Needed: A New Generation of Game Changers to Solve Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck: “In order to change the way we govern, it is important to train and nurture a new generation of problem solvers who possess the multidisciplinary skills to become effective agents of change. That’s why we at the GovLab have launched The GovLab Academy with the support of the Knight Foundation.
In an effort to help people in their own communities become more effective at developing and implementing creative solutions to compelling challenges, The Gov Lab Academy is offering two new training programs:
1) An online platform with an unbundled and evolving set of topics, modules and instructors on innovations in governance, including themes such as big and open data and crowdsourcing and forthcoming topics on behavioral economics, prizes and challenges, open contracting and performance management for governance;
2) Gov 3.0: A curated and sequenced, 14-week mentoring and training program.
While the online-platform is always freely available, Gov 3.0 begins on January 29, 2014 and we invite you to to participate. Please forward this email to your networks and help us spread the word about the opportunity to participate.
Please consider applying (individuals or teams may apply), if you are:

  • an expert in communications, public policy, law, computer science, engineering, business or design who wants to expand your ability to bring about social change;

  • a public servant who wants to bring innovation to your job;

  • someone with an important idea for positive change but who lacks key skills or resources to realize the vision;

  • interested in joining a network of like-minded, purpose-driven individuals across the country; or

  • someone who is passionate about using technology to solve public problems.

The program includes live instruction and conversation every Wednesday from 5:00– 6:30 PM EST for 14 weeks starting Jan 29, 2014. You will be able to participate remotely via Google Hangout.

Gov 3.0 will allow you to apply evolving technology to the design and implementation of effective solutions to public interest challenges. It will give you an overview of the most current approaches to smarter governance and help you improve your skills in collaboration, communication, and developing and presenting innovative ideas.

Over 14 weeks, you will develop a project and a plan for its implementation, including a long and short description, a presentation deck, a persuasive video and a project blog. Last term’s projects covered such diverse issues as post-Fukushima food safety, science literacy for high schoolers and prison reform for the elderly. In every case, the goal was to identify realistic strategies for making a difference quickly.  You can read the entire Gov 3.0 syllabus here.

The program will include national experts and instructors in technology and governance both as guests and as mentors to help you design your project. Last term’s mentors included current and former officials from the White House and various state, local and international governments, academics from a variety of fields, and prominent philanthropists.

People who complete the program will have the opportunity to apply for a special fellowship to pursue their projects further.

Previously taught only on campus, we are offering Gov 3.0 in beta as an online program. This is not a MOOC. It is a mentoring-intensive coaching experience. To maximize the quality of the experience, enrollment is limited.

Please submit your application by January 22, 2014. Accepted applicants (individuals and teams) will be notified on January 24, 2014. We hope to expand the program in the future so please use the same form to let us know if you would like to be kept informed about future opportunities.”

Safety Datapalooza Shows Power of Data.gov Communities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa Nelson at DigitalGov: “The White House Office of Public Engagement held the first Safety Datapalooza illustrating the power of Data.gov communities. Federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Deputy Secretary of Transportation John Porcari hosted the event, which touted the data available on Safety.Data.gov and the community of innovators using it to make effective tools for consumers.
The event showcased many of the  tools that have been produced as a result of  opening this safety data including:

  • PulsePoint, from the San Ramon Fire Protection District, a lifesaving mobile app that allows CPR-trained volunteers to be notified if someone nearby is in need of emergency assistance;
  • Commute and crime maps, from Trulia, allow home buyers to choose their new residence based on two important everyday factors; and
  • Hurricane App, from the American Red Cross, to monitor storm conditions, prepare your family and home, find help, and let others know you’re safe even if the power is out;

Safety data is far from alone in generating innovative ideas and gathering a community of developers and entrepreneurs, Data.gov currently has 16 different topically diverse communities on land and sea — the Cities and Oceans communities being two such examples. Data.gov’s communities are a virtual meeting spot for interested parties across government, academia and industry to come together and put the data to use. Data.gov enables a whole set of tools to make these communities come to life: apps, blogs, challenges, forums, ranking, rating and wikis.
For a summary of the Safety Datapalooza visit Transportation’s “Fast Lane” blog.”

