Opening Health Data: What Do Researchers Want? Early Experiences With New York's Open Health Data Platform.

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Paper by Martin, Erika G. PhD, MPH; Helbig, Natalie PhD, MPA; and Birkhead, Guthrie S. MD, MPH in the Journal of Public Health Management & Practice: “Governments are rapidly developing open data platforms to improve transparency and make information more accessible. New York is a leader, with currently the only state platform devoted to health. Although these platforms could build public health departments’ capabilities to serve more researchers, agencies have little guidance on releasing meaningful and usable data.

Objective: Structured focus groups with researchers and practitioners collected stakeholder feedback on potential uses of open health data and New York’s open data strategy….

Results: There was low awareness of open data, with 67% of researchers reporting never using open data portals prior to the workshop. Participants were interested in data sets that were geocoded, longitudinal, or aggregated to small area granularity and capabilities to link multiple data sets. Multiple environmental conditions and barriers hinder their capacity to use health data for research. Although open data platforms cannot address all barriers, they provide multiple opportunities for public health research and practice, and participants were overall positive about the state’s efforts to release open data.

Conclusions: Open data are not ideal for some researchers because they do not contain individually identifiable data, indicating a need for tiered data release strategies. However, they do provide important new opportunities to facilitate research and foster collaborations among agencies, researchers, and practitioners.”

City Service Development Kit (CitySDK)

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What is CitySDK?: “Helping cities to open their data and giving developers the tools they need, the CitySDK aims for a step change in how to deliver services in urban environments. With governments around the world looking at open data as a kick start for their economies, CitySDK provides better and easier ways for the cities throughout the Europe to release their data in a format that is easy for the developers to re-use.
Taking the best practices around the world the project will foresee the development of a toolkit – CitySDK v1.0 – that can be used by any city looking to create a sustainable infrastructure of “city apps”.
Piloting the CitySDK
The Project focuses on three Pilot domains: Smart Participation, Smart Mobility and Smart Tourism. Within each of the three domains, a large-scale Lead Pilot is carried out in one city. The experiences of the Lead Pilot will be applied in the Replication Pilots in other Partner cities.
Funding
CitySDK is a 6.8 million Euro project, part funded by the European Commission. It is a Pilot Type B within the ICT Policy Support Programme of the Competitiveness and Framework Programme. It runs from January 2012-October 2014.”

Using technology, data and crowdsourcing to hack infrastructure problems

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Courtney M. Fowler at CAFWD.ORG: “Technology has become a way of life for most Americans, not just for communication but also for many daily activities. However, there’s more that can be done than just booking a trip or crushing candy. With a majority of Americans now owning smartphones, it’s only becoming more obvious that there’s room for governments to engage the public and provide more bang for their buck via technology.
CA Fwd has been putting on an “Open Data roadshow” around the state to highlight ways the marriage of tech and info can make government more efficient and transparent.
Jurisdictions have also been discovering that using technology and smartphone apps can be beneficial in the pursuit of improving infrastructure. Saving any amount of money on such projects is especially important for California, where it’s been estimated the state will only have half of the $765 billion needed for infrastructure investments over the next decade.
One of the best examples of applying technology to infrastructure problems comes from South Carolina, where an innovative bridge-monitoring system is producing real savings, despite being in use on only eight bridges.
Girder sensors are placed on each bridge so that they can measure its carrying capacity and can be monitored 24/7. Although, the monitors don’t eliminate the need for inspections, the technology does make the need for them significantly less frequent. Data from the monitors also led the South Carolina Department of Transportation to correct one bridge’s problems with a $100,000 retrofit, rather than spending $800,000 to replace it…”
In total, having the monitors on just eight bridges, at a cost of about $50,000 per bridge, saved taxpayers $5 million.
That kind of innovation and savings is exactly what California needs to ensure that infrastructure projects happen in a more timely and efficient fashion in the future. It’s also what is driving civic innovators to bring together technology and crowdsourcing and make sure infrastructure projects also are results oriented.

