for the Privacy Advisor: “The City of Seattle this week launched a citywide privacy initiative aimed at providing greater transparency into the city’s data collection and use practices.
To that end, the city has convened a group of stakeholders, the Privacy Advisory Committee, comprising various government departments, to look at the ways the city is using data collected from practices as common as utility bill payments and renewing pet licenses or during the administration of emergency services like police and fire. By this summer, the committee will deliver the City Council suggested principles and a “privacy statement” to provide direction on privacy practices citywide.
In addition, the city has partnered with the University of Washington, where Jan Whittington, assistant professor of urban design and planning and associate director at the Center for Information Assurance and Cybersecurity, has been given a $50,000 grant to look at open data, privacy and digital equity and how municipal data collection could harm consumers.
Responsible for all things privacy in this progressive city is Michael Mattmiller, who was hired to the position of chief technology officer (CTO) for the City of Seattle in June. Before his current gig, he worked as a senior strategist in enterprise cloud privacy for Microsoft. He said it’s an exciting time to be at the helm of the office because there’s momentum, there’s talent and there’s intention.
“We’re at this really interesting time where we have a City Council that strongly cares about privacy … We have a new police chief who wants to be very good on privacy … We also have a mayor who is focused on the city being an innovative leader in the way we interact with the public,” he said.
In fact, some City Council members have taken it upon themselves to meet with various groups and coalitions. “We have a really good, solid environment we think we can leverage to do something meaningful,” Mattmiller said….
Armbruster said the end goal is to create policies that will hold weight over time.
“I think when looking at privacy principles, from an ethical foundation, the idea is to create something that will last while technology dances around us,” she said, adding the principles should answer the question, “What do we stand for as a city and how do we want to move forward? So any technology that falls into our laps, we can evaluate and tailor or perhaps take a pass on as it falls under our ethical framework.”
The bottom line, Mattmiller said, is making a decision that says something about Seattle and where it stands.
“How do we craft a privacy policy that establishes who we want to be as a city and how we want to operate?” Mattmiller asked.”
OpenUp Corporate Data while Protecting Privacy
Much of the data generated by these devices is today controlled by corporations. These companies are in effect “owners” of terabytes of data and metadata. Companies use this data to aggregate, analyze, and track individual preferences, provide more targeted consumer experiences, and add value to the corporate bottom line.
At the same time, even as we witness a rapid “datafication” of the global economy, access to data is emerging as an increasingly critical issue, essential to addressing many of our most important social, economic, and political challenges. While the rise of the Open Data movement has opened up over a million datasets around the world, much of this openness is limited to government (and, to a lesser extent, scientific) data. Access to corporate data remains extremely limited. This is a lost opportunity. If corporate data—in the form of Web clicks, tweets, online purchases, sensor data, call data records, etc.—were made available in a de-identified and aggregated manner, researchers, public interest organizations, and third parties would gain greater insights on patterns and trends that could help inform better policies and lead to greater public good (including combatting Ebola).
Corporate data sharing holds tremendous promise. But its potential—and limitations—are also poorly understood. In what follows, we share early findings of our efforts to map this emerging open data frontier, along with a set of reflections on how to safeguard privacy and other citizen and consumer rights while sharing. Understanding the practice of shared corporate data—and assessing the associated risks—is an essential step in increasing access to socially valuable data held by businesses today. This is a challenge certainly worth exploring during the forthcoming OpenUp conference!
Understanding and classifying current corporate data sharing practices
Corporate data sharing remains very much a fledgling field. There has been little rigorous analysis of different ways or impacts of sharing. Nonetheless, our initial mapping of the landscape suggests there have been six main categories of activity—i.e., ways of sharing—to date:…
Assessing risks of corporate data sharing
Although the shared corporate data offers several benefits for researchers, public interest organizations, and other companies, there do exist risks, especially regarding personally identifiable information (PII). When aggregated, PII can serve to help understand trends and broad demographic patterns. But if PII is inadequately scrubbed and aggregated data is linked to specific individuals, this can lead to identity theft, discrimination, profiling, and other violations of individual freedom. It can also lead to significant legal ramifications for corporate data providers….”
Could digital badges clarify the roles of co-authors?
at AAAS Science Magazine: “Ever look at a research paper and wonder how the half-dozen or more authors contributed to the work? After all, it’s usually only the first or last author who gets all the media attention or the scientific credit when people are considered for jobs, grants, awards, and more. Some journals try to address this issue with the “authors’ contributions” sections within a paper, but a collection of science, publishing, and software groups is now developing a more modern solution—digital “badges,” assigned on publication of a paper online, that detail what each author did for the work and that the authors can link to their profiles elsewhere on the Web.
