Sean Varah at VentureBeat: “Everyone takes pictures and video with their devices. Parents record their kids’ soccer games, companies record employee training, police surveillance cameras at busy intersections run 24/7, and drones monitor pipelines in the desert.
With vast amounts of video growing vaster at a rate faster than the day before, and the hottest devices like drones decreasing in price and size until everyone has one (OK, not in their pocket quite yet) it’s time to start talking about mining this mass of valuable video data for useful purposes.
Julian Mann, the cofounder of Skybox Imaging — a company in the business of commercial satellite imagery and the developer advocate for Google Earth outreach — says that the new “Skybox for Good” program will provide “a constantly updated model of change of the entire planet” with the potential to “save lives, protect the environment, promote education, and positively impact humanity.”…
Mining video data through “man + machine” artificial intelligence is new technology in search of unsolved problems. Could this be the next chapter in the ever-evolving technology revolution?
For the past 50 years, satellite imagery has only been available to the U.S. intelligence community and those countries with technology to launch their own. Digital Globe was one of the first companies to make satellite imagery available commercially, and now Skybox and a few others have joined them. Drones are even newer, having been used by the U.S. military since the ‘90s for surveillance over battlefields or, in this age of counter-terrorism, playing the role of aerial detectives finding bad guys in the middle of nowhere. Before drones, the same tasks required thousands of troops on the ground, putting many young men and women in harm’s way. Today, hundreds of trained “eyes” safely located here in the U.S. watch hours of video from a single drone to assess current situations in countries far away….”
Using twitter to get ground truth on floods
Interview with Floodtags founder Jurjen Wagemaker at Global Pulse: “…Twtitter has proved to be a fantastic flood monitor tool and we encourage people to share even more of their flood experiences on Twitter. Now the difficult part is, to create the right flood filters and enrichments, so that disaster managers only need to look at a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of observations coming in.
So we enrich and analyse all flood data in real-time, and present them in an understandable format through our web service. A good example is the water depth of a flood. It turns out that a large number of people both mention the flood depth as well as the location where they monitored it. Take for instance January 29th, 2014: out of the 360.000 tweets we collected on floods, 15.000 included water depth observations (see picture). Together with the Dutch water management institute Deltares (@arnejanvl) we are working to develop a sound interpretation framework for these observations to create real-time floodmaps. For reference, to make a reliable floodmap of the January 2013 flood took a total of nine days. This was thanks to the hard work of the disaster management office and the HOT team (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team)….
We will launch the site at the upcoming Data Innovation for Policy Makers conference in Bali. And from that date onwards you can use Floodtags to get realtime flood information in Indonesia. Just go to Floodtags.com and sign-up. Especially when it rains it can become quite interesting: you can search for different neighbourhoods and see what people tweeted and how deep the water is. There is also a realtime tweet density map and you can request tweet statistics (e.g. figure 5, where we compare flood tweets with flood response tweets) – and we have got so much more to come. “
The Year of Data-Driven Government Accountability
in Pacific Standard: “Indeed, 2014 could be called the Year of Government Accountability, as voters on just about every continent have demanded that public officials govern with relentless efficiency, fiscal responsibility, and transparency….
The bottom line, in my view, is that facts must be the fundamental basis for critical and strategic decision-making at every level of government around the world today.
This belief—the foundation of massive technology and social movements, such as open data, big data, and data-driven government—is currently shared by a number of global government leaders. Just recently, for example, President Obama declared that “We must respond based on facts, not fear” when confronting the global Ebola crisis.
To be sure, presenting facts to decision-makers where and when they are needed is one of the most urgent technology priorities of our time. The good news is that we’re seeing progress on this front each and every day as civic organizations around the world rush to open their vast troves of data on the Internet and usher in a new era in data-driven government that will produce facts at the speed of light, and deliver them in context to political leaders, everyday citizens, professional academicians, scientists, journalists, and software developers wherever they are connected to the Web.
Data-driven government, which capitalizes on data, one of the most valuable natural resources of the 21st century, is a breakthrough opportunity of truly significant proportions. And it will be absolutely critical if governments everywhere are to achieve their ultimate mission. Without it, I worry that we just won’t be able to provide citizens with a higher quality of life and with greater opportunities to achieve their full potential.
Big Data: The Key Vocabulary Everyone Should Understand
Bernard Marr at LinkedIn Pulse: “The field of Big Data requires more clarity and I am a big fan of simple explanations. This is why I have attempted to provide simple explanations for some of the most important technologies and terms you will come across if you’re looking at getting into big data.
