Report by Rwitwika Bhattacharya and Mohitkumar Daga: “The importance of data in informing the policy-making process is being increasingly realized across the world. With India facing significant developmental challenges, use of data offers an important opportunity to improve the quality of public services. However, lack of formal structures to internalize a data-informed decision-making process impedes the path to robust policy formation. This paper seeks to highlight these challenges through a case study of data dashboard implementation in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The study suggests the importance of capacity building, improvement of data collection and engagement of non-governmental players as measures to address issues….(More)”
Designing the Next Generation of Open Data Policy
Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.
The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”
How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger
Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.
Real-time research
One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.
Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.
“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”
Data to the people
New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.
Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.
Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.
Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.
Enhancing connection
Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.
In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.
Mobilizing the world
Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”
Open Government Implementation Model
KDZ: “The City of Vienna was the first public agency in a German speaking country to develop an Open Government Initative and to commit itself to the concept of Open Data – an open and transparent system that makes city data available to citizens for their further use. Vienna’s first Open Data catalogue has been presented to the public.The KDZ – Centre for Public Administration Research was contracted by the Chief Executive Office of Vienna to contribute to the Open Government strategy of the City of Vienna. In order to bring the insights and propositions gained to the attention of a wider public, the Open Government Implementation Model has been translated into English.
The KDZ Implementation Model is based on and significantly elaborates the “Open Government Implementation Model” by Lee/Kwak (2011). …(More)
See also:
Responsible Data in Agriculture
Report by Lindsay Ferris and Zara Rahman for GODAN: “The agriculture sector is creating increasing amounts of data, from many different sources. From tractors equipped with GPS tracking, to open data released by government ministries, data is becoming ever more valuable, as agricultural business development and global food policy decisions are being made based upon data. But the sector is also home to severe resource inequality. The largest agricultural companies make billions of dollars per year, in comparison with subsistence farmers growing just enough to feed themselves, or smallholder farmers who grow enough to sell on a year-by-year basis. When it comes to data and technology, these differences in resources translate to stark power imbalances in data access and use. The most well resourced actors are able to delve into new technologies and make the most of those insights, whereas others are unable to take any such risks or divert any of their limited resources. Access to and use of data has radically changed the business models and behaviour of some of those well resourced actors, but in contrast, those with fewer resources are receiving the same, limited access to information that they always have.
In this paper, we have approached these issues from a responsible data perspective, drawing upon the experience of the Responsible Data community1 who over the past three years have created tools, questions and resources to deal with the ethical, legal, privacy and security challenges that come from new uses of data in various sectors. This piece aims to provide a broad overview of some of the responsible data challenges facing these actors, with a focus on the power imbalance between actors, and looking into how that inequality affects behaviour when it comes to the agricultural data ecosystem. What are the concerns of those with limited resources, when it comes to this new and rapidly changing data environment? In addition, what are the ethical grey areas or uncertainties that we need to address in the future? As a first attempt to answer these questions, we spoke to 14 individuals with various perspectives on the sector to understand what the challenges are for them and for the people they work with. We also carried out desk research to dive deeper into these issues, and we provide here an analysis of our findings and responsible data challenges….(More)”
How to advance open data research: Towards an understanding of demand, users, and key data
Danny Lämmerhirt and Stefaan Verhulst at IODC blog: “…Lord Kelvin’s famous quote “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it” equally applies to open data. Without more evidence of how open data contributes to meeting users’ needs and addressing societal challenges, efforts and policies toward releasing and using more data may be misinformed and based upon untested assumptions.
When done well, assessments, metrics, and audits can guide both (local) data providers and users to understand, reflect upon, and change how open data is designed. What we measure and how we measure is therefore decisive to advance open data.
Back in 2014, the Web Foundation and the GovLab at NYU brought together open data assessment experts from Open Knowledge, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations, Canada’s International Development Research Centre, and elsewhere to explore the development of common methods and frameworks for the study of open data. It resulted in a draft template or framework for measuring open data. Despite the increased awareness for more evidence-based open data approaches, since 2014 open data assessment methods have only advanced slowly. At the same time, governments publish more of their data openly, and more civil society groups, civil servants, and entrepreneurs employ open data to manifold ends: the broader public may detect environmental issues and advocate for policy changes, neighbourhood projects employ data to enable marginalized communities to participate in urban planning, public institutions may enhance their information exchange, and entrepreneurs embed open data in new business models.
