open data

Beyond Transparency

Curated on October 17, 2013July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book on Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation: The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driven efficiency, and fueled economic development. And in the vein of high-profile federal initiatives like Data.gov and the White House’s Open Government Initiative, more and more local governments are making their foray into the field with Chief Data Officers, open data policies, and open data catalogs.
While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative potential of open data in shaping the future of our civic life. It’s at the local level that government most directly impacts the lives of residents—providing clean parks, fighting crime, or issuing permits to open a new business. This is where there is the biggest opportunity to use open data to reimagine the relationship between citizens and government.
Beyond Transparency is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve accomplished with open civic data. It seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving. Through these stories, we examine what is needed to build an ecosystem in which open data can become the raw materials to drive more effective decision-making and efficient service delivery, spur economic activity, and empower citizens to take an active role in improving their own communities….
This book is a resource for (and by) practitioners inside and outside government—from the municipal chief information officer to the community organizer to the civic-minded entrepreneur. Beyond Transparency is intended to capture and distill the community’s learnings around open data for the past four years. And we know that the community is going to continue learning. That’s why, in addition to the print version of the book which you can order on Amazon, we’ve also published the digital version of this book on this site under a Creative Commons license. The full text of this site is on GitHub — which means that anyone can submit a pull request with a suggested edit. Help us improve this resource for the community and write the next edition of Beyond Transparency by submitting your pull requests.
Code for America is a national nonprofit committed to building a government for the people, by the people, that works in the 21st century. Over the past four years, CfA has worked with dozens of cities to support civic innovation through open data. You can support this work by contributing to the book on GitHub, joining the CfA volunteer community (the Brigade), or connecting your city with CfA.

GitHub and Government

Curated on October 17, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New site: “Make government better, together. Stories of open source, open data, and open government.
This site is an open source effort to showcase best practices of open sourcing government. See something that you think could be better? Want to submit your own story? Simply fork the project and submit a pull request.
…

Ready to get started on GitHub? Here are some ideas that are easy to get your feet wet with.

Feedback Repository

GitHub’s about connecting with developers. Whether you’re an API publishing pro, or just getting started, creating a “feedback” repository can go a long way to connect your organization with the community. Get feedback from current and potential data consumers by creating a specific repository for them to contribute ideas and suggestions for types of data or other information they’d like to see opened. Here’s how:

Create a new repository
- Choose your organization as the Owner
- Name the repository “feedback” or similar
- Click the checkbox to automatically create a README.md file
Set up your Readme
- Click README.md within your newly created repository
- Click Edit
- Introduce yourself, describe why you’ve joined GitHub, what you’re hoping to do and what you’d like to learn from the development community. Encourage them to leave feedback through issues on the repository.

Sample text for your README.md:

# City of Gotham Feedback
We've just joined GitHub and want to know what data would be interesting to our development community?
Leave us comments via issues!

Open source a Dataset

Open sourcing a dataset can be as simple as uploading a .csv to GitHub and letting people know about it. Rather than publishing data as a zip file on your website or an FTP server, you can add the files through the GitHub.com web interface, or via the GitHub for Windows or GitHub for Mac native clients. Create a new repository to store your datasets – in many cases, it’s as easy as drag, drop, sync.
GitHub can host any file type (although open, non-binary files like .csvs tend to work best). Plus, GitHub supports rendering certain open data formats interactively such as the popular geospacial .geojson format. Once uploaded, citizens can view the files, and can even open issues or submit pull requests with proposed fixes.

Explore Open Source Civic Apps

There are many open source applications freely available on GitHub that were built just for government. Check them out, and see if it fits a need. Here are some examples:

Adopt-a – This open source web app was created for the City of Boston in 2011 by Code for America fellows. It allows residents to “adopt” a hydrant and make sure it’s clear of snow in the winter so that emergency crews can locate them when needed. It has since been adopted in Chicago (for sidewalks), Seattle (for storm drains), and Honolulu (for tsunami sirens).
StreetMix – Another creation of Code for America fellows (2013) this website, www.streetmix.net, allows anyone to create street sections in a way that is not only beautiful but educational, too. No downloading, no installing, no paying – make and save your creations right at the website. Great for internal or public community planning meetings.
We The People – We The People, the White House’s petitions application hosted at petitions.whitehouse.gov is a Drupal module to allow citizens to submit and digitally sign petitions.