Here they are:
Algorithm: A mathematical formula or statistical process run by software to perform an analysis of data. It usually consists of multiple calculations steps and can be used to automatically process data or solve problems.
Amazon Web Services: A collection of cloud computing services offered by Amazon to help businesses carry out large scale computing operations (such as big data projects) without having to invest in their own server farms and data storage warehouses. Essentially, Storage space, processing power and software operations are rented rather than having to be bought and installed from scratch.
Analytics: The process of collecting, processing and analyzing data to generate insights that inform fact-based decision-making. In many cases it involves software-based analysis using algorithms. For more, have a look at my post: What the Heck is… Analytics
Big Table: Google’s proprietary data storage system, which it uses to host, among other things its Gmail, Google Earth and Youtube services. It is also made available for public use through the Google App Engine.
Biometrics: Using technology and analytics to identify people by one or more of their physical traits, such as face recognition, iris recognition, fingerprint recognition, etc. For more, see my post: Big Data and Biometrics
Cassandra: A popular open source database management system managed by The Apache Software Foundation that has been designed to handle large volumes of data across distributed servers.
Cloud: Cloud computing, or computing “in the cloud”, simply means software or data running on remote servers, rather than locally. Data stored “in the cloud” is typically accessible over the internet, wherever in the world the owner of that data might be. For more, check out my post: What The Heck is… The Cloud?
Distributed File System: Data storage system designed to store large volumes of data across multiple storage devices (often cloud based commodity servers), to decrease the cost and complexity of storing large amounts of data.
….”
See also: Big Data: Using SMART Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance
Forget the FOIA Request: Cities, States Open Data Portals
Alexa Capeloto in MediaShift (PBS): “In almost any city you can read your local leaders’ emails if you formally ask for them. In Gainesville, Fla., all you have to do is go here.
In most states you can find out how tax dollars are being spent if you officially request expenditure records. In Wisconsin, you just click here.
For the last 50 years, governments have given up public records in response to Freedom of Information requests. But a number of public agencies are learning the value of proactively providing information before anyone has to ask for it.
The trend is part of the open-data movement that most large cities and the federal government have already begun to embrace. The information itself can range from simple emails to complex datasets, but the general idea is the same: Deliver information directly to the public using digital tools that can save money and serve the goal of government transparency.
…And there’s the added benefit of helping the bottom line. Users don’t have to request information if it’s already posted, saving agencies time and money, and a centralized FOIA tracking system can further streamline processing.
Sean Moulton of the Center for Effective Government testified before Congress that full participation in FOIAonline could save federal agencies an estimated $40 million per year in processing costs.
And Reinvent Albany, a nonprofit that pushes for transparency in New York, estimated in a June report that New York City could reduce FOI-related costs by 66 percent – from $20 million per year down to $7 million – by adopting an open-data system and doing away with its “hodgepodge of paper-based methods that are expensive, slow and unreliable.”
So…What’s the Catch?
In their survey, chief information officers were asked to name the top three barriers to advancing open data in state government. Fifty-three percent cited “agencies’ willingness to publish data,” and 49 percent cited “the reliability of the data.”
Information is of little value to the public if it’s faulty or too complex to understand. It could become a way for agencies to claim they’re being transparent without actually providing anything useful.
Plus, some worry that public servants will self-censor if they know, for example, their emails are automatically being shared with the world….”
E-Governance for Smart Cities
New book edited by Vinod Kumar, T. M. : “This book highlights the electronic governance in a smart city through case studies of cities located in many countries. “E-Government” refers to the use by government agencies of information technologies (such as Wide Area Networks, the Internet, and mobile computing) that have the ability to transform relations with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government. These technologies can serve a variety of different ends: better delivery of government services to citizens, improved interactions with business and industry, citizen empowerment through access to information, or more efficient government management. The resulting benefits are less corruption, increased transparency, greater convenience, revenue growth, and/or cost reductions.
The book is divided into three parts.
• E-Governance State of the Art Studies of many cities
• E-Governance Domains Studies
• E-Governance Tools and Issues”
Download Table of contents (pdf, 1.4 MB)
Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology
By Julia Root and Stefaan Verhulst
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 civic innovation was originally published in 2014.
The last five years have seen a wave of new organizations, entrepreneurs and investment in cities and the field of civic innovation. Two subfields, Civic Tech and Government Innovation, are particularly aligned with GovLab’s interest in the ways in which technology is and can be deployed to redesign public institutions and re-imagine governance.
