Public Sector Data Management Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Australian government: “Earlier in 2015, Michael Thawley, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), commissioned an in-house study into how public sector data can be better used to achieve efficiencies for government, enable better service delivery and properly be used by the private sector to stimulate economic activity…..

There are four commonly used classifications of data: personal data, research data, open data and security data. Each type of data is used for different purposes and requires a different set of considerations, as the graphic below illustrates. The project focused on how the Australian Public Service manages its research data and open data, while ensuring personal data was kept appropriately secured. Security data was beyond the scope of this project.

4 different types of data and their different purposes

The project found that there are pockets of excellence across the Australian Public Service, with some agencies actively working on projects that focus on a richer analysis of linked data. However, this approach is fragmented and is subject to a number of barriers, both perceived and real. These include cultural and legislative barriers, and a data analytics skills and capability shortage across the Australian Public Service.

To overcome these barriers, the project established a roadmap to make better use of public data, comprising an initial period to build confidence and momentum across the APS, and a longer term set of initiatives to systematise the use, publishing and sharing of public data.

The report is available from the link below: Public Sector Data Management Project“

Big Data as Governmentality – Digital Traces, Algorithms, and the Reconfiguration of Data in International Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Flyverbom, Mikkel and Madsen, Anders Klinkby and Rasche, Andreas: “This paper conceptualizes how large-scale data and algorithms condition and reshape knowledge production when addressing international development challenges. The concept of governmentality and four dimensions of an analytics of government are proposed as a theoretical framework to examine how big data is constituted as an aspiration to improve the data and knowledge underpinning development efforts. Based on this framework, we argue that big data’s impact on how relevant problems are governed is enabled by (1) new techniques of visualizing development issues, (2) linking aspects of international development agendas to algorithms that synthesize large-scale data, (3) novel ways of rationalizing knowledge claims that underlie development efforts, and (4) shifts in professional and organizational identities of those concerned with producing and processing data for development. Our discussion shows that big data problematizes selected aspects of traditional ways to collect and analyze data for development (e.g. via household surveys). We also demonstrate that using big data analyses to address development challenges raises a number of questions that can deteriorate its impact….(More)

Open Data, Privacy, and Fair Information Principles: Towards a Balancing Framework

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Paper by Zuiderveen Borgesius, Frederik J. and van Eechoud, Mireille and Gray, Jonathan: “Open data are held to contribute to a wide variety of social and political goals, including strengthening transparency, public participation and democratic accountability, promoting economic growth and innovation, and enabling greater public sector efficiency and cost savings. However, releasing government data that contain personal information may threaten privacy and related rights and interests. In this paper we ask how these privacy interests can be respected, without unduly hampering benefits from disclosing public sector information. We propose a balancing framework to help public authorities address this question in different contexts. The framework takes into account different levels of privacy risks for different types of data. It also separates decisions about access and re-use, and highlights a range of different disclosure routes. A circumstance catalogue lists factors that might be considered when assessing whether, under which conditions, and how a dataset can be released. While open data remains an important route for the publication of government information, we conclude that it is not the only route, and there must be clear and robust public interest arguments in order to justify the disclosure of personal information as open data….(More)

For people, by people

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Geeta Padmanabhan at the Hindu: “Ippodhu, a mobile app, is all about crowd-sourced civic participation for good governance…Last week, a passer-by noticed how the large hoardings outside Vivekanandar Illam, facing Marina Beach, blocked the view of the iconic building. Enraged, he whipped out his smartphone, logged on to Ippodhu and wrote: “How is this allowed? The banners are in the walking space and we can’t see the historic building!” Ippodhu.com carried the story with pictures.

“On Ippodhu, a community information mobile application, the person complaining has the option to do more,” says Peer Mohamed, the team leader of the app/website. “He could have registered a complaint with the police, the Corporation or a relevant NGO, using the ‘Act’ option. This facility makes Ippodhu a valuable tool for beleaguered citizens to complain and puts it above other social media avenues.”

Users can choose between Tamil and English, and read the latest posts just as they would in a Twitter feed. While posting, your location is geo-tagged automatically; if you find that intrusive, you can post anonymously. There is no word limit and one can enlarge the font, write an essay, a note or a rant and post it under one of 15 categories. I decided to check out the app and created an account. My post went live in less than a minute. Then I moved to Ippodhu’s USP. I clicked‘Act’, chose ‘civic issue’ as the category, and posted a note about flooding in my locality. “It’s on Apple and Android as just text now, but expect picture and video features soon when the circulation hits the target,” says Peer. “My team of 12 journalists curates the feeds 24/7, allowing no commercials, ads or abusive language. We want to keep it non-controversial and people-friendly.” It’s crowd-sourced citizen journalism and civic participation for good governance….(More)”

Decoding the Future for National Security

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

George I. Seffers at Signal: “U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.

The Office for Anticipating Surprise at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a place where crystal balls come in the form of software, tournaments and throngs of people. The office sponsors eight programs designed to improve predictive analytics, which uses a variety of data to forecast events. The programs all focus on incidents outside of the United States, and the information is anonymized to protect privacy. The programs are in different stages, some having recently ended as others are preparing to award contracts.