Open data movement faces fresh hurdles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SciDevNet: “The open-data community made great strides in 2013 towards increasing the reliability of and access to information, but more efforts are needed to increase its usability on the ground and the general capacity of those using it, experts say.
An international network of innovation hubs, the first extensive open data certification system and a data for development partnership are three initiatives launched last year by the fledgling Open Data Institute (ODI), a UK-based not-for-profit firm that champions the use of open data to aid social, economic and environmental development.
Before open data can be used effectively the biggest hurdles to be cleared are agreeing common formats for data sets and improving their trustworthiness and searchability, says the ODI’s chief statistician, Ulrich Atz.
“As it is so new, open data is often inconsistent in its format, making it difficult to reuse. We see a great need for standards and tools,” he tells SciDev.Net. Data that is standardised is of “incredible value” he says, because this makes it easier and faster to use and gives it a longer useable lifetime.
The ODI — which celebrated its first anniversary last month — is attempting to achieve this with a first-of-its-kind certification system that gives publishers and users important details about online data sets, including publishers’ names and contact information, the type of sharing licence, the quality of information and how long it will be available.
Certificates encourage businesses and governments to make use of open data by guaranteeing their quality and usability, and making them easier to find online, says Atz.
Finding more and better ways to apply open data will also be supported by a growing network of ODI ‘nodes’: centres that bring together companies, universities and NGOs to support open-data projects and communities….
Because lower-income countries often lack well-established data collection systems, they have greater freedom to rethink how data are collected and how they flow between governments and civil society, he says.
But there is still a long way to go. Open-data projects currently rely on governments and other providers sharing their data on online platforms, whereas in a truly effective system, information would be published in an open format from the start, says Davies.
Furthermore, even where advances are being made at a strategic level, open-data initiatives are still having only a modest impact in the real world, he says.
“Transferring [progress at a policy level] into availability of data on the ground and the capacity to use it is a lot tougher and slower,” Davies says.”

New Book: Open Data Now

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Joel Gurin (The GovLab): “Open Data is the world’s greatest free resource–unprecedented access to thousands of databases–and it is one of the most revolutionary developments since the Information Age began. Combining two major trends–the exponential growth of digital data and the emerging culture of disclosure and transparency–Open Data gives you and your business full access to information that has never been available to the average person until now. Unlike most Big Data, Open Data is transparent, accessible, and reusable in ways that give it the power to transform business, government, and society.
Open Data Now is an essential guide to understanding all kinds of open databases–business, government, science, technology, retail, social media, and more–and using those resources to your best advantage. You’ll learn how to tap crowds for fast innovation, conduct research through open collaboration, and manage and market your business in a transparent marketplace.
Open Data is open for business–and the opportunities are as big and boundless as the Internet itself. This powerful, practical book shows you how to harness the power of Open Data in a variety of applications:

  • HOT STARTUPS: turn government data into profitable ventures
  • SAVVY MARKETING: understand how reputational data drives your brand
  • DATA-DRIVEN INVESTING: apply new tools for business analysis
  • CONSUMER IN FORMATION: connect with your customers using smart disclosure
  • GREEN BUSINESS: use data to bet on sustainable companies
  • FAST R&D: turn the online world into your research lab
  • NEW OPPORTUNITIES: explore open fields for new businesses

Whether you’re a marketing professional who wants to stay on top of what’s trending, a budding entrepreneur with a billion-dollar idea and limited resources, or a struggling business owner trying to stay competitive in a changing global market–or if you just want to understand the cutting edge of information technology–Open Data Now offers a wealth of big ideas, strategies, and techniques that wouldn’t have been possible before Open Data leveled the playing field.
The revolution is here and it’s now. It’s Open Data Now.”

Supporting open government in New Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Europe Blog: “The “New Europe” countries that joined the European Union over the past decade are moving ahead fast to use the Internet to improve transparency and open government. We recently partnered with Techsoup Global to support online projects driving forward good governance in Romania, the Czech Republic, and most recently, in Slovakia.
Techsoup Global, in partnership with the Slovak Center for Philanthropy, recently held an exciting social-startups awards ceremony Restart Slovakia 2013 in Bratislava. Slovakia’s Deputy Minister of Finance and Digital Champion Peter Pellegrini delivered keynote promoting Internet and Open Data and announced the winners of this year contest. Ambassadors from U.S., Israel and Romania and several distinguished Slovak NGOs also attended the ceremony.
Winning projects included:

  • Vzdy a vsade – Always and Everywhere – a volunteer portal offering online and anonymous psychological advice to internet users via chat.
  • Nemlcme.sk – a portal providing counsel for victims of sexual assaults.
  • Co robim – an educational online library of job careers advising young people how to choose their career paths and dream jobs.
  • Mapa zlocinu – an online map displaying various rates of criminality in different neighbourhoods.
  • Demagog.sk – a platform focused on analyzing public statements of politicians and releasing information about politicians and truthfulness of their speeches in a user-friendly format.”

