Putting Government Data to Work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

U.S. Department of Commerce Press Release: “The Governance Lab (GovLab) at New York University today released “Realizing The Potential of Open Government Data: A Roundtable with the U.S. Department of Commerce,” a report on findings and recommendations for ways the U.S. Commerce Department can improve its data management, dissemination and use. The report summarizes a June 2014 Open Data Roundtable, co-hosted by The GovLab and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy with the Commerce Department, which brought together Commerce data providers and 25 representatives from the private sector and nonprofit organizations for an action-oriented dialogue on data issues and potential solutions. The GovLab is convening a series of other Open Data Roundtables in its mission to help make government more effective and connected to the public through technology.

“We were honored to work with the White House and the Department of Commerce to convene this event,” said Joel Gurin, senior advisor at The GovLab and project director of the Open Data 500 and the Roundtable Series. “The Department’s commitment to engaging with its data customers opens up great opportunities for public-private collaboration.”
Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs Mark Doms said, “At the Commerce Department, we are only at the beginning of our open data effort. We share the goals and objectives embodied by the call of the Open Data 500: to deliver data that is valuable to industry and that provides greater economic opportunity for millions of Americans.” …”

Canada's Action Plan on Open Government 2014-2016

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Draft action plan: “Canada’s second Action Plan on Open Government consists of twelve commitments that will advance open government principles in Canada over the next two years and beyond. The Directive on Open Government, new policy direction to federal departments and agencies on open government, will provide foundational support for each of the additional commitments which fall under three streams: Open Data, Open Information, and Open Dialogue.
Figure 1: Our Commitments
Open Government Directive Diagram

 

More:

Table of Contents

 
 

Brazilian Government Develops Toolkit to Guide Institutions in both Planning and Carrying Out Open Data Initatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Nitai Silva at the Open Knowledge Blog: “Recently Brazilian government released the Kit de Dados Abertos (open data toolkit). The toolkit is made up of documents describing the process, methods and techniques for implementing an open data policy within an institution. Its goal is to both demystify the logic of opening up data and to share with public employees observed best practices that have emerged from a number of Brazilian government initiatives.

The toolkit focuses on the Plano de Dados Abertos – PDA (Open Data Plan) as the guiding instrument where commitments, agenda and policy implementation cycles in the institution are registered. We believe that making each public agency build it’s own PDA is a way to perpetuate the open data policy, making it a state policy and not just a transitory governmental action.
It is organized to facilitate the implementation of the main activities cycles that must be observed in an institution and provides links and manuals to assist in these activities. Emphasis is given to the actors/roles involved in each step and their responsibilities. It also helps to define a central person to monitor and maintain the PDA. The following diagram summarizes the macro steps of implementing an open data policy in an institution:
 

Hey Uncle Sam, Eat Your Own Dogfood

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Anthea Watson Strong  at Medium: “It’s been five years since Tim O’Reilly published his screed on Government as Platform. In that time, we’ve seen “civic tech” and “open data” gain in popularity and acceptance. The Federal Government has an open data platform, data.gov. And so too do states and municipalities across America. Code for America is the hottest thing around, and the healthcare.gov fiasco landed fixing public technology as a top concern in government. We’ve successfully laid the groundwork for a new kind of government technology. We’re moving towards a day when, rather than building user facing technology, the government opens up interfaces to data that allows the private sector to create applications and websites that consume public data and surface it to users.

However, we appear to have stalled out a bit in our progress towards government as platform. It’s incredibly difficult to ingest the data for successful commercial products. The kaleidoscope of data formats in open data portals like data.gov might politely be called ‘obscure’, and perhaps more accurately, ‘perversely unusable’. Some of the data hasn’t been updated since first publication, and is quite positively too stale to use. If documentation exists, most of the time it’s incomprehensible….

What we actually need, is for Uncle Sam to start dogfooding his own open data.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, dogfooding is a slang term used by engineers who are using their own product. So, for example, Google employees use Gmail and Google Drive to organize their own work. This term also applies to engineering teams that consume their public APIs to access internal data. Dogfooding helps teams deeply understand their own work from the same perspective as external users. It also provides a keen incentive to make products work well.

Dogfooding is the golden rule of platforms. And currently, open government portals are flagrantly violating this golden rule. I’ve asked around, and I can’t find a single example of a government entity consuming the data they publish…”

Open Data Beyond the Big City

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at PBS MediaShift: “…Open data is the future — of how we govern, of how public services are delivered, of how governments engage with those that they serve. And right now, it is unevenly distributed. I think there is a strong argument to be made that data standards can provide a number of benefits to small and midsized municipal governments and could provide a powerful incentive for these governments to adopt open data.
One way we can use standards to drive the adoption of open data is to partner with companies like Yelp, Zillow, Google and others that can use open data to enhance their services. But how do we get companies with 10s and 100s of millions of users to take an interest in data from smaller municipal governments?
In a word – standards.