But they all have one more thing in common: They use tournaments to advance the state of the predictive analytic arts. “We decided to run a series of forecasting tournaments in which people from around the world generate forecasts about, now, thousands of real-world events,” says Jason Matheny, IARPA’s new director. “All of our programs on predictive analytics do use this tournament style of funding and evaluating research.” The Open Source Indicators program used a crowdsourcing technique in which people across the globe offered their predictions on such events as political uprisings, disease outbreaks and elections.

The data analyzed included social media trends, Web search queries and even cancelled dinner reservations—an indication that people are sick. “The methods applied to this were all automated. They used machine learning to comb through billions of pieces of data to look for that signal, that leading indicator, that an event was about to happen,” Matheny explains. “And they made amazing progress. They were able to predict disease outbreaks weeks earlier than traditional reporting.” The recently completed Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program also used a crowdsourcing competition in which people predicted events, including whether weapons would be tested, treaties would be signed or armed conflict would break out along certain borders. Volunteers were asked to provide information about their own background and what sources they used. IARPA also tested participants’ cognitive reasoning abilities. Volunteers provided their forecasts every day, and IARPA personnel kept score. Interestingly, they discovered the “deep domain” experts were not the best at predicting events. Instead, people with a certain style of thinking came out the winners. “They read a lot, not just from one source, but from multiple sources that come from different viewpoints. They have different sources of data, and they revise their judgments when presented with new information. They don’t stick to their guns,” Matheny reveals. …

The ACE research also contributed to a recently released book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, according to the IARPA director. The book was co-authored, along with Dan Gardner, by Philip Tetlock, the Annenberg University professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a principal investigator for the ACE program. Like ACE, the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation program uses the forecasting tournament format, but it also requires participants to explain and defend their reasoning. The initiative aims to improve analytic thinking by combining structured reasoning techniques with crowdsourcing.

Meanwhile, the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program forecasts science and technology breakthroughs….(More)”

Artificial Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Tom Simonite in MIT Technology Review: “Software trained to know the difference between an honest mistake and intentional vandalism is being rolled out in an effort to make editing Wikipedia less psychologically bruising. It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia.

One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy (see “The Decline of Wikipedia”).

Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation who helped diagnose that problem, is now leading the project trying to fight it, which relies on algorithms with a sense for human fallibility. His ORES system, for “Objective Revision Evaluation Service,” can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not….

ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Halfaker. “I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they’re making judgments really fast and they’re not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person,” he says. “This enables a tool to say, ‘If you’re going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.’”

..Earlier efforts to make Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers have been stymied by the very community that’s supposed to benefit. Wikipedians rose up in 2013 when Wikimedia made a word-processor-style editing interface the default, forcing the foundation to make it opt-in instead. To this day, the default editor uses a complicated markup language called Wikitext…(More)”

Government’s innovative approach to skills sharing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Blake Johnson at GovLoop: “For both managers and employees, it often seems there aren’t enough hours in the day to tackle every priority project.

But what if there was another option — a way for federal managers to get the skills they need internally and for employees to work on projects they’re interested in but unaware of?

Maybe you’re the employee who is really into data analytics or social media, but that’s not a part of your regular job duties. What if you had the support of your supervisor to help out on an analytics project down the hall or in a field office across the country?

I’m not making up hypothetical scenarios. These types of initiatives are actually taking shape at federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and Commerce departments.

Many agencies are in the pilot phase of rolling out their programs, which are versions of a governmentwide initiative called GovConnect. The initiative was inspired by an EPA program called Skills Marketplace that dates back to 2011.(Read more about GovConnect here.)

“We felt like we had something really promising at EPA, and we wanted to share it with other government agencies,” said Noha Gaber, EPA’s Director of Internal Communications. “So we actually pitched it to OPM and several other agencies, and that ended up becoming GovConnect.”

“The goal of GovConnect is to develop federal workforce skills through cross-agency collaboration and teamwork, to enable more agile response to mission demands without being unnecessarily limited by organizational silos,” said Melissa Kline Lee, who serves as Program Manager of GovConnect at the Office of Personnel Management. “As part of the President’s Management Agenda, the Office of Personnel Management and Environmental Protection Agency are using the GovConnect pilot to help agencies test and scale new approaches to workforce development.”…

Managers post projects or tasks in the online marketplace, which was developed using the agency’s existing SharePoint environment. Projects include clear tasks that employees can accomplish using up to 20 percent of their workweek or less. Projects cannot be open-ended and should not exceed one year.

From there, any employee can view the projects, evaluate what skills or competencies are needed and apply for the position. Managers review the applications and conduct interviews before selecting a candidate. Here are the latest stats for Skills Marketplace as of November 2015:

  • Managers posted 358 projects in the marketplace
  • Employees submitted 577 applications
  • More than 750 people have created profiles for the marketplace

Gaber shared one example involving an employee from the Office of Pesticide Programs and staff from the Office of Environmental Information (OEI), which is the main IT office at EPA. The employee brought to the team technical expertise and skills in geographic information systems to support OEI’s Toxic Release Inventory Program, which tracks data on toxic chemicals being produced by different facilities.

The benefits were twofold: The employee established new connections in a different part of the agency, and his home office benefited from the experiences and knowledge he gleaned while working on the project….(More)

Freedom of Information, Right to Access Information, Open Data: Who is at the Table?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”