Those organizations include publishers BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science; The Wellcome Trust research charity; software development groups Mozilla Science Lab (a group of researchers, developers, librarians, and publishers) and Digital Science (a software and technology firm); and ORCID, an effort to assign researchers digital identifiers. The collaboration presented its progress on the project at the Mozilla Festival in London that ended last week. (Mozilla is the open software community behind the Firefox browser and other programs.)
The infrastructure of the badges is still being established, with early prototypes scheduled to launch early next year, according to Amye Kenall, the journal development manager of open data initiatives and journals at BioMed Central. She envisions the badge process in the following way: Once an article is published, the publisher would alert software maintained by Mozilla to automatically set up an online form, where authors fill out roles using a detailed contributor taxonomy. After the authors have completed this, the badges would then appear next to their names on the journal article, and double-clicking on a badge would lead to the ORCID site for that particular author, where the author’s badges, integrated with their publishing record, live….
The parties behind the digital badge effort are “looking to change behavior” of scientists in the competitive dog-eat-dog world of academia by acknowledging contributions, says Kaitlin Thaney, director of Mozilla Science Lab. Amy Brand, vice president of academic and research relations and VP of North America at Digital Science, says that the collaboration believes that the badges should be optional, to accommodate old-fashioned or less tech-savvy authors. She says that the digital credentials may improve lab culture, countering situations where junior scientists are caught up in lab politics and the “star,” who didn’t do much of the actual research apart from obtaining the funding, gets to be the first author of the paper and receive the most credit. “All of this calls out for more transparency,” Brand says….”
Open Data – Searching for the right questions
Talk by Boyan Yurukov at TEDxBG: “Working on various projects Boyan started a sort of a quest for better transparency. It came with the promise of access that would yield answers to what is wrong and what is right with governments today. Over time, he realized that better transparency and more open data bring us almost no relevant answers. Instead, we get more questions and that’s great news. Questions help us see what is relevant, what is hidden, what our assumptions are. That’s the true value of data.
Boyan Yurukov is a software engineer and open data advocate based in Frankfurt. Graduated Computational Engineering with Data Mining from TU Darmstadt. Involved in data liberation, crowd sourcing and visualization projects focused on various issues in Bulgaria as well as open data legislation….
Ten Leaders In the Civic Space
List Developed by SeeClickFix:
5. OpenGov Hub
The OpenGov Hub seeks to bring together existing small and medium-sized organizations working on the broader open government agenda. …
Learn more about them here on their website.
6. Blexting
Blexting is a mobile app that lets individuals photographically survey properties and update condition information for posting and sharing. …
Read another article about them here.
9. Emerging Local Government Leaders
ELGL is a group of innovative local government leaders who are hungry to make an impact. …
Learn more about them here on their website.
10. ArchiveSocial
ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution that automates record keeping from social media networks like Facebook and Twitter. ….
Learn more about them here on their website.”
VoteATX
PressRelease: “Local volunteers have released a free application that helps Austin area residents find the best place to vote. The application, Vote ATX, is available at http://voteatx.us
Travis County voters have many options for voting. The Vote ATX application tries to answer the simple question, “Where is the best place I can go vote right now?” The application is location and calendar aware, and helps identify available voting places – even mobile voting locations that move during the day.
The City of Austin has incorporated the Vote ATX technology to power the voting place finder on its election page at http://www.austintexas.gov/vote
The Vote ATX application was developed by volunteers at Open Austin, and is provided as a free public service. …Open Austin is a citizen volunteer group that promotes open government, open data, and civic application development in Austin, Texas. Open Austin was formed in 2009 by citizens interested in the City of Austin web strategy. Open Austin is non-partisan and non-endorsing. It has conducted voter outreach campaigns in every City of Austin municipal election since 2011. Open Austin is on the web at www.open-austin.org“
USAID establishes its first open data policy
Billy Mitchell at FedScoop: “The U.S. Agency for International Development jumped on the open data wave last week, announcing its first-ever policy to share its data sets and tools with the public on a central repository.
Referred to as Automated Directives System 579, the open data policy is a hat tip to President Barack Obama’s directive on transparency and open government five years ago and comes after the agency’s Frontiers in Development Forum in September addressing pathways for innovation for its mission to provide support to impoverished countries. With the new policy, USAID will provide a framework to open its agency-funded data to the public and publish it in a central location, making it easy to consume and use.
“USAID has long been a data-driven and evidence-based Agency, but never has the need been greater to share our data with a diverse set of partners—including the general public—to improve development outcomes,” wrote Angelique Crumbly, USAID’s performance improvement officer, and Brandon Pustejovsky, chief data officer for USAID, in a blog post. “For the first time in history, we have the tools, technologies and approaches to end extreme poverty within two decades. And while many of these new innovations were featured at our recent Frontiers in Development Forum, we also recognize that they largely rely on an ongoing stream of data (and new insights generated by that data) to ensure their appropriate application.”…
USAID’s DDL and open data will be hosted on the USAID website, where there’s already a long list of databases hosted. USAID also started a GitHub page for any feedback on the data”
European Union Open Data Portal
About: “The European Union Open Data Portal is the single point of access to a growing range of data from the institutions and other bodies of the European Union (EU). Data are free for you to use and reuse for commercial or non-commercial purposes.