The emerging field of civic technology, or “Civic Tech,” champions new digital platforms, open data and collaboration tools for transforming government service delivery and engagement with citizens. Government Innovation, while not a new field, has seen in the last five years a proliferation of new structures (e.g. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), roles (e.g. Chief Technology/Innovation Officer) and public/private investment (e.g. Innovation Delivery Teams and Code for America Fellows) that are building a world-wide movement for transforming how government thinks about and designs services for its citizens.
There is no set definition for “civic innovation.” However, broadly speaking, it is about improving our cities through the implementation of tools, ideas and engagement methods that strengthen the relationship between government and citizens. The civic innovation field encompasses diverse actors from across the public, private and nonprofit spectrums. These can include government leaders, nonprofit and foundation professionals, urbanists, technologists, researchers, business leaders and community organizers, each of whom may use the term in a different way, but ultimately are seeking to disrupt how cities and public institutions solve problems and invest in solutions.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work – a report that creates a typology for the new innovation offices cropping up in cities and government agencies across the country.
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow – a white paper on the field of civic innovation and how it is defined by different stakeholders in the field.
- Bloomberg Philanthropies – Transform Your City Through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model For Making It Happen – a playbook for implementing an Innovation Delivery Team in your city.
- Jeremy M. Goldberg – Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation – an article that highlights new forms of public/private partnership in the field of civic innovation.
- Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford – The Responsive City – a comprehensive book of case studies from Boston, Chicago, and New York that document how digital technologies are transforming the relationship between city governments and citizens.
- Jessica Mulholland and Noelle Knell – Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map) – an article that maps the new role for innovation officers in municipal government.
- Open Plans – Field Scan on Civic Technology – a 2012 report from Living Cities that provides one of the first overviews and set of recommendations for the civic tech field.
- Mayur Patel, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley and Daniel Houghton – Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology – a report that maps the field of civic tech, charts overall investment, clusters organizations into shared themes and offers robust examples of activity and impact.
- Anthony M. Townsend – Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia – a book exploring the diversity of motivations, challenges and potential benefits of smart cities in our “era of mass urbanization and technological ubiquity.”
Annotated Selected Readings (in alphabetical order)
Books
Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. 1 edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014. http://bit.ly/1zvKOL0.
- The Responsive City, a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age, is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level.
- The “data smart city” is one that is responsive to citizens, engages them in problem solving and finds new innovative solutions for dismantling entrenched bureaucracy.
- The authors document case studies from New York City, Boston and Chicago to explore the following topics:
- Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;
- Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;
- Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
- Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.
Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://bit.ly/17Y4G0R.
- In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
- He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
- He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure; instead, it is how citizens are using ever-changing and grassroots technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient” that will make cities ‘smart.’
Reports + Journal Articles
Black, Alissa, and Rachel Burstein. “The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow.” White Paper. New America Foundation – California Civic Innovation Project, June 2013. https://bit.ly/2GohMvw.
- Through their interviews, the authors determine that civic innovation is not just a “compilation of projects” but that it can inspire institutional structural change.
- Civic innovation projects that have a “technology focus can sound very different than process-related innovations”; however the outcomes are actually quite similar as they disrupt how citizens and government engage with one another.
- Technology is viewed by some of the experts as an enabler of civic innovation – not necessarily the driver for innovation itself. What constitutes innovation is how new tools are implemented by government or by civic groups that changes the governing dynamic.
Patel, Mayur, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley, and Daniel Houghton. “Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology.” Presentation. Knight Foundation, December 2013. http://slidesha.re/11UYgO0.
- This reports aims to advance the field of civic technology, which compared to the tech industry as a whole is relatively young. It maps the field, creating a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector.
- It defines two themes, Open Government and Civic Action, and identifies 11 clusters of civic tech innovation that fall into the two themes. For each cluster, the authors describe the type of activities and highlights specific organizations.
- The report identified more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013.
Open Plans. “Field Scan on Civic Technology.” Living Cities, November 2012. http://bit.ly/1HGjGih.
- Commissioned by Living Cities and authored by Open Plans, the Field Scan investigates the emergent field of civic technology and generates the first analysis of the potential impact for the field as well as a critique for how tools and new methods need to be more inclusive of low-income communities in their use and implementation.
- Respondents generally agreed that the tools developed and in use in cities so far are demonstrations of the potential power of civic tech, but that these tools don’t yet go far enough.
- Civic tech tools have the potential to improve the lives of low-income people in a number of ways. However, these tools often fail to reach the population they are intended to benefit. To better understand this challenge, civic tech for low-income people must be considered in the broader context of their interactions with technology and with government.
- Although hackathons are popular, their approach to problem solving is not always driven by community needs, and hackathons often do not produce useful material for governments or citizens in need.
Goldberg, Jeremy M. “Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation.” Governing, August 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOKnhJ.