From Faith-Based to Evidence-Based: The Open Data 500 and Understanding How Open Data Helps the American Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck in Forbes: “Public funds have, after all, paid for their collection, and the law says that federal government data are not protected by copyright. By the end of 2009, the US and the UK had the only two open data one-stop websites where agencies could post and citizens could find open data. Now there are over 300 such portals for government data around the world with over 1 million available datasets. This kind of Open Data — including weather, safety and public health information as well as information about government spending — can serve the country by increasing government efficiency, shedding light on regulated industries, and driving innovation and job creation.

It’s becoming clear that open data has the potential to improve people’s lives. With huge advances in data science, we can take this data and turn it into tools that help people choose a safer hospital, pick a better place to live, improve the performance of their farm or business by having better climate models, and know more about the companies with whom they are doing business. Done right, people can even contribute data back, giving everyone a better understanding, for example of nuclear contamination in post-Fukushima Japan or incidences of price gouging in America’s inner cities.

The promise of open data is limitless. (see the GovLab index for stats on open data) But it’s important to back up our faith with real evidence of what works. Last September the GovLab began the Open Data 500 project, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, to study the economic value of government Open Data extensively and rigorously.  A recent McKinsey study pegged the annual global value of Open Data (including free data from sources other than government), at $3 trillion a year or more. We’re digging in and talking to those companies that use Open Data as a key part of their business model. We want to understand whether and how open data is contributing to the creation of new jobs, the development of scientific and other innovations, and adding to the economy. We also want to know what government can do better to help industries that want high quality, reliable, up-to-date information that government can supply. Of those 1 million datasets, for example, 96% are not updated on a regular basis.

The GovLab just published an initial working list of 500 American companies that we believe to be using open government data extensively.  We’ve also posted in-depth profiles of 50 of them — a sample of the kind of information that will be available when the first annual Open Data 500 study is published in early 2014. We are also starting a similar study for the UK and Europe.

Even at this early stage, we are learning that Open Data is a valuable resource. As my colleague Joel Gurin, author of Open Data Now: the Secret to Hot Start-Ups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing and Fast Innovation, who directs the project, put it, “Open Data is a versatile and powerful economic driver in the U.S. for new and existing businesses around the country, in a variety of ways, and across many sectors. The diversity of these companies in the kinds of data they use, the way they use it, their locations, and their business models is one of the most striking things about our findings so far.” Companies are paradoxically building value-added businesses on top of public data that anyone can access for free….”

FULL article can be found here.

Entrepreneurs Shape Free Data Into Money

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Angus Loten in the Wall Street Journal: “More cities are putting information on everything from street-cleaning schedules to police-response times and restaurant inspection reports in the public domain, in the hope that people will find a way to make money off the data.
Supporters of such programs often see them as a local economic stimulus plan, allowing software developers and entrepreneurs in cities ranging from San Francisco to South Bend, Ind., to New York, to build new businesses based on the information they get from government websites.
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive directive last month to launch the city’s open-data program, he cited entrepreneurs and businesses as important beneficiaries. Open-data promotes innovation and “gives companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to leverage one of government’s greatest assets: public information,” according to the Dec. 18 directive.
A poster child for the movement might be 34-year-old Matt Ehrlichman of Seattle, who last year built an online business in part using Seattle work permits, professional licenses and other home-construction information gathered up by the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
While his website is free, his business, called Porch.com, has more than 80 employees and charges a $35 monthly fee to industry professionals who want to boost the visibility of their projects on the site.
The site gathers raw public data—such as addresses for homes under renovation, what they are doing, who is doing the work and how much they are charging—and combines it with photos and other information from industry professionals and homeowners. It then creates a searchable database for users to compare ideas and costs for projects near their own neighborhood.
…Ian Kalin, director of open-data services at Socrata, a Seattle-based software firm that makes the back-end applications for many of these government open-data sites, says he’s worked with hundreds of companies that were formed around open data.
Among them is Climate Corp., a San Francisco-based firm that collects weather and yield-forecasting data to help farmers decide when and where to plant crops. Launched in 2006, the firm was acquired in October by Monsanto Co. MON -2.90% , the seed-company giant, for $930 million.
Overall, the rate of new business formation declined nationally between 2006 and 2010. But according to the latest data from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an entrepreneurship advocacy group in Kansas City, Mo., the rate of new business formation in Seattle in 2011 rose 9.41% in 2011, compared with the national average of 3.9%.
Other cities where new business formation was ahead of the national average include Chicago, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, and South Bend, Ind.—all cities that also have open-data programs. Still, how effective the ventures are in creating jobs is difficult to gauge.
One wrinkle: privacy concerns about the potential for information—such as property tax and foreclosure data—to be misused.
Some privacy advocates fear that government data that include names, addresses and other sensitive information could be used by fraudsters to target victims.”