By providing easy and free access to data, the portal aims to promote their innovative use and unleash their economic potential. It also aims to help foster the transparency and the accountability of the institutions and other bodies of the EU.
The EU Open Data Portal is managed by the Publications Office of the European Union. Implementation of the EU’s open data policy is the responsibility of the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission.
By providing easy and free access to data, the portal aims to promote their innovative use and unleash their economic potential. It also aims to help foster the transparency and the accountability of the institutions and other bodies of the EU.
The EU Open Data Portal is managed by the Publications Office of the European Union. Implementation of the EU’s open data policy is the responsibility of the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology of the European Commission.
What can I find on the portal?
The portal provides a metadata catalogue giving access to data from the institutions and other bodies of the EU. To facilitate reuse, these metadata are based on common encoding rules and standardized vocabularies.To learn more, see Linked Data.
Data are available in both human and machine readable formats for immediate reuse. You will also find a selection of applications built around EU data.To learn more, see Applications.How can I reuse these data?
As a general principle, you can reuse data free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged (see legal notice).Specific conditions on reuse, related mostly to the protection of third-party intellectual property rights, apply to a small number of data. A link to these conditions is displayed on the relevant data pages.
How can I participate in the portal?
Another important goal of the portal is to engage with the user community around EU open data. You can participate by:
The portal provides a metadata catalogue giving access to data from the institutions and other bodies of the EU. To facilitate reuse, these metadata are based on common encoding rules and standardized vocabularies.To learn more, see Linked Data.
Data are available in both human and machine readable formats for immediate reuse. You will also find a selection of applications built around EU data.To learn more, see Applications.How can I reuse these data?
As a general principle, you can reuse data free of charge, provided that the source is acknowledged (see legal notice).Specific conditions on reuse, related mostly to the protection of third-party intellectual property rights, apply to a small number of data. A link to these conditions is displayed on the relevant data pages.
How can I participate in the portal?
Another important goal of the portal is to engage with the user community around EU open data. You can participate by:
- suggesting datasets,
- giving your feedback and suggestions, and
- sharing your apps or the use you have made with the data from the portal.
Open Access Button
About the Open Access Button: “The key functions of the Open Access Button are finding free research, making more research available and also advocacy. Here’s how each works.
Finding free papers
Research published in journals that require you to pay to read can sometimes be accessed free in other places. These other copies are often very similar to the published version, but may lack nice formatting or be a version prior to peer review. These copies can be found in research repositories, on authors websites and many other places because they’re archived. To find these versions we identify the paper a user needs and effectively search on Google Scholar and CORE to find these copies and link them to the users.
Making more research, or information about papers available
If a free copy isn’t available we aim to make one. This is not a simple task and so we have to use a few different innovative strategies. First, we email the author of the research and ask them to make a copy of the research available – once they do this we’ll send it to everyone who needs it. Second, we create pages for each paper needed which, if shared, viewed, and linked to an author could see and provide their paper on. Third, we’re building ways to find associated information about a paper such as the facts contained, comments from people who’ve read it, related information and lay summaries.
Advocacy
Unfortunately the Open Access Button can only do so much, and isn’t a perfect or long term solution to this problem. The data and stories collected by the Button are used to help make the changes required to really solve this issue. We also support campaigns and grassroots advocates with this at openaccessbutton.org/action..”
Open data for open lands
at Radar: “President Obama’s well-publicized national open data policy (pdf) makes it clear that government data is a valuable public resource for which the government should be making efforts to maximize access and use. This policy was based on lessons from previous government open data success stories, such as weather data and GPS, which form the basis for countless commercial services that we take for granted today and that deliver enormous value to society. (You can see an impressive list of companies reliant on open government data via GovLab’s Open Data 500 project.)
Based on this open data policy, I’ve been encouraging entrepreneurs to invest their time and ingenuity to explore entrepreneurial opportunities based on government data. I’ve even invested (through O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures) in one such start-up, Hipcamp, which provides user-friendly interfaces to making reservations at national and state parks.
A better system is sorely needed. The current reservation system, managed by the Active Network / Reserve America is clunky and almost unusable. Hipcamp changes all that, making it a breeze to reserve camping spots.
But now this is under threat. Active Network / Reserve America’s 10-year contract is up for renewal, and the Department of the Interior had promised an RFP for a new contract that conformed with the open data mandate. Ideally, that RFP would require an API so that independent companies could provide alternate interfaces, just like travel sites provide booking interfaces for air travel, hotels, and more. That explosion of consumer convenience should be happening for customers of our nation’s parks as well, don’t you think?…”