- In this piece, Goldberg argues that innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets.
- Organizations and Fellowship programs such as Bayes Impact, Code for America, Data Science for Social Good and Fuse Corps, are creating a new public-private partnership model that is bringing new talent into city hall, increasing innovation capacity and engagement with diverse networks.
Black, Alissa, and Burstein, Rachel. “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work.” IBM Center for the Business of Government, October 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOFZP4.
- In this report, Burstein and Black examine the recent trend toward the creation of innovation offices across the nation at all levels of government to understand the structural models now being used to stimulate innovation—both internally within an agency, and externally for the agency’s partners and communities.
- The authors conducted interviews with leadership of innovation offices of cities that include Philadelphia, Austin, Kansas City, Chicago, Davis, Memphis and Los Angeles.
- The report cites examples of offices, generates a typology for the field, links to projects and highlights success factors.
Mulholland, Jessica, and Noelle Knell. “Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map).” Government Technology, March 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ycArvX.
- This article provides an overview of how different cities structure their Chief Innovation Officer positions and provides links to offices, projects and additional editorial content.
- Some innovation officers find their duties merged with traditional CIO responsibilities, as is the case in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. Others, like those in Louisville and Nashville, have titles that reveal a link to their jurisdiction’s economic development endeavors.
Toolkits
Bloomberg Philanthropies. January 2014. “Transform Your City through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model for Making It Happen.” New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies. http://bloombg.org/120VrKB.
- In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies funded a three-year innovation capacity program in five major United States cities— Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans – in which cities could hire top-level staff to develop and see through the implementation of solutions to top mayoral priorities such as customer service, murder, homelessness, and economic development, using a sequence of steps.
- The Innovation Delivery Team Playbook describes the Innovation Delivery Model and describes each aspect of the model from how to hire and structure the team, to how to manage roundtables and run competitions.
Smart citizens. How internet facilitates smart choices in city life
Report by Ericsson Consumer Lab: “The idea of smart cities is an intriguing concept. However, the future will partly be a story of how the architects defining the way our future cities operate are going to be citizens themselves. As the internet makes us more informed, we are in turn making better informed decisions.
We are becoming smart citizens and through our changing behaviors, efficient practices and smarter social norms are developing in our cities.”
Participatory sensing: enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement
New White Paper by the Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society (Australia): “Local government (such as the City of Melbourne) is accountable and responsible for establishment, execution and oversight of strategic objectives and resource management in the metropolis. Faced with a rising population, Council has in place a number of strategic plans to ensure it is able to deliver services that maintain (and ideally improve) the quality of life for its citizens (including residents, workers and visitors). This publication explores participatory sensing (PS) and issues associated with governance in the light of new information gathering capabilities that directly engage citizens in collecting data and providing contextual insight that has the potential to greatly enhance Council operations in managing these environments. Download: Participatory Sensing: Enabling interactive local governance through citizen engagement (pdf: 2.3mb)“
What do businesses really look for in open data?
Harvey Lewis in Computer Weekly: “In 2015, the UK’s primary open data portal, www.data.gov.uk, will be six years old. The portal hosts approximately 20,000 official data sets from central government departments and their agencies, local authorities and other public sector bodies across the country. Just over half of these data sets are available as open data under the Open Government Licence (OGL). Data.gov.uk forms part of an international network of over three hundred open data efforts that have seen not just thousands but millions of data sets worldwide becoming freely available for personal or commercial use. [See http://datacatalogs.org and www.quandle.com].
…simply publishing open data does not guarantee that a business will use it…., if businesses are building new products or services, or relying on the data to inform their strategy, a number of characteristics other than just openness become critical in determining success:
- Provenance – what is the source of the data and how it was collected? Is it authoritative?
- Completeness and accuracy – are the examples and features of the data present and correct, and, if not, is the quality understood and documented?
- Consistency – is the data published in a consistent, easy-to-access format and are any changes documented?
- Timeliness – is the data available when it is needed for the time periods needed?
- Richness – does the data contain a level of detail sufficient to answer our questions?
- Guarantees of availability – will the data continue to be made available in the future?
If these characteristics cannot be guaranteed in open data or are unavailable except under a commercial licence then many businesses would prefer to pay to get them. While some public sector bodies – particularly the Trading Funds – have, over the years, established strong connections with business users of their data and understand their needs implicitly, the Open Data Institute is the first to cement these characteristics into a formal certification scheme for publishers of open data.
A campaign is needed to get publishers to adopt these certificates and to recognise that, economically at least, they are as important as Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s five-star scale for linked open data. ….”