks to Big Data, a new “Science of Cities” is emerging. Urban processes that until now could only be perceived subjectively can finally be quantified. Point in case: two French scientists have developed a mathematical formula to ‘fingerprint’ cities.
Take a good, close look at your fingertips. The pattern of grooves and ridges on your skin there [1] is yours alone. Equally unique is the warp and weft of urban road networks. No two cities’ street grids are exactly alike. Some are famously distinct. The forensic urbanist in all of us can probably recognise a blind map of New York, London and a few other global metropolises.
Rémi Louf and Marc Barthelemy examined the street patterns of 131 cities around the world. Not to learn them by heart and impress their fellow scientists at the Institut de Physique Théorique near Paris – although that would be a neat parlor trick. They wanted to see if it would be possible to classify them into distinct types. The title of their paper, A Typology of Street Patterns, is a bit of a giveaway: the answer is Yes.
Before we get to the How, let’s hear them explain the Why:

“[Street and road] networks can be thought as a simplified schematic view of cities, which captures a large part of their structure and organization and contain a large amount of information about underlying and universal mechanisms at play in their formation and evolution. Extracting common patterns between cities is a way towards the identification of these underlying mechanisms. At stake is the question of the processes behind the so-called ‘organic’ patterns – which grow in response to local constraints – and whether they are preferable to the planned patterns which are designed under large scale constraints”.

There have been attempts before to classify urban networks, but the results have always been colored by the subjectivity of what Louf and Barthelemy call the ‘Space Syntax Community’. That’s all changed now: Big Data – in this case, the mass digitization of street maps – makes it possible to extract common patterns from street grids in an objective manner, as dispassionately as the study of tree leaves according to their venation. …
Read their entire paper here.“

The Year of Data-Driven Government Accountability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Runge in Pacific Standard: “Indeed, 2014 could be called the Year of Government Accountability, as voters on just about every continent have demanded that public officials govern with relentless efficiency, fiscal responsibility, and transparency….
The bottom line, in my view, is that facts must be the fundamental basis for critical and strategic decision-making at every level of government around the world today.
This belief—the foundation of massive technology and social movements, such as open data, big data, and data-driven government—is currently shared by a number of global government leaders. Just recently, for example, President Obama declared that “We must respond based on facts, not fear” when confronting the global Ebola crisis.
To be sure, presenting facts to decision-makers where and when they are needed is one of the most urgent technology priorities of our time. The good news is that we’re seeing progress on this front each and every day as civic organizations around the world rush to open their vast troves of data on the Internet and usher in a new era in data-driven government that will produce facts at the speed of light, and deliver them in context to political leaders, everyday citizens, professional academicians, scientists, journalists, and software developers wherever they are connected to the Web.
Data-driven government, which capitalizes on data, one of the most valuable natural resources of the 21st century, is a breakthrough opportunity of truly significant proportions. And it will be absolutely critical if governments everywhere are to achieve their ultimate mission. Without it, I worry that we just won’t be able to provide citizens with a higher quality of life and with greater opportunities to achieve their full potential.

Big Data: The Key Vocabulary Everyone Should Understand

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bernard Marr at LinkedIn Pulse: “The field of Big Data requires more clarity and I am a big fan of simple explanations. This is why I have attempted to provide simple explanations for some of the most important technologies and terms you will come across if you’re looking at getting into big data.

Here they are:
Algorithm: A mathematical formula or statistical process run by software to perform an analysis of data. It usually consists of multiple calculations steps and can be used to automatically process data or solve problems.
Amazon Web Services: A collection of cloud computing services offered by Amazon to help businesses carry out large scale computing operations (such as big data projects) without having to invest in their own server farms and data storage warehouses. Essentially, Storage space, processing power and software operations are rented rather than having to be bought and installed from scratch.
Analytics: The process of collecting, processing and analyzing data to generate insights that inform fact-based decision-making. In many cases it involves software-based analysis using algorithms. For more, have a look at my post: What the Heck is… Analytics
Big Table: Google’s proprietary data storage system, which it uses to host, among other things its Gmail, Google Earth and Youtube services. It is also made available for public use through the Google App Engine.
Biometrics: Using technology and analytics to identify people by one or more of their physical traits, such as face recognition, iris recognition, fingerprint recognition, etc. For more, see my post: Big Data and Biometrics
Cassandra: A popular open source database management system managed by The Apache Software Foundation that has been designed to handle large volumes of data across distributed servers.
Cloud: Cloud computing, or computing “in the cloud”, simply means software or data running on remote servers, rather than locally. Data stored “in the cloud” is typically accessible over the internet, wherever in the world the owner of that data might be. For more, check out my post: What The Heck is… The Cloud?
Distributed File System: Data storage system designed to store large volumes of data across multiple storage devices (often cloud based commodity servers), to decrease the cost and complexity of storing large amounts of data.
….”
See also: Big Data: Using SMART Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance

Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology

Curated on Posted on by Julia Root

By Julia Root and Stefaan Verhulst

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of civic innovation was originally published in 2014.

The last five years have seen a wave of new organizations, entrepreneurs and investment in cities and the field of civic innovation.  Two subfields, Civic Tech and Government Innovation, are particularly aligned with GovLab’s interest in the ways in which technology is and can be deployed to redesign public institutions and re-imagine governance.

The emerging field of civic technology, or “Civic Tech,” champions new digital platforms, open data and collaboration tools for transforming government service delivery and engagement with citizens. Government Innovation, while not a new field, has seen in the last five years a proliferation of new structures (e.g. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), roles (e.g. Chief Technology/Innovation Officer) and public/private investment (e.g. Innovation Delivery Teams and Code for America Fellows) that are building a world-wide movement for transforming how government thinks about and designs services for its citizens.