Opportunities for strengthening open meetings with open data

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at the Sunlight Foundation Blog: “Governments aren’t alone in thinking about how open data can help improve the open meetings process. There are an increasing number of tools governments can use to help bolster open meetings with open data. From making public records generated by meetings more easily accessible and reusable online to inviting the public to participate in the decision-making process from wherever they may be, these tools allow governments to upgrade open meetings for the opportunities and demands of the 21st Century.
Improving open meetings with open data may involve taking advantage of simple solutions already freely available online, developing new tools within government, using open-source tools, or investing in new software, but it can all help serve the same goal: bringing more information online where it’s easily accessible to the public….
It’s not just about making open meetings more accessible, either. More communities are thinking about how they can bring government to the people. Open meetings are typically held in government-designated buildings at specified times, but are those locations and times truly accessible for most of the public or for those who may be most directly impacted by what’s being discussed?
Technology presents opportunities for governments to engage with the public outside of regularly scheduled meetings. Tools like Speakup and Textizen, for example, are being used to increase public participation in the general decision-making process. A continually increasing array of toolsprovidenewways for government and the public to identify issues, share ideas, and work toward solutions, even outside of open meetings. Boston, for example, took an innovative approach to this issue with its City Hall To Go truck and other efforts, bringing government services to locations around the city rather than requiring people to come to a government building…”

App enables citizens to report water waste in drought regions

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Springwise: “Rallying citizens to take a part in looking after the community they live in has become easier thanks to smartphones. In the past, the Creek Watch app has enabled anyone to help monitor their local water quality by sending data back to the state water board. Now Everydrop LA wants to use similar techniques to avoid drought in California, encouraging residents to report incidents of water wastage.
According to the team behind the app — which also created the CitySourced platform for engaging users in civic issues — even the smallest amount of water wastage can lead to meaningful losses over time. A faucet that drips just once a minute will lose over 2000 gallons of drinkable water each year. Using the Everydrop LA, citizens can report the location of leaking faucets and fire hydrants as well as occurrences of blatant water wastage. They can also see how much water is being wasted in their local area and learn about what they can do to cut their own water usage. In times when drought is a risk, the app notifies users to conserve. Cities and counties can use the data in their reports and learn more about how water wastage is affecting their jurisdiction.”

Fifteen open data insights

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Tim Davies from ODRN: “…below are the 15 points from the three-page briefing version, and you can find a full write-up of these points for download. You can also find reports from all the individual project partners, including a collection of quick-read research posters over on the Open Data Research Network website.

