Elizabeth Shepherd in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: “Many national governments have adopted the idea of the ‘right to access information’ (RTI) or ‘freedom of information’ (FOI) as an essential element of the rights of citizens to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights, trust in public discourse and transparent, accountable and open government. Over 100 countries worldwide have introduced access to information legislation: 50+ in Europe; a dozen in Africa; 20 in the Americas and Caribbean; more than 15 in Asia and the Pacific; and two in the Middle East (Banisar, 2014). This article will provide an overview of access to information legislation and focus on the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 as a case example. It will discuss the impact of the UK FOI Act on public authorities, with particular attention to records management implications, drawing on research undertaken by University College London. In the final section, it will reflect on relationships between access to information and open government data. If governments are moving to more openness, what implications might this have for those charged with implementing FOI and RTI policies, including for records management professionals?…(More)”
Sharing Information
An Ericsson Consumer Insight Summary Report: “In the age of the internet we often hear how companies, authorities and other organizations get access to our personal information. As a result, the topic of privacy is frequently debated. What is sometimes overlooked is how we as individuals watch in return. We observe not only each other, but also companies and authorities – and we share what we see. Your neighbor searches the net about the family that just moved in next door. The traveler films his hotel and shares the video with other potential holidaymakers. A friend shares her experience about her employer on a social network. As sharing online continues to grow, we are starting to see the impact on both our individual lives and society. In this report we begin to uncover how consumers perceive their influence – but also some issues that arise as a result….
By sharing more information than ever, smartphone owners are increasingly acting like citizen journalists > Over 70 percent of all smartphone users share personal photos regularly. 69 percent share more than they did 2 years ago
> 69 percent also read or watch other people’s shared content more than they did 2 years ago
People report wrongdoings by businesses and authorities online
> 34 percent of smartphone owners who have had bad experiences with companies say they usually share their experiences online. 27 percent repost other consumers’ complaints on a weekly basis
> Over half of smartphone users surveyed believe that being able to express opinions online about companies has increased their influence
Consumers expect shared information to have an effect on society and the world
> 54 percent believe that the internet has increased the possibility for whistleblowers to expose corrupt and illicit behavior in companies and organizations
> Furthermore, 37 percent of smartphone users believe that sharing information about a corrupt company online has greater impact than going to the police
With new power comes new challenges
> 46 percent of smartphone users would like a verification service to check the authenticity of an online posting or news clip
> 64 percent would like to be able to stop negative information about themselves circulating online
> 1 in 2 says protecting personal information should be a priority on the political agenda, although only 1 in 4 says it is not”…(More)”
Tech and Innovation to Re-engage Civic Life
Hollie Russon Gilman at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Sometimes even the best-intentioned policymakers overlook the power of people. And even the best-intentioned discussions on social impact and leveraging big data for the social sector can obscure the power of every-day people in their communities.
But time and time again, I’ve seen the transformative power of civic engagement when initiatives are structured well. For example, the other year I witnessed a high school student walk into a school auditorium one evening during Boston’s first-ever youth-driven participatory budgeting project. Participatory budgeting gives residents a structured opportunity to work together to identify neighborhood priorities, work in tandem with government officials to draft viable projects, and prioritize projects to fund. Elected officials in turn pledge to implement these projects and are held accountable to their constituents. Initially intrigued by an experiment in democracy (and maybe the free pizza), this student remained engaged over several months, because she met new members of her community; got to interact with elected officials; and felt like she was working on a concrete objective that could have a tangible, positive impact on her neighborhood.
For many of the young participants, ages 12-25, being part of a participatory budgeting initiative is the first time they are involved in civic life. Many were excited that the City of Boston, in collaboration with the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project, empowered young people with the opportunity to allocate $1 million in public funds. Through participating, young people gain invaluable civic skills, and sometimes even a passion that can fuel other engagements in civic and communal life.
This is just one example of a broader civic and social innovation trend. Across the globe, people are working together with their communities to solve seemingly intractable problems, but as diverse as those efforts are, there are also commonalities. Well-structured civic engagement creates the space and provides the tools for people to exert agency over policies. When citizens have concrete objectives, access to necessary technology (whether it’s postcards, trucks, or open data portals), and an eye toward outcomes, social change happens.