Open source something small

Chances are you’ve got something small you can open source. Check in with your web or new media team, and see if they’ve got something they’ve been dying to share or blog about, no matter how small. It can be snippet of analytics code, or maybe a small script used internally. It doesn’t even have to be code.
Post your website’s privacy policy, comment moderation policy, or terms of service and let the community weigh in before your next edit. No matter how small it is, getting your first open source project going is a great first step.

Improve an existing project

Does you agency use an existing open source project to conduct its own business? Open an issue on the project’s repository with a feature request or a bug you spot. Better yet, fork the project, and submit your improvements. Even if it’s one or two lines of code, such examples are great to blog about to showcase your efforts.
Don’t forget, this site is an open source project, too. Making an needed edit is another great way to get started.”

And Data for All: On the Validity and Usefulness of Open Government Data

Curated on October 16, 2013November 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper presented at the the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies: “Open Government Data (OGD) stands for a relatively young trend to make data that is collected and maintained by state authorities available for the public. Although various Austrian OGD initiatives have been started in the last few years, less is known about the validity and the usefulness of the data offered. Based on the data-set on Vienna’s stock of trees, we address two questions in this paper. First of all, we examine the quality of the data by validating it according to knowledge from a related discipline. It shows that the data-set we used correlates with findings from meteorology. Then, we explore the usefulness and exploitability of OGD by describing a concrete scenario in which this data-set can be supportive for citizens in their everyday life and by discussing further application areas in which OGD can be beneficial for different stakeholders and even commercially used.”

Five Ways to Make Government Procurement Better

Curated on October 15, 2013October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: “Nothing in recent memory has focused attention on the need for wholesale reform of the government IT procurement system more than the troubled launch of healthcare.gov.
There has been a myriad of blog posts, stories and articles written in the last few weeks detailing all of the problems that led to the ignominious launch of the website meant to allow people to sign up for health care coverage.
Though the details of this high profile flop are in the latest headlines, the underlying cause has been talked about many times before – the process by which governments contract with outside parties to obtain IT services is broken…
With all of this in mind, here are – in no particular order – five suggested changes that can be adopted to improve the government procurement process.
Raise the threshold on simplified / streamlined procurement
Many governments use a separate, more streamlined process for smaller projects that do not require a full RFP (in the City of Philadelphia, professional services projects that do not exceed $32,000 annually go through this more streamlined bidding process). In Philadelphia, we’ve had great success in using these smaller projects to test new ideas and strategies for partnering with IT vendors. There is much we can learn from these experiments, and a modest increase to enable more experimentation would allow governments to gain valuable new insights.
Narrowing the focus of any enhanced thresholds for streamlined budding to web-based projects would help mitigate risk and foster a quicker process for testing new ideas.
Identify clear standards for projects
Having a clear set of vendor-agnostic IT standards to use when developing RFPs and in performing work can make a huge difference in how a project turns out. Clearly articulating standards for:

The various components that a system will use.
The environment in which it will be housed.
The testing it must undergo prior to final acceptance.

