U.S. to release indexes of federal data


The Sunlight Foundation: “For the first time, the United States government has agreed to release what we believe to be the largest index of government data in the world.
On Friday, the Sunlight Foundation received a letter from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) outlining how they plan to comply with our FOIA request from December 2013 for agency Enterprise Data Inventories. EDIs are comprehensive lists of a federal agency’s information holdings, providing an unprecedented view into data held internally across the government. Our FOIA request was submitted 14 months ago.
These lists of the government’s data were not public, however, until now. More than a year after Sunlight’s FOIA request and with a lawsuit initiated by Sunlight about to be filed, we’re finally going to see what data the government holds.
Sunlight’s FOIA request built on President Obama’s Open Data Executive Order, which first required agency-wide data indexes to be built and maintained. According to implementation guidance prepared in response to the executive order, Enterprise Data Inventories are intended to help agencies “develop a clear and comprehensive understanding of what data assets they possess” by accounting “for all data assets created or collected by the agency.”
At the time, we argued that “without seeing the entire EDIs, it is impossible for the public to know what data is being collected and stored by the government and to debate whether or not that data should be made public.”
When OMB initially responded to our request, it didn’t cite an exemption to FOIA. Instead, OMB directed us to approach each agency individually for its EDIs. This, despite the fact that the agencies are required to submit their updated EDIs to OMB on a quarterly basis.
With that in mind, and with the help of some very talented lawyers from the firm of Garvey Schubert Barer, we filed an administrative appeal with OMB and prepared for court. We were ready to fight for the idea that government data cannot be leveraged to its fullest if the public only knows about a fraction of it.
We hoped that OMB would recognize that open data is worth the work it takes to disclose the indexes. We’re pleased to say that our hope looks like it is becoming reality.
Since 2013, federal agencies have been required to construct a list of all of their major data sets, subject only to a few exceptions detailed in President Obama’s executive order as well as some information exempted from disclosure under the FOIA.
Having access to a detailed index of agencies’ data is a key step in aiding the use and utility of government data. By publicly describing almost all data the government has in an index, the Enterprise Data Inventories should empower IT management, FOIA requestors and oversight — by government officials and citizens alike….(More)”.

More Power to the People: How Cities Are Letting Data Flow


Stephen Taylor at People4SmarterCities: “Smart cities understand that engaging the public in decision-making is vital to enhancing services and ensuring accountability. Here are three ideas that show how cities are embracing new technologies and opening up data to spur civic participation and improve citizens’ lives.

 City Texts Help Keep Food on the Table
In San Francisco, about a third of the 52,000 people that receive food stamps are disenrolled from the program because they miss certain deadlines, such as filing quarterly reports with the city’s Human Services Agency. To help keep recipients up to date on their status, the nonprofit organization Code for America worked with the city agency to create Promptly, an open-source software platform that sends alerts by text message when citizens need to take action to keep their benefits. Not only does it help ensure that low-income residents keep food on the table, it also helps the department run more efficiently as less staff time is spent on re-enrollments.
Fired Up in Los Angeles Over Open Data
For the Los Angeles Fire Department, its work is all about responding to citizens. Not only does it handle fire and medical calls, it’s also the first fire agency in the U.S. to gather and post data on its emergency-response times on the Internet through a program called FireStat. The data gives citizens the opportunity to review metrics such as the amount of time it takes for stations to process emergency calls, the time for firefighters to leave the station and the travel time to the incident for each of its 102 firehouses throughout the city. The goal of FireStat is to see where and how response times can be improved, while increasing management accountability….(More)”