Using Technology to Distribute Expertise
Technology is allowing citizens around the world to participate in solving local, national, and global problems. When it comes to large, public bureaucracies, expertise is largely top-down and concentrated. Leveraging technology creates opportunities for people to work together in new ways to solve public problems. One way is through civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor.com, which cities can use to develop public sector projects for citizen support; several cities in Rhode Island, Oregon, and Philadelphia have successfully pooled citizen resources to fund new public works. Another way is through citizen science. Old Weather, a crowdsourcing project from the National Archives and Zooniverse, enrolls people to transcribe old British ship logs to identify climate change patterns. Platforms like these allow anyone to devote a small amount of time or resources toward a broader public good. And because they have a degree of transparency, people can see the progress and impact of their efforts. ….(More)”
Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies
Book edited by Daniel Araya: “The concept of the ‘smart city’ as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a ‘smart city’. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the ‘smart city’ refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure.
This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of ‘smart cities’ as ‘democratic ecologies’ for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of ‘smart cities’ to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of ‘smart cities’ should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices….(More)”
Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action
Book by Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, & Taha Yasseri: “As people spend increasing proportions of their daily lives using social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, they are being invited to support myriad political causes by sharing, liking, endorsing, or downloading. Chain reactions caused by these tiny acts of participation form a growing part of collective action today, from neighborhood campaigns to global political movements. Political Turbulence reveals that, in fact, most attempts at collective action online do not succeed, but some give rise to huge mobilizations—even revolutions.
Drawing on large-scale data generated from the Internet and real-world events, this book shows how mobilizations that succeed are unpredictable, unstable, and often unsustainable. To better understand this unruly new force in the political world, the authors use experiments that test how social media influence citizens deciding whether or not to participate. They show how different personality types react to social influences and identify which types of people are willing to participate at an early stage in a mobilization when there are few supporters or signals of viability. The authors argue that pluralism is the model of democracy that is emerging in the social media age—not the ordered, organized vision of early pluralists, but a chaotic, turbulent form of politics.
This book demonstrates how data science and experimentation with social data can provide a methodological toolkit for understanding, shaping, and perhaps even predicting the outcomes of this democratic turbulence….(More)”
Big Data and Big Cities: The Promises and Limitations of Improved Measures of Urban Life
Paper by Edward L. Glaeser et al: “New, “big” data sources allow measurement of city characteristics and outcome variables higher frequencies and finer geographic scales than ever before. However, big data will not solve large urban social science questions on its own. Big data has the most value for the study of cities when it allows measurement of the previously opaque, or when it can be coupled with exogenous shocks to people or place. We describe a number of new urban data sources and illustrate how they can be used to improve the study and function of cities. We first show how Google Street View images can be used to predict income in New York City, suggesting that similar image data can be used to map wealth and poverty in previously unmeasured areas of the developing world. We then discuss how survey techniques can be improved to better measure willingness to pay for urban amenities. Finally, we explain how Internet data is being used to improve the quality of city services….(More)”
Meeting the Challenges of Big Data
Opinion by the European Data Protection Supervisor: “Big data, if done responsibly, can deliver significant benefits and efficiencies for society and individuals not only in health, scientific research, the environment and other specific areas. But there are serious concerns with the actual and potential impact of processing of huge amounts of data on the rights and freedoms of individuals, including their right to privacy. The challenges and risks of big data therefore call for more effective data protection.
Technology should not dictate our values and rights, but neither should promoting innovation and preserving fundamental rights be perceived as incompatible. New business models exploiting new capabilities for the massive collection, instantaneous transmission, combination and reuse of personal information for unforeseen purposes have placed the principles of data protection under new strains, which calls for thorough consideration on how they are applied.
European data protection law has been developed to protect our fundamental rights and values, including our right to privacy. The question is not whether to apply data protection law to big data, but rather how to apply it innovatively in new environments. Our current data protection principles, including transparency, proportionality and purpose limitation, provide the base line we will need to protect more dynamically our fundamental rights in the world of big data. They must, however, be complemented by ‘new’ principles which have developed over the years such as accountability and privacy by design and by default. The EU data protection reform package is expected to strengthen and modernise the regulatory framework .
The EU intends to maximise growth and competitiveness by exploiting big data. But the Digital Single Market cannot uncritically import the data-driven technologies and business models which have become economic mainstream in other areas of the world. Instead it needs to show leadership in developing accountable personal data processing. The internet has evolved in a way that surveillance – tracking people’s behaviour – is considered as the indispensable revenue model for some of the most successful companies. This development calls for critical assessment and search for other options.