…can go a long way to reduce the risk an uncertainly inherent in IT projects.
It’s worth noting that most governments probably already have a set of IT standards that are usually made part of any IT solicitation. But these standards documents can quickly become out of date – they must undergo constant review and refinement. In addition, many of the people writing these standards may confuse a specific vendor product or platform with a true standard.
Require open source
Requiring that IT projects be open source during development or after completion can be an effective way to reduce risk on an IT project and enhance transparency. This is particularly true of web-based projects.
In addition, government RFPs should encourage the use of existing open source tools – leveraging existing software components that are in use in similar projects and maintained by an active community – to foster external participation by vendors and volunteers alike. When governments make the code behind their project open source, they enable anyone that understands software development to help make them better.
Develop a more robust internal capacity for IT project management and implementation
Governments must find ways to develop the internal capacity for developing, implementing and managing technology projects.
Part of the reason that governments make use of a variety of different risk mitigation provisions in public bidding is that there is a lack of people in government with hands on experience building or maintaining technology. There is a dearth of makers in government, and there is a direct relationship between the perceived risk that governments take on with new technology projects and the lack of experienced technologists working in government.
Governments need to find ways to develop a maker culture within their workforces and should prioritize recruitment from the local technology and civic hacking communities.
Make contracting, lobbying and campaign contribution data public as open data
One of the more disheartening revelations to come out of the analysis of healthcare.gov implementation is that some of the firms that were awarded work as part of the project also spent non-trivial amounts of money on lobbying. It’s a good bet that this kind of thing also happens at the state and local level as well.
This can seriously undermine confidence in the bidding process, and may cause many smaller firms – who lack funds or interest in lobbying elected officials – to simply throw up their hands and walk away.
In the absence of statutory or regulatory changes to prevent this from happening, governments can enhance the transparency around the bidding process by working to ensure that all contracting data as well as data listing publicly registered lobbyists and contributions to political campaigns is open.
Ensuring that all prospective participants in the public bidding process have confidence that the process will be fair and transparent is essential to getting as many firms to participate as possible – including small firms more adept at agile software development methodologies. More bids typically equates to higher quality proposals and lower prices.
None of the changes list above will be easy, and governments are positioned differently in how well they may achieve any one of them. Nor do they represent the entire universe of things we can do to improve the system in the near term – these are items that I personally think are important and very achievable.
One thing that could help speed the adoption of these and other changes is the development of robust communication framework between government contracting and IT professionals in different cities and different states. I think a “Municipal Procurement Academy” could go a long way toward achieving this.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee: The many meanings of Open

Curated on October 12, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sir Tim Berners-Lee; ” I was recently asked to talk about the idea of “open”, and I realized the term is used in at least eight different ways. The distinct interpretations are all important in different but interlocking ways. Getting them confused leads to a lot of misunderstanding, so it’s good to review them all.
When we tease apart their meanings, we can understand more clearly which aspects of each are the most important. The first, one of the most important forms of openness for the Web, is its universality.
Universality – When I designed the Web protocols, I had already seen many networked information systems fail because they made some assumptions about the users – that they were using a particular type of computer for instance – or constrained the way they worked, such as forcing them to organize their data in a particular way, or to use a particular data format. The Web had to avoid these issues. The goal was that anyone should be able to publish anything on the Web and so it had to be universal in that it was independent of all these technical constraints, as well as language, character sets, and culture….
Open Standards
The actual design of the Web involved the creation of open standards – and getting people to agree to use them globally. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which I am the Director, helps create interoperable standards for Web technology, including HTML5, mobile Web, graphics, the Semantic Web of linked data, and Web accessibility. Any company can join and anyone can review and help create the specifications for the Web….
Open Web Platform (OWP)
W3C’s Open Web Platform is the name for a particular set of open standards which enable an exciting stage of Web computing. Standards such as HTML5, SVG, CSS, video, JavaScript, and others are advancing together so that programmes that once worked only on desktop, tablets or phones can now work from within the browser itself. It has all the power of HTML5, like easily-inserted video and, in the future, easily-inserted conferences. It also features the APIs for accessing hardware and other capabilities on the device, such as a smartphone’s accelerometer, camera, and local storage. While native apps are limited, Web Apps can work on any platform….
Open Government through Open Data
In 2009, I resolved to encourage more use of data on the Web. Too many websites could generate nice reports as documents, but had no way to access the data behind it to check and build on the results. In February that year I stood up in front of a TED audience and asked them for their data; I even got them to chant: “raw data now”. In April that year, I met with Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of the UK and with him began the UK Government’s ground-breaking work on Open Data. That same year President Barack Obama announced his commitment to the US Open Government Initiative. In 2010 I went back to TED and showed the audience some of what had been achieved, including Open Street Map’s role in relief efforts in Haiti….
Open Platform
While it’s not really a feature of the Web, a concern for a lot of people is whether they can choose which apps run on their own phone or computer. An Open Platform means having the right to install and write software on your computer or device. One motivation to close off a computing platform comes from a manufacturer wanting to allow you to experience their content on your machine without being able to store it or pass it on. Some systems are very closed, in that the user can only watch a movie or play a game, with no chance to copy anything or back it up. Some systems are very open, allowing users to take copies of files and run any application they like. Many systems fall in between, letting users pay for additional material or an experience…
Open Source
“Open Source” is another way “open” is used on the web, one which has been and is very important to the Web’s growth. It’s important to me that I can get at the source code of any software I’m using. If I can get at the source code, can I modify it? Can I distribute the modified code and run it on my machine? As Free Software Foundation lead Richard Stallman puts it, “free as in freedom rather than free as in beer”.
Open Access
Open Access is a Web-based movement specifically about free (as in beer) access to the body of academic learning. Governments, and therefore taxpayers, pay for research via grants but often the results of the research are kept in closed-access academic journals. The results are only available to those at big universities. The poor and those in remote rural areas cannot participate…
Open Internet and Net Neutrality
When we talk about keeping the internet free and open, we are often worried about blocking and spying. One of the ways in which we protect the Web is by ensuring Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is about non-discrimination. Its principle is that if I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This is important because it allows an open, fair market. It’s essential to an open, fair democracy. The alternative is a Web in which governments or large companies, or frequently a close association of the two, try to control the internet, with packets of information delivered in a way that discriminates for commercial or political reasons. Regimes of every sort spy on their citizens, deriving hugely accurate and detailed profiles of them and their intimate lives. Today, the battle is building. The rights of individual people on the Web are being attacked, and at the moment only a few people really understand and realize what is going on.”