Why do we care about cities?

When we talk about open data, it’s important to keep in mind that there is a lot of good work happening at the federal, state and local levels all over the country — plenty of states and even counties doing good things on the open data front, but for me it’s important to evaluate where we are on open data with respect to cities.
States typically occupy a different space in the service delivery ecosystem than cities, and the kinds of data that they typically make available can be vastly different from city data. State capitals are often far removed from our daily lives and we may hear about them only when a budget is adopted or when the state legislature takes up a controversial issue.
In cities, the people that represent and serve us us can be our neighbors — the guy behind you at the car wash, or the woman who’s child is in you son’s preschool class. Cities matter.
As cities go, we need to consider carefully that importance of smaller cities — there are a lot more of them than large cities and a non-trivial number of people live in them….”

New Data for a New Energy Future

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(This post originally appeared on the blog of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.)

Two growing concerns—climate change and U.S. energy self-sufficiency—have accelerated the search for affordable, sustainable approaches to energy production and use. In this area, as in many others, data-driven innovation is a key to progress. Data scientists are working to help improve energy efficiency and make new forms of energy more economically viable, and are building new, profitable businesses in the process.
In the same way that government data has been used by other kinds of new businesses, the Department of Energy is releasing data that can help energy innovators. At a recent “Energy Datapalooza” held by the department, John Podesta, counselor to the President, summed up the rationale: “Just as climate data will be central to helping communities prepare for climate change, energy data can help us reduce the harmful emissions that are driving climate change.” With electric power accounting for one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, the opportunities for improvement are great.
The GovLab has been studying the business applications of public government data, or “open data,” for the past year. The resulting study, the Open Data 500, now provides structured, searchable information on more than 500 companies that use open government data as a key business driver. A review of those results shows four major areas where open data is creating new business opportunities in energy and is likely to build many more in the near future.

Commercial building efficiency
Commercial buildings are major energy consumers, and energy costs are a significant business expense. Despite programs like LEED Certification, many commercial buildings waste large amounts of energy. Now a company called FirstFuel, based in Boston, is using open data to drive energy efficiency in these buildings. At the Energy Datapalooza, Swap Shah, the company’s CEO, described how analyzing energy data together with geospatial, weather, and other open data can give a very accurate view of a building’s energy consumption and ways to reduce it. (Sometimes the solution is startlingly simple: According to Shah, the largest source of waste is running heating and cooling systems at the same time.) Other companies are taking on the same kind of task – like Lucid, which provides an operating system that can track a building’s energy use in an integrated way.

Home energy use
A number of companies are finding data-driven solutions for homeowners who want to save money by reducing their energy usage. A key to success is putting together measurements of energy use in the home with public data on energy efficiency solutions. PlotWatt, for example, promises to help consumers “save money with real-time energy tracking” through the data it provides. One of the best-known companies in this area, Opower, uses a psychological strategy: it simultaneously gives people access to their own energy data and lets them compare their energy use to their neighbors’ as an incentive to save. Opower partners with utilities to provide this information, and the Virginia-based company has been successful enough to open offices in San Francisco, London, and Singapore. Soon more and more people will have access to data on their home energy use: Green Button, a government-promoted program implemented by utilities, now gives about 100 million Americans data about their energy consumption.

Solar power and renewable energy
As solar power becomes more efficient and affordable, a number of companies are emerging to support this energy technology. Clean Power Finance, for example, uses its database to connect solar entrepreneurs with sources of capital. In a different way, a company called Solar Census is analyzing publicly available data to find exactly where solar power can be produced most efficiently. The kind of analysis that used to require an on-site survey over several days can now be done in less than a minute with their algorithms.
Other kinds of geospatial and weather data can support other forms of renewable energy. The data will make it easier to find good sites for wind power stations, water sources for small-scale hydroelectric projects, and the best opportunities to tap geothermal energy.

Supporting new energy-efficient vehicles
The Tesla and other electric vehicles are becoming commercially viable, and we will soon see even more efficient vehicles on the road. Toyota has announced that its first fuel-cell cars, which run on hydrogen, will be commercially available by mid-2015, and other auto manufacturers have announced plans to develop fuel-cell vehicles as well. But these vehicles can’t operate without a network to supply power, be it electricity for a Tesla battery or hydrogen for a fuel cell.
It’s a chicken-and-egg problem: People won’t buy large numbers of electric or fuel-cell cars unless they know they can power them, and power stations will be scarce until there are enough vehicles to support their business. Now some new companies are facilitating this transition by giving drivers data-driven tools to find and use the power sources they need. Recargo, for example, provides tools to help electric car owners find charging stations and operate their vehicles.
The development of new energy sources will involve solving social, political, economic, and technological issues. Data science can help develop solutions and bring us more quickly to a new kind of energy future.
Joel Gurin, senior advisor at the GovLab and project director, Open Data 500. He also currently serves as a fellow of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Driving Innovation With Open Data

