Open-Data Project Adds Transparency to African Elections

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jessica Weiss at the International Center for Journalists: “An innovative tool developed to help people register to vote in Kenya is proving to be a valuable asset to voters across the African continent.

GotToVote was created in 2012 by two software developers under the guidance of ICFJ’s Knight International Journalism Fellow Justin Arenstein for use during Kenya’s general elections. In just 24 hours, the developers took voter registration information in a government PDF and turned it into a simple website with usable data that helped people locate the nearest voting center where they could register for elections. Kenyan media drove a large audience to the site, which resulted in a major boost in voter registrations.

Since then, GotToVote has helped people register to vote in Malawi and Zimbabwe. Now, it is being adapted for use in national elections in Ghana and Uganda in 2016.

Ugandan civic groups led by The African Freedom of Information Centre are planning to use it to help people register, to verify registrations and for SMS registration drives. They are also proposing new features—including digital applications to help citizens post issues of concern and compare political positions between parties and candidates so voters better understand the choices they are being offered.

In Ghana, GotToVote is helping citizens find their nearest registration center to make sure they are eligible to vote in that country’s 2016 national elections. The tool, which is optimized for mobile devices, makes voter information easily accessible to the public. It explains who is eligible to register for the 2016 general elections and gives a simple overview of the voter registration process. It also tells users what documentation to take with them to register…..

Last year, Malawi’s national government used GotToVote to check whether voters were correctly registered. As a result, more than 20,000 were found to be incorrectly registered, because they were not qualified voters or were registered in the wrong constituency. In 2013, thousands used GotToVote via their mobile and tablet devices to find their polling places in Zimbabwe.

The successful experiment provides a number of lessons about the power and feasibility of open data projects, showing that they don’t require large teams, big budgets or a lot of time to build…(More)“

Open Research, Open Data, Open Humans

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ernesto Ramirez at Quantified Self: ….“Open Humans aims to break down data silos in human health and research. We believe data has a huge potential to live and grow beyond the boundaries a single study or program. Our online portal allows members to aggregate data from the research they participate in. By connecting individuals willing to share existing research data about themselves with researchers who are interested in using that data, data can be re-used and built upon.” — OpenHumans.org

On March 24, 2015 the Open Humans Network officially opened their virtual doors and began allowing individuals to sign up and engage in a new model of participatory research. We spoke with Co-founder & Principal Investigator of the Public Data Sharing study, Madeleine Ball, Ph.D. about Open Humans, what it means for research, and what we can look foward to from this exciting initiative. The following is an edited transcript of that conversation….

What excites me about Open Humans is the potential we have to transform future research studies — from how they treat data to how they think about data sharing. We’re building our system so that participants are central to the data process. A good example of this when researchers use our member’s data they must also agree to return any new data that results from their research back to the original participant. This decentralization of data is a key component of our design. No single person, researchers, or study has all the data…(More)

Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities.

A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions. Cities can be more sustainable, while its users save money and time when they are choosing a new home.

Not everyone is eager to read long lists of raw data. Therefore they created appealing user-friendly maps that visualize the statistics. Offering the user fast and accessible information on the neighborhoods that matter to them.

Another cornerstone of PlaceILive is their Life Quality Index: an algorithm that takes aspects like transportation, safety, and affordability into account. Making it possible for people to easily compare the livability of different houses. You can read more on the methodology and sources here.

life quality index press release

In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. When you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know more about by borough, zip code, or address. Using New York as an example, it looks like this….(More)

Modeling Mobility with Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Book edited by Behrisch, Michael, and Weber, Melanie: “This contributed volume contains the conference proceedings of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) conference 2014, Berlin. The included research papers cover a wide range of topics in traffic planning and simulation, including open data, vehicular communication, e-mobility, urban mobility, multimodal traffic as well as usage approaches. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

An In-Depth Analysis of Open Data Portals as an Emerging Public E-Service

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Martin Lnenicka: “Governments collect and produce large amounts of data. Increasingly, governments worldwide have started to implement open data initiatives and also launch open data portals to enable the release of these data in open and reusable formats. Therefore, a large number of open data repositories, catalogues and portals have been emerging in the world. The greater availability of interoperable and linkable open government data catalyzes secondary use of such data, so they can be used for building useful applications which leverage their value, allow insight, provide access to government services, and support transparency. The efficient development of successful open data portals makes it necessary to evaluate them systematic, in order to understand them better and assess the various types of value they generate, and identify the required improvements for increasing this value. Thus, the attention of this paper is directed particularly to the field of open data portals. The main aim of this paper is to compare the selected open data portals on the national level using content analysis and propose a new evaluation framework, which further improves the quality of these portals. It also establishes a set of considerations for involving businesses and citizens to create eservices and applications that leverage on the datasets available from these portals….(More)”

Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.

Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship

This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.

This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.

Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:

  • all 28 current members of the European Union ;
  • 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland

This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…

The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.

Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:

  • the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
  • the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
  • the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)

UNESCO demonstrates global impact through new transparency portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Opendata.UNESCO.org  is intended to present comprehensive, quality and timely information about UNESCO’s projects, enabling users to find information by country/region, funding source, and sector and providing comprehensive project data, including budget, expenditure, completion status, implementing organization, project documents, and more. It publishes program and financial information that are in line with UN system-experience of the IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) standards and other relevant transparency initiatives. UNESCO is now part of more than 230 organizations that have published to the IATI Registry, which brings together donor and developing countries, civil society organizations and other experts in aid information who are committed to working together to increase the transparency of aid.

Since its creation 70 years ago, UNESCO has tirelessly championed the causes of education, culture, natural sciences, social and human sciences, communication and information, globally. For instance – started in March 2010, the program for the Enhancement of Literacy in Afghanistan (ELA) benefited from a $19.5 million contribution by Japan. It aimed to improve the level of literacy, numeracy and vocational skills of the adult population in 70 districts of 15 provinces of Afghanistan. Over the next three years, until April 2013, the ELA programme helped some 360,000 adult learners in General Literacy compotency. An interactive map allows for an easy identification of UNESCO’s high-impact programs, and up-to-date information of current and future aid allocations within and across countries.

Public participation and interactivity are key to the success of any open data project. http://Opendata.UNESCO.org will evolve as Member States and partners will get involved, by displaying data on their own websites and sharing data among different networks, building and sharing applications, providing feedback, comments, and recommendations. …(More)”

31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils  and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.

The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.

Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(More)”

Study to examine Australian businesses’ use of government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ComputerWorld: “The New York University’s GovLab and the federal Department of Communications have embarked on a study of how Australian organisations are employing government data sets.

The ‘Open Data 500’ study was launched today at the Locate15 conference. It aims to provide a basis for assessing the value of open data and encourage the development of new businesses based on open data, as well as encourage discussion about how to make government data more useful to businesses and not-for-profit organisations.

The study is part of a series of studies taking place under the auspices of the OD500 Global Network.

“This study will help ensure the focus of Government is on the publication of high value datasets, with an emphasis on quality rather than quantity,” a statement issued by the Department of Communications said.

“Open Data 500 advances the government’s policy of increasing the number of high value public datasets in Australia in an effort to drive productivity and innovation, as well as its commitment to greater consultation with private sector stakeholders on open data,” Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said in remarks prepared for the Locate 15 conference….(More)”

The Data Disclosure Decision

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The CIO Council Innovation Committee has released its first Open Data case study, The Data Disclosure Decision, showcasing the Department of Education (Education) Disclosure Review Board.
The Department of Education is a national warehouse for open data across a decentralized educational system, managing and exchanging education related data from across the country. Education collects large amounts of aggregate data at the state, district, and school level, disaggregated by a number of demographic variables. A majority of the data Education collects is considered personally identifiable information (PII), making data disclosure avoidance plans a mandatory component of Education’s data releases. With their expansive data sets and a need to protect sensitive information, Education quickly realized the need to organize and standardize their data disclosure protocol.
Education formally established the Data Disclosure Board with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signing their Charter in August 2013. Since its inception, the Disclosure Review Board has recognized substantial successes and has greatly increased the volume and quality of data being released. Education’s Disclosure Review Board is continually learning through its open data journey and improving their approach through cultural change and leadership buy-in.
Learn more about Education’s Data Review Board’s story by reading The Data Disclosure Decision where you will find the full account of their experience and what they learned along the way. Read The Data Disclosure Decision “