In 2015, the International Open Data Conference roadmap made the following recommendations on how to improve the way we assess and measure open data.
- Reviewing and refining the Common Assessment Methods for Open Data framework. This framework lays out four areas of inquiry: context of open data, the data published, use practices and users, as well as the impact of opening data.
- Developing a catalogue of assessment methods to monitor progress against the International Open Data Charter (based on the Common Assessment Methods for Open Data).
- Networking researchers to exchange common methods and metrics. This helps to build methodologies that are reproducible and increase credibility and impact of research.
- Developing sectoral assessments.
In short, the IODC called for refining our assessment criteria and metrics by connecting researchers, and applying the assessments to specific areas. It is hard to tell how much progress has been made in answering these recommendations, but there is a sense among researchers and practitioners that the first two goals are yet to be fully addressed.
Instead we have seen various disparate, yet well meaning, efforts to enhance the understanding of the release and impact of open data. A working group was created to measure progress on the International Open Data Charter, which provides governments with principles for implementing open data policies. While this working group compiled a list of studies and their methodologies, it did not (yet) deepen the common framework of definitions and criteria to assess and measure the implementation of the Charter.
In addition, there is an increase of sector- and case-specific studies that are often more descriptive and context specific in nature, yet do contribute to the need for examples that illustrate the value proposition for open data.
As such, there seems to be a disconnect between top-level frameworks and on-the-ground research, preventing the sharing of common methods and distilling replicable experiences about what works and what does not….(More)”
National Transit Map Seeks to Close the Transit Data Gap
Ben Miller at GovTech: “In bringing together the first ever map illustrating the nation’s transit system, the U.S. Department of Transportation isn’t just making data more accessible — it’s also aiming to modernize data collection and dissemination for many of the country’s transit agencies.
With more than 10,000 routes and 98,000 stops represented, the National Transit Map is already enormous. But Dan Morgan, chief data officer of the department, says it’s not enough. When measuring vehicles operated in maximum service — a metric illustrating peak service at a transit agency — the National Transit Map captures only about half of all transit in the U.S.
“Not all of these transit agencies have this data available,” Morgan said, “so this is an ongoing project to really close the transit data gap.”Which is why, in the process of building out the map, the DOT is working with transit agencies to make their data available.
Which is why, in the process of building out the map, the DOT is working with transit agencies to make their data available.
On the whole, transit data is easier to collect and process than a lot of transportation data because many agencies have adopted a standard called General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) that applies to schedule-related data. That’s what made the National Transit Map an easy candidate for completion, Morgan said.
But as popular as GTFS has become, many agencies — especially smaller ones — haven’t been able to use it. The tools to convert to GTFS come with a learning curve.
“It’s really a matter of priority and availability of resources,” he said.
Bringing those agencies into the mainstream is important to achieving the goals of the map. In the map, Morgan said he sees an opportunity to achieve a new level of clarity where it has never existed before.
That’s because transit has long suffered from difficulty in seeing its own history. Transit officials can describe their systems as they exist, but looking at how they got there is trickier.
“There’s no archive,” Morgan said, “there’s no picture of how transit changes over time.”
And that’s a problem for assessing what works and what doesn’t, for understanding why the system operates the way it does and how it responds to changes. …(More)”
More African governments are enacting open data policies but still aren’t willing to share information
Joshua Masinde at Quartz Africa: “Working as a data journalist and researcher in Uganda, Lydia Namubiru does not remember a moment she had an easy time accessing official government data in the execution of her work. She has had to literally beg for such information from officials with little success.
In June this year, she approached the Uganda Bureau of Statistics seeking a nationally representative sample of micro data from the country’s 2014 census. Despite frequent calls and emails, she is still waiting for the information from the bureau several months down the line….
It doesn’t have to be that way of course. In neighboring Kenya there’s much optimism there’ll be a different attitude to open data. Last month civil society activists and supporters of open data celebrated the government signing the Access to Information bill into law. It comes after many years of lobbying….
Despite well-earned reputations of authoritarianism and conservative attitudes to governance, it turns out more African governments are opening up to their citizens in the guise of espousing transparency and accountability in the conduct of their affairs.
However, in truth, a government saying it’s allowing citizens to access data or information is very different from the actual practice of enabling that access. For the most part, several governments’ open data initiatives often serve far more mundane purposes and may not be the data that citizens really want—the kind that potentially exposes corruption or laxity in public service…
“Countries that have embraced open data have seen real savings in public spending and improved efficiency in services. Nowhere is this more vital than in our nations – many of which face severe health and education crises,” Nnenna Nwakanma, Africa regional coordinator at World Wide Web Foundation,points out.
