Jan Lauren Boyles in Journalism: “Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration integrates civic organizations and community leaders….(More)”.
Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data
Book by Mariel Borowitz: “Key to understanding and addressing climate change is continuous and precise monitoring of environmental conditions. Satellites play an important role in collecting climate data, offering comprehensive global coverage that can’t be matched by in situ observation. And yet, as Mariel Borowitz shows in this book, much satellite data is not freely available but restricted; this remains true despite the data-sharing advocacy of international organizations and a global open data movement. Borowitz examines policies governing the sharing of environmental satellite data, offering a model of data-sharing policy development and applying it in case studies from the United States, Europe, and Japan—countries responsible for nearly half of the unclassified government Earth observation satellites.
Borowitz develops a model that centers on the government agency as the primary actor while taking into account the roles of such outside actors as other government officials and non-governmental actors, as well as the economic, security, and normative attributes of the data itself. The case studies include the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), and the United States Geological Survey (USGS); the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT); and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA). Finally, she considers the policy implications of her findings for the future and provides recommendations on how to increase global sharing of satellite data….(More)”.
Open data, democracy and public service reform
Mark Thompson at Computer Weekly: “Discussion around reforming public services is as important as better information sharing rules if government is to make the most of public data…
Our public services face two paradoxes in relation to data sharing. First, on the demand side, “Zuckerberg’s law” – which claims that the amount of data we’re happy to share with companies increases exponentially year-on-year – flies in the face of our wariness as citizens to share with the state….
The upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – a beefed-up version of the existing Data Protection Act (DPA) – is likely to only exacerbate a fundamental problem, therefore: citizens don’t want the state to know much about them, and public servants don’t want to share. Each behaviour is paradoxical, and thus complex to address culturally.
Worse, we need to accelerate our public conversation considerably if we are to maintain pace with accelerating technological developments.
Existing complexity in the data space will shortly be exacerbated by new abilities to process unstructured data such as images and natural language – abilities which offer entirely new opportunities for commercial exploitation as well as surveillance…(More)”.
Priceless? A new framework for estimating the cost of open government reforms
New paper by Praneetha Vissapragada and Naomi Joswiak: “The Open Government Costing initiative, seeded with funding from the World Bank, was undertaken to develop a practical and actionable approach to pinpointing the full economic costs of various open government programs. The methodology developed through this initiative represents an important step towards conducting more sophisticated cost-benefit analyses – and ultimately understanding the true value – of open government reforms intended to increase citizen engagement, promote transparency and accountability, and combat corruption, insights that have been sorely lacking in the open government community to date. The Open Government Costing Framework and Methods section (Section 2 of this report) outlines the critical components needed to conduct cost analysis of open government programs, with the ultimate objective of putting a price tag on key open government reform programs in various countries at a particular point in time. This framework introduces a costing process that employs six essential steps for conducting a cost study, including (1) defining the scope of the program, (2) identifying types of costs to assess, (3) developing a framework for costing, (4) identifying key components, (5) conducting data collection and (6) conducting data analysis. While the costing methods are built on related approaches used for analysis in other sectors such as health and nutrition, this framework and methodology was specifically adapted for open government programs and thus addresses the unique challenges associated with these types of initiatives. Using the methods outlined in this document, we conducted a cost analysis of two case studies: (1) ProZorro, an e-procurement program in Ukraine; and (2) Sierra Leone’s Open Data Program….(More)”
TfL’s free open data boosts London’s economy
Press Release by Transport for London: “Research by Deloitte shows that the release of open data by TfL is generating annual economic benefits and savings of up to £130m a year…
TfL has worked with a wide range of professional and amateur developers, ranging from start-ups to global innovators, to deliver new products in the form that customers want. This has led to more than 600 apps now being powered specifically using TfL’s open data feeds, used by 42 per cent of Londoners.
The report found that TfL’s data provides the following benefits:
- Saved time for passengers. TfL’s open data allows customers to plan journeys more accurately using apps with real-time information and advice on how to adjust their routes. This provides greater certainty on when the next bus/Tube will arrive and saves time – estimated at between £70m and £90m per year.
- Better information to plan journeys, travel more easily and take more journeys. Customers can use apps to better plan journeys, enabling them to use TfL services more regularly and access other services. Conservatively, the value of these journeys is estimated at up to £20m per year.
- Creating commercial opportunities for third party developers. A wide range of companies now use TfL’s open data commercially to help generate revenue, many of whom are based in London. Having free and up-to-date access to this data increases the ‘Gross Value Add’ (analogous to GDP) that these companies contribute to the London economy, both directly and across the supply chain and wider economy, of between £12m and £15m per year.
- Leveraging value and savings from partnerships with major customer facing technology platform owners. TfL receives back significant data on areas it does not itself collect data (e.g. crowdsourced traffic data). This allows TfL to get an even better understanding of journeys in London and improve its operations….(More).
Tech’s fight for the upper hand on open data
Rana Foroohar at the Financial Times: “One thing that’s becoming very clear to me as I report on the digital economy is that a rethink of the legal framework in which business has been conducted for many decades is going to be required. Many of the key laws that govern digital commerce (which, increasingly, is most commerce) were crafted in the 1980s or 1990s, when the internet was an entirely different place. Consider, for example, the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This 1986 law made it a federal crime to engage in “unauthorised access” to a computer connected to the internet. It was designed to prevent hackers from breaking into government or corporate systems. …While few hackers seem to have been deterred by it, the law is being used in turf battles between companies looking to monetise the most valuable commodity on the planet — your personal data. Case in point: LinkedIn vs HiQ, which may well become a groundbreaker in Silicon Valley.