There is no set definition for “civic innovation.” However, broadly speaking, it is about improving our cities through the implementation of tools, ideas and engagement methods that strengthen the relationship between government and citizens. The civic innovation field encompasses diverse actors from across the public, private and nonprofit spectrums. These can include government leaders, nonprofit and foundation professionals, urbanists, technologists, researchers, business leaders and community organizers, each of whom may use the term in a different way, but ultimately are seeking to disrupt how cities and public institutions solve problems and invest in solutions.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Readings (in alphabetical order)

Books

Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. 1 edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014. http://bit.ly/1zvKOL0.

  • The Responsive City, a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age, is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level.
  • The “data smart city” is one that is responsive to citizens, engages them in problem solving and finds new innovative solutions for dismantling entrenched bureaucracy.
  • The authors document case studies from New York City, Boston and Chicago to explore the following topics:
    • Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;
    • Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;
    • Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
    • Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.

Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://bit.ly/17Y4G0R.

  • In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
  • He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
  • He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure; instead, it is how citizens are using ever-changing and grassroots technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient” that will make cities ‘smart.’

Reports + Journal Articles

Black, Alissa, and Rachel Burstein. “The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow.” White Paper. New America Foundation – California Civic Innovation Project, June 2013. https://bit.ly/2GohMvw.

  • Through their interviews, the authors determine that civic innovation is not just a “compilation of projects” but that it can inspire institutional structural change.
  • Civic innovation projects that have a “technology focus can sound very different than process-related innovations”; however the outcomes are actually quite similar as they disrupt how citizens and government engage with one another.
  • Technology is viewed by some of the experts as an enabler of civic innovation – not necessarily the driver for innovation itself. What constitutes innovation is how new tools are implemented by government or by civic groups that changes the governing dynamic.

Patel, Mayur, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley, and Daniel Houghton. “Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology.” Presentation. Knight Foundation, December 2013. http://slidesha.re/11UYgO0.

  • This reports aims to advance the field of civic technology, which compared to the tech industry as a whole is relatively young. It maps the field, creating a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector.
  • It defines two themes, Open Government and Civic Action, and identifies 11 clusters of civic tech innovation that fall into the two themes. For each cluster, the authors describe the type of activities and highlights specific organizations.
  • The report identified more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013.

Open Plans. “Field Scan on Civic Technology.” Living Cities, November 2012. http://bit.ly/1HGjGih.

  • Commissioned by Living Cities and authored by Open Plans, the Field Scan investigates the emergent field of civic technology and generates the first analysis of the potential impact for the field as well as a critique for how tools and new methods need to be more inclusive of low-income communities in their use and implementation.
  • Respondents generally agreed that the tools developed and in use in cities so far are demonstrations of the potential power of civic tech, but that these tools don’t yet go far enough.
  • Civic tech tools have the potential to improve the lives of low-income people in a number of ways. However, these tools often fail to reach the population they are intended to benefit. To better understand this challenge, civic tech for low-income people must be considered in the broader context of their interactions with technology and with government.
  • Although hackathons are popular, their approach to problem solving is not always driven by community needs, and hackathons often do not produce useful material for governments or citizens in need.

Goldberg, Jeremy M. “Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation.” Governing, August 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOKnhJ.

  • In this piece, Goldberg argues that innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets.

Black, Alissa, and Burstein, Rachel. “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work.” IBM Center for the Business of Government, October 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOFZP4.

  • In this report, Burstein and Black examine the recent trend toward the creation of innovation offices across the nation at all levels of government to understand the structural models now being used to stimulate innovation—both internally within an agency, and externally for the agency’s partners and communities.
  • The authors conducted interviews with leadership of innovation offices of cities that include Philadelphia, Austin, Kansas City, Chicago, Davis, Memphis and Los Angeles.
  • The report cites examples of offices, generates a typology for the field, links to projects and highlights success factors.

Mulholland, Jessica, and Noelle Knell. “Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map).” Government Technology, March 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ycArvX.

  • This article provides an overview of how different cities structure their Chief Innovation Officer positions and provides links to offices, projects and additional editorial content.
  • Some innovation officers find their duties merged with traditional CIO responsibilities, as is the case in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. Others, like those in Louisville and Nashville, have titles that reveal a link to their jurisdiction’s economic development endeavors.

Toolkits

Bloomberg Philanthropies. January 2014. “Transform Your City through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model for Making It Happen.” New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies. http://bloombg.org/120VrKB.

  • In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies funded a three-year innovation capacity program in five major United States cities— Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans – in which cities could hire top-level staff to develop and see through the implementation of solutions to top mayoral priorities such as customer service, murder, homelessness, and economic development, using a sequence of steps.
  • The Innovation Delivery Team Playbook describes the Innovation Delivery Model and describes each aspect of the model from how to hire and structure the team, to how to manage roundtables and run competitions.

Participatory sensing: enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New White Paper by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (Australia): “Local government (such as the City of Melbourne) is accountable and responsible for establishment, execution and oversight of strategic objectives and resource management in the metropolis. Faced with a rising population, Council has in place a number of strategic plans to ensure it is able to deliver services that maintain (and ideally improve) the quality of life for its citizens (including residents, workers and visitors). This publication explores participatory sensing (PS) and issues associated with governance in the light of new information gathering capabilities that directly engage citizens in collecting data and providing contextual insight that has the potential to greatly enhance Council operations in managing these environments. Download: Participatory Sensing: Enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement (pdf: 2.3mb)“