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Research Article by The GovLab’s Joel Gurin (Chapter 6 in the report, “The Future of Data-Driven Innovation.”):  The chapters in this report provide ample evidence of the power of data and its business potential. But like any business resource, data is only valuable if the benefit of using it outweighs its cost. Data collection, management, distribution, quality control, and application all come at a price—a potential obstacle for companies of any size, though especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Over the last several years, however, the “I” of data’s return on investment (ROI) has become less of a hurdle, and new data-driven companies are developing rapidly as a result. One major reason is that governments at the federal, state, and local level are making more data available at little or no charge for the private sector and the public to use. Governments collect data of all kinds—including scientific, demographic, and financial data—at taxpayer expense.
Now, public sector agencies and departments are increasingly repaying that public investment by making their data available to all for free or at a low cost. This is Open Data. While there are still costs in putting the data to use, the growing availability of this national resource is becoming a significant driver for hundreds of new businesses. This chapter describes the growing potential of Open Data and the data-driven innovation it supports, the types of data and applications that are most promising, and the policies that will encourage innovation going forward. Read and download this article in PDF format. “

Open Data as Universal Service. New perspectives in the Information Profession

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Paper by L. Fernando Ramos Simón et al in Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences: “The Internet provides a global information flow, which improves living conditions in poor countries as well as in rich countries. Owing to its abundance and quality, public information (meteorological, geographic, transport information. and also the content managed in libraries, archives and museums) is an incentive for change, becoming invaluable and accessible to all citizens. However, it is clear that Open Data plays a significant role and provides a business service in the digital economy. Nevertheless, it is unknown how this amount of public data may be introduced as universal service to make it available to all citizens in matters of education, health, culture . In fact, a function or role which has traditionally been assumed by libraries. In addition, information professionals will have to acquire new skills that enable them to assume a new role in the information management: data management (Open Data) and content management (Open Content). Thus, this study analyzes new roles, which will be assumed by new information professionals such as metadata, interoperability, access licenses, information search and retrieval tools and applications for data queries…”

Why the Open Definition Matters for Open Data: Quality, Compatibility and Simplicity

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Rufus Pollock at Open Knowledge: “The Open Definition performs an essential function as a “standard”, ensuring that when you say “open data” and I say “open data” we both mean the same thing. This standardization, in turn, ensures the quality, compatibility and simplicity essential to realizing one of the main practical benefits of “openness”: the greatly increased ability to combine different datasets together to drive innovation, insight and change. …
However, these benefits are at significant risk both from quality-dilution and “open-washing”” (non-open data being passed off as open) as well as from fragmentation of the ecosystem as the proliferation of open licenses each with their own slightly different terms and conditions leads to incompatibility. The Open Definition helps eliminates these risks and ensure we realize the full benefits of open. It acts as the “gold standard” for open content and data guaranteeing quality and preventing incompatibility. This post explores in more detail why it’s important to have the Open Definition and the clear standard it provides for what “open” means in open data and open content…”

Uncovering State And Local Gov’s 15 Hidden Successes

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Emily Jarvis at GovLoop: “From garbage trucks to vacant lots, cities and states are often tasked with the thankless job of cleaning up a community’s mess. These are tasks that are often overlooked, but are critical to keeping a community vibrant.
But even in these sometimes thankless jobs, there are real innovations happening. Take Miami-Dade County where they are using hybrid garbage trucks to save the community millions of dollars in fuel every year and make the environment a little cleaner. Or head over to Milwaukee where the city is turning vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms.
There are just two of the fifteen examples, GovLoop uncovered in our new guide, From the State House to the County Clerk – 15 Challenges and Success Stories.
We have broken the challenges into four categories:

  • Internal Best Practices
  • Tech Challenges
  • Health and Safety
  • Community Engagement and Outreach

Here’s another example, the open data movement has the potential to effect governing and civic engagement at the state and local government levels. But today very few agencies are actively providing open data. In fact, only 46 U.S. cities and counties have open data sites. One of the cities on the leading edge of the open data movement is Fort Worth, Texas.

“When I came into office, that was one of my campaign promises, that we would get Fort Worth into this century on technology and that we would take a hard look at open records requests and requests for data,” Mayor Betsy Price said in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “It goes a lot further to being transparent and letting people participate in their government and see what we are doing. It is the people’s data, and it should be easy to access.”

The website, data.fortworthtexas.gov, offers data and documents such as certificates of occupancy, development permits and residential permits for download in several formats, including Excel and PDF. Not all datasets are available yet — the city said its priority was to put the most-requested data on the portal first. Next up? Crime data, code violations, restaurant ratings and capital projects progress.

City officials’ ultimate goal is to create and adopt a full open data policy. As part of the launch, they are also looking for local software developers and designers who want to help guide the open data initiative. Those interested in participating can sign up online to receive more information….”