LinkedIn is the dominant professional networking platform, a Facebook for corporate types. HiQ is a “data-scraping” company, one that accesses publicly available data from LinkedIn profiles and then mixes it up in its own quantitative black box to create two products — Keeper, which tells employers which of their employees are at greatest risk of being recruited away, and Skill Mapper, which provides a summary of the skills possessed by individual workers. LinkedIn allowed HiQ to do this for five years, before developing a very similar product to Skill Mapper, at which point LinkedIn sent the company a “cease and desist” letter, and threatened to invoke the CFAA if HiQ did not stop tapping its user data.
..Meanwhile, a case that might have been significant mainly to digital insiders is being given a huge publicity boost by Harvard professor Laurence Tribe, the country’s pre-eminent constitutional law scholar. He has joined the HiQ defence team because, as he told me, he believes the case is “tremendously important”, not only in terms of setting competitive rules for the digital economy, but in the realm of free speech. According to Prof Tribe, if you accept that the internet is the new town square, and “data is a central type of capital”, then it must be freely available to everyone — and LinkedIn, as a private company, cannot suddenly decide that publicly accessible, Google-searchable data is their private property….(More)”.
Policy Analytics, Modelling, and Informatics
Open mapping from the ground up: learning from Map Kibera
Report by Erica Hagen for Making All Voices Count: “In Nairobi in 2009, 13 young residents of the informal settlement of Kibera mapped their community using OpenStreetMap, an online mapping platform. This was the start of Map Kibera, and eight years of ongoing work to date on digital mapping, citizen media and open data. In this paper, Erica Hagen – one of the initiators of Map Kibera – reflects on the trajectory of this work. Through research interviews with Map Kibera staff, participants and clients, and users of the data and maps the project has produced, she digs into what it means for citizens to map their communities, and examines the impact of open local information on members of the community. The paper begins by situating the research and Map Kibera in selected literature on transparency, accountability and mapping. It then presents three case studies of mapping in Kibera – in the education, security and water sectors – discussing evidence about the effects not only on project participants, but also on governmental and non-governmental actors in each of the three sectors. It concludes that open, community-based data collection can lead to greater trust, which is sorely lacking in marginalised places. In large-scale data gathering, it is often unclear to those involved why the data is needed or what will be done with it. But the experience of Map Kibera shows that by starting from the ground up and sharing open data widely, it is possible to achieve strong sector-wide ramifications beyond the scope of the initial project, including increased resources and targeting by government and NGOs. While debates continue over the best way to truly engage citizens in the ‘data revolution’ and tracking the Sustainable Development Goals, the research here shows that engaging people fully in the information value chain can be the missing link between data as a measurement tool, and information having an impact on social development….(More)”.
Paraguay’s transparency alchemists
Story by the Open Contracting Partnership: “….The “Cocido de oro” scandal is seen as part of a well-organized and well-informed youth movement that has sprung up in Paraguay in recent years. An equally dramatic controversyinvolving alleged corruption and unfair staff appointments at one of the country’s top public universities led to the resignation of the Chancellor and other senior staff in September 2015. Mostly high school and university students, they are no longer willing to tolerate the waste and corruption in public spending — a hangover from 35 years of authoritarian rule. They expect their government to be more open and accountable, and public decision-making processes to be more inclusive and democratic.
Thanks to government initiatives that have sought to give citizens greater access to information about public institutions, these students, along with investigative journalists and other civil society groups, are starting to engage actively in civic affairs. And they are data-savvy, basing recommendations on empirical evidence about government policies and processes, how they are implemented, and whether they are working.
Leading the pack is the country’s public procurement office, which runs a portal that ranks among the most open government data sources in the world. Together with information about budgets, public bodies’ payrolls, and other government data, this is helping Paraguayans to tackle some of the biggest long-standing problems faced by the government, like graft, overpricing, nepotism and influence-peddling….
The government recognizes there’s still a long way to go in their quest to open up public data. Few institutions have opened their databases or publish their data on an open data portal, and use of the data that has been published is still limited, according to a report on the country’s third OGP Action Plan. Priority data sets aren’t accessible in ways that meet the needs of civil society, the report adds.
And yet, the tremors of a tectonic shift in transparency and accountability in Paraguay are already being felt. In a short time, armed with access to information, citizens have started engaging with how public money is and should be spent.
The government is now doubling down on its strategy of fostering public participation, using cutting-edge technology to increase citizens’ access to data about their state institutions. Health, education, and municipal-level government, and procurement spending across these areas are being prioritized….(More).
Using Open Data to Analyze Urban Mobility from Social Networks
Paper by Caio Libânio Melo Jerônimo, Claudio E. C. Campelo, Cláudio de Souza Baptista: “The need to use online technologies that favor the understanding of city dynamics has grown, mainly due to the ease in obtaining the necessary data, which, in most cases, are gathered with no cost from social networks services. With such facility, the acquisition of georeferenced data has become easier, favoring the interest and feasibility in studying human mobility patterns, bringing new challenges for knowledge discovery in GIScience. This favorable scenario also encourages governments to make their data available for public access, increasing the possibilities for data scientist to analyze such data. This article presents an approach to extracting mobility metrics from Twitter messages and to analyzing their correlation with social, economic and demographic open data. The proposed model was evaluated using a dataset of georeferenced Twitter messages and a set of social indicators, both related to Greater London. The results revealed that social indicators related to employment conditions present higher correlation with the mobility metrics than any other social indicators investigated, suggesting that these social variables may be more relevant for studying mobility behaviors….(More)”.