15 insights into open data supply, use and impacts

(1) There are many gaps to overcome before open data availability, can lead to widespread effective use and impact. Open data can lead to change through a ‘domino effect’, or by creating ripples of change that gradually spread out. However, often many of the key ‘domino pieces’ are missing, and local political contexts limit the reach of ripples. Poor data quality, low connectivity, scarce technical skills, weak legal frameworks and political barriers may all prevent open data triggering sustainable change. Attentiveness to all the components of open data impact is needed when designing interventions.
(2) There is a frequent mismatch between open data supply and demand in developing countries. Counting datasets is a poor way of assessing the quality of an open data initiative. The datasets published on portals are often the datasets that are easiest to publish, not the datasets most in demand. Politically sensitive datasets are particularly unlikely to be published without civil society pressure. Sometimes the gap is on the demand side – as potential open data users often do not articulate demands for key datasets.
(3) Open data initiatives can create new spaces for civil society to pursue government accountability and effectiveness. The conversation around transparency and accountability that ideas of open data can support is as important as the datasets in some developing countries.
(4) Working on open data projects can change how government creates, prepares and uses its own data. The motivations behind an open data initiative shape how government uses the data itself. Civil society and entrepreneurs interacting with government through open data projects can help shape government data practices. This makes it important to consider which intermediaries gain insider roles shaping data supply.
(5) Intermediaries are vital to both the supply and the use of open data. Not all data needed for governance in developing countries comes from government. Intermediaries can create data, articulate demands for data, and help translate open data visions from political leaders into effective implementations. Traditional local intermediaries are an important source of information, in particular because they are trusted parties.
(6) Digital divides create data divides in both the supply and use of data. In some developing countries key data is not digitised, or a lack of technical staff has left data management patchy and inconsistent. Where Internet access is scarce, few citizens can have direct access to data or services built with it. Full access is needed for full empowerment, but offline intermediaries, including journalists and community radio stations, also play a vital role in bridging the gaps between data and citizens.
(7) Where information is already available and used, the shift to open data involves data evolution rather than data revolution. Many NGOs and intermediaries already access the information which is now becoming available as data. Capacity building should start from existing information and data practices in organisations, and should look for the step-by-step gains to be made from a data-driven approach.
(8) Officials’ fears about the integrity of data are a barrier to more machine-readable data being made available. The publication of data as PDF or in scanned copies is often down to a misunderstanding of how open data works. Only copies can be changed, and originals can be kept authoritative. Helping officials understand this may help increase the supply of data.
(9) Very few datasets are clearly openly licensed, and there is low understanding of what open licenses entail. There are mixed opinions on the importance of a focus on licensing in different contexts. Clear licenses are important to building a global commons of interoperable data, but may be less relevant to particular uses of data on the ground. In many countries wider conversation about licensing are yet to take place.
(10) Privacy issues are not on the radar of most developing country open data projects, although commercial confidentiality does arise as a reason preventing greater data transparency. Much state held data is collected either from citizens or from companies. Few countries in the ODDC study have weak or absent privacy laws and frameworks, yet participants in the studies raised few personal privacy considerations. By contrast, a lack of clarity, and officials’ concerns, about potential breaches of commercial confidentiality when sharing data gathered from firms was a barrier to opening data.
(11) There is more to open data than policies and portals. Whilst central open data portals act as a visible symbol of open data initiatives, a focus on portal building can distract attention from wider reforms. Open data elements can also be built on existing data sharing practices, and data made available through the locations where citizens, NGOs are businesses already go to access information.
(12) Open data advocacy should be aware of, and build upon, existing policy foundations in specific countries and sectors. Sectoral transparency policies for local government, budget and energy industry regulation, amongst others, could all have open data requirements and standards attached, drawing on existing mechanisms to secure sustainable supplies of relevant open data in developing countries. In addition, open data conversations could help make existing data collection and disclosure requirements fit better with the information and data demands of citizens.
(13) Open data is not just a central government issue: local government data, city data, and data from the judicial and legislative branches are all important. Many open data projects focus on the national level, and only on the executive branch. However, local government is closer to citizens, urban areas bring together many of the key ingredients for successful open data initiatives, and transparency in other branches of government is important to secure citizens democratic rights.
(14) Flexibility is needed in the application of definitions of open data to allow locally relevant and effective open data debates and advocacy to emerge. Open data is made up of various elements, including proactive publication, machine-readability and permissions to re-use. Countries at different stages of open data development may choose to focus on one or more of these, but recognising that adopting all elements at once could hinder progress. It is important to find ways to both define open data clearly, and to avoid a reductive debate that does not recognise progressive steps towards greater openness.
(15) There are many different models for an open data initiative: including top-down, bottom-up and sector-specific. Initiatives may also be state-led, civil society-led and entrepreneur-led in their goals and how they are implemented – with consequences for the resources and models required to make them sustainable. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to open data. More experimentation, evaluation and shared learning on the components, partners and processes for putting open data ideas into practice must be a priority for all who want to see a world where open-by-default data drives real social, political and economic change.
You can read more about each of these points in the full report.”

Quantifying the Interoperability of Open Government Datasets

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Paper by Pieter Colpaert, Mathias Van Compernolle, Laurens De Vocht, Anastasia Dimou, Miel Vander Sande, Peter Mechant, Ruben Verborgh, and Erik Mannens, to be published in Computer: “Open Governments use the Web as a global dataspace for datasets. It is in the interest of these governments to be interoperable with other governments worldwide, yet there is currently no way to identify relevant datasets to be interoperable with and there is no way to measure the interoperability itself. In this article we discuss the possibility of comparing identifiers used within various datasets as a way to measure semantic interoperability. We introduce three metrics to express the interoperability between two datasets: the identifier interoperability, the relevance and the number of conflicts. The metrics are calculated from a list of statements which indicate for each pair of identifiers in the system whether they identify the same concept or not. While a lot of effort is needed to collect these statements, the return is high: not only relevant datasets are identified, also machine-readable feedback is provided to the data maintainer.”