Open Government Strategy Continues with US Currency Production API

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eric Carter in the ProgrammableWeb: “Last year, the Executive branch of the US government made huge strides in opening up government controlled data to the developer community. Projects such as the Open Data Policy and the Machine Readable Executive Order have led the US government to develop an API strategy. Today, ProgrammableWeb takes a look at another open government API: the Annual Production Figures of United States Currency API.

The US Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) provides the dataset available through the Production Figures API. The data available consists of the number of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, $100 notes printed each year from 1980 to 2012. With this straightforward, seemingly basic set of data available, the question becomes: “Why is this data useful“? To answer this, one should consider the purpose of the Executive Order:

“Openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth. As one vital benefit of open government, making information resources easy to find, accessible, and usable can fuel entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans’ lives and contributes significantly to job creation.”

The API uses HTTP and can return requests in XML, JSON, or CSV data formats. As stated, the API retrieves the number of bills of a designated currency for the desired year. For more information and code samples, visit the API docs.”
 

Introduction to Linked Open Data (LOD)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Ivan Herman, presented at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2013: “The goal of the tutorial is to introduce the audience into the basics of the technologies used for Linked Data. This includes RDF, RDFS, main elements of SPARQL, SKOS, and OWL. Some general guidelines on publishing data as Linked Data will also be provided, as well as real-life usage examples of the various technologies.”

Full Text: PDF (Description)  |  PDF (Presentation)

The GovLab Index: Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Please find below the latest installment in The GovLab Index series, inspired by Harper’s Index. “The GovLab Index: Open Data — December 2013” provides an update on our previous Open Data installment, and highlights global trends in Open Data and the release of public sector information. Previous installments include Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions.
Value and Impact

  • Potential global value of open data estimated by McKinsey: $3 trillion annually
  • Potential yearly value for the United States: $1.1 trillion 
  • Europe: $900 billion
  • Rest of the world: $1.7 trillion
  • How much the value of open data is estimated to grow per year in the European Union: 7% annually
  • Value of releasing UK’s geospatial data as open data: 13 million pounds per year by 2016
  • Estimated worth of business reuse of public sector data in Denmark in 2010: more than €80 million a year
  • Estimated worth of business reuse of public sector data across the European Union in 2010: €27 billion a year
  • Total direct and indirect economic gains from easier public sector information re-use across the whole European Union economy, as of May 2013: €140 billion annually
  • Economic value of publishing data on adult cardiac surgery in the U.K., as of May 2013: £400 million
  • Economic value of time saved for users of live data from the Transport for London apps, as of May 2013: between £15 million and £58 million
  • Estimated increase in GDP in England and Wales in 2008-2009 due to the adoption of geospatial information by local public services providers: +£320m
  • Average decrease in borrowing costs in sovereign bond markets for emerging market economies when implementing transparent practices (measured by accuracy and frequency according to IMF policies, across 23 countries from 1999-2002): 11%
  • Open weather data supports an estimated $1.5 billion in applications in the secondary insurance market – but much greater value comes from accurate weather predictions, which save the U.S. annually more than $30 billion
  • Estimated value of GPS data: $90 billion

Efforts and Involvement

  • Number of U.S. based companies identified by the GovLab that use government data in innovative ways: 500
  • Number of open data initiatives worldwide in 2009: 2
  • Number of open data initiatives worldwide in 2013: over 300
  • Number of countries with open data portals: more than 40
  • Countries who share more information online than the U.S.: 14
  • Number of cities globally that participated in 2013 International Open Data Hackathon Day: 102
  • Number of U.S. cities with Open Data Sites in 2013: 43
  • U.S. states with open data initiatives: 40
  • Membership growth in the Open Government Partnership in two years: from 8 to 59 countries
  • Number of time series indicators (GDP, foreign direct investment, life expectancy, internet users, etc.) in the World Bank Open Data Catalog: over 8,000
  • How many of 77 countries surveyed by the Open Data Barometer have some form of Open Government Data Initiative: over 55%
  • How many OGD initiatives have dedicated resources with senior level political backing: over 25%
  • How many countries are in the Open Data Index: 70
    • How many of the 700 key datasets in the Index are open: 84
  • Number of countries in the Open Data Census: 77
    • How many of the 727 key datasets in the Census are open: 95
  • How many countries surveyed have formal data policies in 2013: 55%
  • Those who have machine-readable data available: 25%
  • Top 5 countries in Open Data rankings: United Kingdom, United States, Sweden, New Zealand, Norway
  • The different levels of Open Data Certificates a data user or publisher can achieve “along the way to world-class open data”: 4 levels, Raw, Pilot, Standard and Expert
  • The number of data ecosystems categories identified by the OECD: 3, data producers, infomediaries, and users

Examining Datasets…
FULL VERSION AT http://thegovlab.org/govlab-index-open-data-updated/