In any event, and irrespective of the business models chosen, organisations that process large volumes of personal information must comply with applicable data protection law. The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) believes that responsible and sustainable development of big data must rely on four essential elements:
- organisations must be much more transparent about how they process personal data;
- afford users a higher degree of control over how their data is used;
- design user friendly data protection into their products and services; and;
- become more accountable for what they do….(More)
Urban Civics: An IoT middleware for democratizing crowdsensed data in smart societies
Hachem, Sara et al in Research and Technologies for Society and Industry Leveraging a better tomorrow (RTSI): “While the design of smart city ICT systems of today is still largely focused on (and therefore limited to) passive sensing, the emergence of mobile crowd-sensing calls for more active citizen engagement in not only understanding but also shaping of our societies. The Urban Civics Internet of Things (IoT) middleware enables such involvement while effectively closing several feedback loops by including citizens in the decision-making process thus leading to smarter and healthier societies. We present our initial design and planned experimental evaluation of city-scale architecture components where data assimilation, actuation and citizen engagement are key enablers toward democratization of urban data, longer-term transparency, and accountability of urban development policies. All of these are building blocks of smart cities and societies….(More)”
Do We Need to Educate Open Data Users?
Tony Hirst at IODC: “Whilst promoting the publication of open data is a key, indeed necessary, ingredient in driving the global open data agenda, promoting initiatives that support the use of open data is perhaps an even more pressing need….
This, then, is the first issue we need to address: improving basic levels of literacy in interpreting – and manipulating (for example, sorting and grouping) – simple tables and charts. Sensemaking, in other words: what does the chart you’ve just produced actually say? What story does it tell? And there’s an added benefit that arises from learning to read and critique charts better – it makes you better at creating your own.
Associated with reading stories from data comes the reason for telling the story and putting the data to work. How does “data” help you make a decision, or track the impact of a particular intervention? (Your original question should also have informed the data you searched for in the first place). Here we have a need to develop basic skills in how to actually use data, from finding anomalies to hold publishers to account, to using the data as part of a positive advocacy campaign.
After a quick read, on site, of some of the stories the data might have to tell, there may be a need to do further analysis, or more elaborate visualization work. At this point, a range of technical craft skills often come into play, as well as statistical knowledge.
Many openly published datasets just aren’t that good – they’re “dirty”, full of misspellings, missing data, things in the wrong place or wrong format, even if the data they do contain is true. A significant amount of time that should be spent analyzing the data gets spent trying to clean the data set and get it into a form where it can be worked with. I would argue here that a data technician, with a wealth of craft knowledge about how to repair what is essentially a broken dataset, can play an important timesaving role here getting data into a state where an analyst can actually start to do their job analyzing the data.
But at the same time, there are a range of tools and techniques that can help the everyday user improve the quality of their data. Many of these tools require an element of programming knowledge, but less than you might at first think. In the Open University/FutureLean MOOC “Learn to Code for Data Analysis” we use an interactive notebook style of computing to show how you can use code literally one line at a time to perform powerful data cleaning, analysis, and visualization operations on a range of open datasets, including data from the World Bank and Comtrade.
Here, then, is yet another area where skills development may be required: statistical literacy. At its heart, statistics simply provide us with a range of tools for comparing sets of numbers. But knowing what comparisons to make, or the basis on which particular comparisons can be made, knowing what can be said about those comparisons or how they might be interpreted, in short, understanding what story the stats appear to be telling, can quickly become bewildering. Just as we need to improve sensemaking skills associated with reading charts, so to we need to develop skills in making sense of statistics, even if not actually producing those statistics ourselves.
As more data gets published, there are more opportunities for more people to make use of that data. In many cases, what’s likely to hold back that final data use is a skills gap: primary among these are the skills required to interpret simple datasets and the statistics associated with them associated with developing knowledge about how to make decisions or track progress based on that interpretation. However, the path to producing the statistics or visualizations used by the end-users from the originally published open data dataset may also be a windy one, requiring skills not only in analyzing data and uncovering – and then telling – the stories it contains, but also in more mundane technical operational concerns such as actually accessing, and cleaning, dirty datasets….(More)”
Open Government: Missing Questions
Vadym Pyrozhenko at Administration & Society: “This article places the Obama administration’s open government initiative within the context of evolution of the U.S. information society. It examines the concept of openness along the three dimensions of Daniel Bell’s social analysis of the postindustrial society: structure, polity, and culture. Four “missing questions” raise the challenge of the compatibility of public service values with the culture of openness, address the right balance between postindustrial information management practices and the capacity of public organizations to accomplish their missions, and ask to reconsider the idea that greater structural openness of public organizations will necessarily increase their democratic legitimacy….(More)”