The Quiet Revolution: Open Data Is Transforming Citizen-Government Interaction

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Maury Blackman at Wired: “The public’s trust in government is at an all-time low. This is not breaking news.
But what if I told you that just this past May, President Obama signed into law a bill that passed Congress with unanimous support. A bill that could fundamentally transform the way citizens interact with their government. This legislation could also create an entirely new, trillion-dollar industry right here in the U.S. It could even save lives.
On May 9th, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) became law. There were very few headlines, no Rose Garden press conference.
I imagine most of you have never heard of the DATA Act. The bill with the nerdy name has the potential to revolutionize government. It requires federal agencies to make their spending data available in standardized, publicly accessible formats.  Supporters of the legislation included Tea Partiers and the most liberal Democrats. But the bill is only scratches the surface of what’s possible.
So What’s the Big Deal?
On his first day in Office, President Obama signed a memorandum calling for a more open and transparent government. The President wrote, “Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” This was followed by the creation of Data.gov, a one-stop shop for all government data. The site does not just include financial data, but also a wealth of other information related to education, public safety, climate and much more—all available in open and machine-readable format. This has helped fuel an international movement.
Tech minded citizens are building civic apps to bring government into the digital age; reporters are now more able to connect the dots easier, not to mention the billions of taxpayer dollars saved. And last year the President took us a step further. He signed an Executive Order making open government data the default option.
Cities and states have followed Washington’s lead with similar open data efforts on the local level. In San Francisco, the city’s Human Services Agency has partnered with Promptly; a text message notification service that alerts food stamp recipients (CalFresh) when they are at risk of being disenrolled from the program. This service is incredibly beneficial, because most do not realize any change in status, until they are in the grocery store checkout line, trying to buy food for their family.
Other products and services created using open data do more than just provide an added convenience—they actually have the potential to save lives. The PulsePoint mobile app sends text messages to citizens trained in CPR when someone in walking distance is experiencing a medical emergency that may require CPR. The app is currently available in almost 600 cities in 18 states, which is great. But shouldn’t a product this valuable be available to every city and state in the country?…”

This Exercise App Tracks Trends on How We Move In Different Cities

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Mark Byrnes at CityLab: “An app designed to encourage exercise can also tell us a lot about the way different cities get from point A to B.
The app, called Human, runs in the background of your iPhone, automatically detecting activities like walking, cycling, running, and motorized transport. The point is to encourage you to exercise for at least 30 minutes a day.
Almost a year since Human launched (last August), its developers have released stunning visualization of all that movement: 7.5 million miles traveled by their app users so far.
On their site, you can look into the mobility data inside 30 different cities. Once you click on one, you’ll be greeted with a pie chart that shows the distribution of activity within that city lined up against a pie chart that shows the international average.
In the case of Amsterdam, its transportation clichés are verified. App users in the bike-loving city use two wheels way more than they use four. And they walk about as much as anywhere else:

Human then shows the paths traveled by their users. When it comes to Amsterdam, the results look almost exactly like the city’s entire street grid, no matter what physical activity is being shown:

Selected Readings on Economic Impact of Open Data

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The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of open data was originally published in 2014.

Open data is publicly available data – often released by governments, scientists, and occasionally private companies – that is made available for anyone to use, in a machine-readable format, free of charge. Considerable attention has been devoted to the economic potential of open data for businesses and other organizations, and it is now widely accepted that open data plays an important role in spurring innovation, growth, and job creation. From new business models to innovation in local governance, open data is being quickly adopted as a valuable resource at many levels.

Measuring and analyzing the economic impact of open data in a systematic way is challenging, and governments as well as other providers of open data seek to provide access to the data in a standardized way. As governmental transparency increases and open data changes business models and activities in many economic sectors, it is important to understand best practices for releasing and using non-proprietary, public information. Costs, social challenges, and technical barriers also influence the economic impact of open data.

These selected readings are intended as a first step in the direction of answering the question of if we can and how we consider if opening data spurs economic impact.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Bonina, Carla. New Business Models and the Values of Open Data: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities. NEMODE 3K – Small Grants Call 2013. http://bit.ly/1xGf9oe

  • In this paper, Dr. Carla Bonina provides an introduction to open data and open data business models, evaluating their potential economic value and identifying future challenges for the effectiveness of open data, such as personal data and privacy, the emerging data divide, and the costs of collecting, producing and releasing open (government) data.