NEW Publication: “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts”

Curated on October 11, 2013November 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Over the last few years, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada has initiated a variety of practices and policies aimed at providing more legitimate and effective governance. Leveraging advances in technology, the BC Government has focused on changing how it engages with its citizens with the goal of optimizing the way it seeks input and develops and implements policy. The efforts are part of a broader trend among a wide variety of democratic governments to re-imagine public service and governance.
At the beginning of 2013, BC’s Ministry of Citizens’ Services and Open Government, now the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services, partnered with the GovLab to produce “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts.” The GovLab’s May 2013 report, made public today, makes clear that BC’s current practices to create a more open government, leverage citizen engagement to inform policy decisions, create new innovations, and provide improved public monitoring—though in many cases relatively new—are consistently among the strongest examples at either the provincial or national level.
According to Stefaan Verhulst, Chief of Research at the GovLab: “Our benchmarking study found that British Columbia’s various initiatives and experiments to create a more open and participatory governance culture has made it a leader in how to re-imagine governance. Leadership, along with the elimination of imperatives that may limit further experimentation, will be critical moving forward. And perhaps even more important, as with all initiatives to re-imaging governance worldwide, much more evaluation of what works, and why, will be needed to keep strengthening the value proposition behind the new practices and polices and provide proof-of-concept.”
See also our TheGovLab Blog.

AskThem

Curated on October 9, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“AskThem is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. AskThem is supported by a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative.
AskThem is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. It’s a not-for-profit tool for a stronger democracy, with open data for informed and engaged communities.
AskThem allows you to:

Find and ask questions to over 142,000 elected officials nationwide: federal, state and city levels of government.
Get signatures for your question or petition, have it delivered over email or Twitter, and push for a public response.
See questions from people near you, sign-on to questions you care about, and review answers from public figures.