What is more prevalent now is what some open data advocates call ‘open washing’, which is described as a real threat to the open data movement according to the World Wide Web Foundation. By ‘open washing’, governments merely enact open data policies but do not follow through to full implementation. Others simply put in place strong freedom of information and right to information laws but do not really let the citizens take full advantage of the open data. This could, however, be as a result of institutional shortcomings, internal bureaucracies or lack of political will.
As the initiatives towards open data gather steam, challenges such as government agencies being unwilling to release official information as well as state bureaucracies are still prominent. Many governments are also only keen on releasing information that will not portray them as ‘naked’ but that which they feel will project them in positive light. But, as to whether laws will make governments more open, even with the information that citizens really need, is a matter of conjecture. For Namubiru, open data should be a culture that grows more subtly than by way of just passing laws for the sake of it.
“If they release enough packets of data on what they consider neutral or positive information, the storytellers will still be able to connect the dots.”…(More)”
Recent Developments in Open Data Policy
Presentation by Paul Uhlir: “Several International organizations have issued policy statements on open data policies in the past two years. This presentation provides an overview of those statements and their relevance to developing countries.
International Statements on Open Data Policy
Open data policies have become much more supported internationally in recent years. Policy statements in just the most recent 2014-2016 period that endorse and promote openness to research data derived from public funding include: the African Data Consensus (UNECA 2014); the CODATA Nairobi Principles for Data Sharing for Science and Development in Developing Countries (PASTD 2014); the Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age (LIBER 2014); Policy Guidelines for Open Access and Data Dissemination and Preservation (RECODE 2015); Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World (Science International 2015). This presentation will present the principal guidelines of these policy statements.
The Relevance of Open Data from Publicly Funded Research for Development
There are many reasons that publicly funded research data should be made as freely and openly available as possible. Some of these are noted here, although many other benefits are possible. For research, it is closing the gap with more economically developed countries, making researchers more visible on the web, enhancing their collaborative potential, and linking them globally. For educational benefits, open data assists greatly in helping students learn how to do data science and to manage data better. From a socioeconomic standpoint, open data policies have been shown to enhance economic opportunities and to enable citizens to improve their lives in myriad ways. Such policies are more ethical in allowing access to those that have no means to pay and not having to pay for the data twice—once through taxes to create the data in the first place and again at the user level . Finally, access to factual data can improve governance, leading to better decision making by policymakers, improved oversight by constituents, and digital repatriation of objects held by former colonial powers.
Some of these benefits are cited directly in the policy statements themselves, while others are developed more fully in other documents (Bailey Mathae and Uhlir 2012, Uhlir 2015). Of course, not all publicly funded data and information can be made available and there are appropriate reasons—such as the protection of national security, personal privacy, commercial concerns, and confidentiality of all kinds—that make the withholding of them legal and ethical. However, the default rule should be one of openness, balanced against a legitimate reason not to make the data public….(More)”
Doctors’ Individual Opioid Prescription ‘Report Cards’ Show Impact
Scott Calvert at the Wall Street Journal: “Several states, including Arizona, Kentucky and Ohio, are using their state prescription monitoring databases to send doctors individualized “report cards” that show how their prescribing of addictive opioids and other drugs compares with their peers.
“Arizona probably has the most complete one out there right now—it’s pretty impressive,” said Patrick Knue, director of the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program Training and Technical Assistance Center at Brandeis University, which helps states improve their databases.
Arizona’s quarterly reports rate a doctor’s prescribing of oxycodone and certain other drugs as normal, high, severe or extreme compared with the state’s other doctors in his medical specialty.
During a two-year pilot program, the number of opiate prescriptions fell 10% in five counties while rising in other counties, said Dean Wright, former head of the state’s prescription-monitoring program. The report cards also contributed to a 4% drop in overdose deaths in the pilot counties, he said.
The state now issues the report cards statewide and in June sent notices to more than 13,000 doctors statewide. Mr. Wright said the message is clear: “Stop and think about what you’re prescribing and the impact it can have.”
The report cards list statistics such as how many of a doctor’s patients received controlled substances from five or more doctors. Elizabeth Dodge, Mr. Wright’s successor, said some doctors ask for the patients’ names—information they might have gleaned from the database….(More)”