Carpenter, John and Phil Watts. Assessing the Value of OS OpenData™ to the Economy of Great Britain – Synopsis. June 2013. Accessed July 25, 2014. http://bit.ly/1rTLVUE

  • John Carpenter and Phil Watts of Ordnance Survey undertook a study to examine the economic impact of open data to the economy of Great Britain. Using a variety of methods such as case studies, interviews, downlad analysis, adoption rates, impact calculation, and CGE modeling, the authors estimates that the OS OpenData initiative will deliver a net of increase in GDP of £13 – 28.5 million for Great Britain in 2013.

Capgemini Consulting. The Open Data Economy: Unlocking Economic Value by Opening Government and Public Data. Capgemini Consulting. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7MR02

  • This report explores how governments are leveraging open data for economic benefits. Through using a compariative approach, the authors study important open data from organizational, technological, social and political perspectives. The study highlights the potential of open data to drive profit through increasing the effectiveness of benchmarking and other data-driven business strategies.

Deloitte. Open Growth: Stimulating Demand for Open Data in the UK. Deloitte Analytics. December 2012. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1oeFhks

  • This early paper on open data by Deloitte uses case studies and statistical analysis on open government data to create models of businesses using open data. They also review the market supply and demand of open government data in emerging sectors of the economy.

Gruen, Nicholas, John Houghton and Richard Tooth. Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target.  Accessed July 24, 2014, http://bit.ly/UOmBRe

  • This report highlights the potential economic value of the open data agenda in Australia and the G20. The report provides an initial literature review on the economic value of open data, as well as a asset of case studies on the economic value of open data, and a set of recommendations for how open data can help the G20 and Australia achieve target objectives in the areas of trade, finance, fiscal and monetary policy, anti-corruption, employment, energy, and infrastructure.

Heusser, Felipe I. Understanding Open Government Data and Addressing Its Impact (draft version). World Wide Web Foundation. http://bit.ly/1o9Egym

  • The World Wide Web Foundation, in collaboration with IDRC has begun a research network to explore the impacts of open data in developing countries. In addition to the Web Foundation and IDRC, the network includes the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, the Open Development Technology Alliance and Practical Participation.

Howard, Alex. San Francisco Looks to Tap Into the Open Data Economy. O’Reilly Radar: Insight, Analysis, and Reach about Emerging Technologies.  October 19, 2012.  Accessed July 24, 2014. http://oreil.ly/1qNRt3h

  • Alex Howard points to San Francisco as one of the first municipalities in the United States to embrace an open data platform.  He outlines how open data has driven innovation in local governance.  Moreover, he discusses the potential impact of open data on job creation and government technology infrastructure in the City and County of San Francisco.

Huijboom, Noor and Tijs Van den Broek. Open Data: An International Comparison of Strategies. European Journal of ePractice. March 2011. Accessed July 24, 2014.  http://bit.ly/1AE24jq

  • This article examines five countries and their open data strategies, identifying key features, main barriers, and drivers of progress for of open data programs. The authors outline the key challenges facing European, and other national open data policies, highlighting the emerging role open data initiatives are playing in political and administrative agendas around the world.

Manyika, J., Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, Steve Van Kuiken, Peter Groves, and Elizabeth Almasi Doshi. Open Data: Unlocking Innovation and Performance with Liquid Innovation. McKinsey Global Institute. October 2013. Accessed July 24, 2014.  http://bit.ly/1lgDX0v

  • This research focuses on quantifying the potential value of open data in seven “domains” in the global economy: education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance.

Moore, Alida. Congressional Transparency Caucus: How Open Data Creates Jobs. April 2, 2014. Accessed July 30, 2014. Socrata. http://bit.ly/1n7OJpp

  • Socrata provides a summary of the March 24th briefing of the Congressional Transparency Caucus on the need to increase government transparency through adopting open data initiatives. They include key takeaways from the panel discussion, as well as their role in making open data available for businesses.

Stott, Andrew. Open Data for Economic Growth. The World Bank. June 25, 2014. Accessed July 24, 2014. http://bit.ly/1n7PRJF

  • In this report, The World Bank examines the evidence for the economic potential of open data, holding that the economic potential is quite large, despite a variation in the published estimates, and difficulties assessing its potential methodologically. They provide five archetypes of businesses using open data, and provides recommendations for governments trying to maximize economic growth from open data.