It’s like a version of “We The People” for every elected official, from local city council members all the way up to U.S. senators. Enter your email above to be the first to ask a question when we launch and see previews of the site this Fall.
Elected officials: enter your email above and we’ll send you more information about signing up to answer questions on AskThem. It’s a free and non-partisan service to respond to your constituents in an open public forum and update them over email about your work. Or, be a leader in open-government and sign up now.
Issue-based organizations and media: sign up to help promote questions to government from people in your area. We’re working to launch with partnerships that build greater public accountability.
Previously known as the OpenGovernment.org project, AskThem is open-source and uses open government data – our code is available on GitHub – contributions welcome. For more development updates & discussion, join our low-traffic Google Group.
We’re a small non-profit organization actively seeking charitable funding support – help us launch this powerful new tool for public dialogue! Email us for a copy of our non-profit funding prospectus. If you can make a tax-exempt gift to support our work, please donate to PPF via OpenCongress. More background on the project is available on our Knight NewsChallenge proposal from March 2013.
Questions, feedback, ideas? Email David Moore, Executive Director of PPF – david at ppolitics.org, Twitter: @ppolitics; like our page on Facebook & follow @AskThemPPF on Twitter. Stay tuned!”

The Brave New World of Good

Curated on October 8, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brad Smith: “Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic foundations that fund them, today the terrain of good is disputed by social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks. Their tools of choice are markets, open data, innovation, hackathons, and disruption. They cross borders, social classes, and paradigms with the swipe of a touch screen. We seemed poised to unleash a whole new era of social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity.
As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be against it? It is virtually impossible to write an even mildly skeptical blog post about good without sounding well, bad — or at least a bit old-fashioned. For the record, I firmly believe there is much in the brave new world of good that is helping us find our way out of the tired and often failed models of progress and change on which we have for too long relied. Still, there are assumptions worth questioning and questions worth answering to ensure that the good we seek is the good that can be achieved.
…
Open Data
Second only to “good” in terms of marketing genius is the concept of “open data.” An offspring of previous movements such as “open source,” “open content,” and “open access,” open data in the Internet age has come to mean data that is machine-readable, free to access, and free to use, re-use, and re-distribute, subject to attribution. Fully open data goes way beyond posting your .pdf document on a Web site (as neatly explained by Tim Berners Lee’s five-star framework).
When it comes to government, there is a rapidly accelerating movement around the world that is furthering transparency by making vast stores of data open. Ditto on the data of international aid funders like the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The push has now expanded to the tax return data of nonprofits and foundations (IRS Forms 990). Collection of data by government has a business model; it’s called tax dollars. However, open data is not born pure. Cleaning that data, making it searchable, and building and maintaining reliable user interfaces is complex, time-consuming, and often expensive. That requires a consistent stream of income of the kind that can only come from fees, subscriptions, or, increasingly less so, government.
Foundation grants are great for short-term investment, experimentation, or building an app or two, but they are no substitute for a scalable business model. Structured, longitudinal data are vital to social, environmental, and economic progress. In a global economy where government is retreating from the funding of public goods, figuring how to pay for the cost of that data is one of our greatest challenges.”

Global Open Data Initiative moving forward

Curated on October 8, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Global Open Data Initiative will serve as a guiding voice internationally on open data issues. Civil society groups who focus on open data have often been isolated to single national contexts, despite the similar challenges and opportunities repeating themselves in countries across the globe. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help share valuable resources, guidance and judgment, and to clarify the potential for government open data across the world.
Provide a leading vision for how governments approach open data. Open data commitments are among the most popular commitments for countries participating in the Open Government Partnership. The Global Open Data Initiative recommendations and resources will help guide open data initiatives and others as they seek to design and implement strong, effective open data initiatives and policies. Global Open Data Initiative resources will also help civil society actors who will be evaluating government initiatives.
Increase awareness of open data. Global Open Data Initiative will work to advance the understanding of open data issues, challenges, and resources by promoting best practices, engaging in online and offline dialogue, and supporting networking between organizations both new and familiar to the open data arena.
Support the development of the global open data community especially in civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have a key role to play as suppliers, intermediaries, and users of open data, though at present, relatively few organizations are engaging with open data and the opportunities it presents. Most CSOs lack the awareness, skills and support needed to be active users and providers of open data in ways that can help them meet their goals. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help CSOs, to engage with and use open data whether whatever area they work on – be it climate change, democratic rights, land governance or financial reform.
Our immediate focus is on two activities:

To consult with members of the CSO community around the world about what they think is important in this area
Develop a set of principles in collaboration with the CSO community to guide open government data policies and approaches and to help initiate, strengthen and further elevate conversations between governments and civil society.”