The Future of Open and How To Stop It


Blogpost by Steve Song: “In 2008, Jonathan Zittrain wrote a book called The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It. In it he argued that the runaway success of the Internet is also the cause of it being undermined, that vested interests were in the process of locking down the potential for innovation by creating walled gardens.  He wrote that book because he loved the Internet and the potential it represents and was concerned about it going down a path that would diminish its potential.  It is in that spirit that I borrow his title to talk about the open movement.  By the term open movement, I am referring broadly to the group of initiatives inspired by the success of Open Source software that led to initiatives as varied as the Creative Commons, Open Data, Open Science, Open Access, Open Corporates, Open Government, the list goes on.   I write this because I love open initiatives but I fear that openness is in danger of becoming its own enemy as it becomes an orthodoxy difficult to question.
In June of last year, I wrote an article called The Morality of Openness which attempted to unpack my complicated feelings about openness.  Towards the end the essay, I wondered whether the word trust might not be a more important word than open for our current world.  I am now convinced of this.  Which is not to say that I have stopped believing in openness but openness; I believe openness is a means to an end, it is not the endgame.  Trust is the endgame.  Higher trust environments, whether in families or corporations or economies, tend to be both more effective and happier.  There is no similar body of evidence for open and yet open practices can be a critical element on the road to trust. Equally, when mis-applied, openness can achieve the opposite….
Openness can be a means of building trust.  Ironically though, if openness as behaviour is mandated, it stops building trust.  Listen to Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith talk about why that happens.  What Smith argues (building on the work of an earlier Smith, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) is that intent matters.  That as human beings, we signal our intentions to each other with our behaviour and that influences how others behave.  When intention is removed by regulating or enforcing good behaviour, that signal is lost as well.
I watched this happen nearly ten years ago in South Africa when the government decided to embrace the success of Open Source software and make it mandatory for government departments to use Open Source software.  No one did.  It is choosing to share that make open initiatives work.  When you remove choice, you don’t inspire others to share and you don’t build trust.  Looking at the problem from the perspective of trust rather than from the perspective of open makes this problem much easier to see.
Lateral thinker Jerry Michalski gave a great talk last year entitled What If We Trusted You? in which he talked about how the architecture of systems either build or destroy trust.  He give a great example of wikipedia as an open, trust enabling architecture.  We don’t often think about what a giant leap of trust wikipedia makes in allowing anyone to edit it and what an enormous achievement it became…(More).”

The story of the sixth myth of open data and open government


Paper by Ann-Sofie Hellberg and Karin Hedström: “The aim of this paper is to describe a local government effort to realise an open government agenda. This is done using a storytelling approach….The empirical data is based on a case study. We participated in, as well as followed, the process of realising an open government agenda on a local level, where citizens were invited to use open public data as the basis for developing apps and external web solutions. Based on an interpretative tradition, we chose storytelling as a way to scrutinize the competition process. In this paper, we present a story about the competition process using the story elements put forward by Kendall and Kendall (2012).

….Our research builds on existing research by proposing the myth that the “public” wants to make use of open data. We provide empirical insights into the challenge of gaining benefits from open public data. In particular, we illustrate the difficulties in getting citizens interested in using open public data. Our case shows that people seem to like the idea of open public data, but do not necessarily participate actively in the data re-use process…..This study illustrates the difficulties of promoting the re-use of open public data. Public organisations that want to pursue an open government agenda can use our findings as empirical insights… (More)”

 

A lot of private-sector data is also used for public good


Josh New in Computerworld: “As the private sector continues to invest in data-driven innovation, the capacity for society to benefit from this data collection grows as well. Much has been said about how the private sector is using the data it collects to improve corporate bottom lines, but positive stories about how that data contributes to the greater public good are largely unknown.
This is unfortunate, because data collected by the private sector is being used in a variety of important ways, including to advance medical research, to help students make better academic decisions and to provide government agencies and nonprofits with actionable insights. However, overzealous actions by government to restrict the collection and use of data by the private sector are likely to have a chilling effect on such data-driven innovation.
Companies are working to advance medical research with data sharing. Personal genetics company 23andMe, which offers its customers inexpensive DNA test kits, has obtained consent from three-fourths of its 800,000 customers to donate their genetic information for research purposes. 23andMe has partnered with pharmaceutical companies, such as Genentech and Pfizer, to advance genomics research by providing scientists with the data needed to develop new treatments for diseases like Crohn’s and Parkinson’s. The company has also worked with researchers to leverage its network of customers to recruit patients for clinical trials more effectively than through previous protocols.
Private-sector data is also helping students make more informed decisions about education. With the cost of attending college rising, data that helps make this investment worthwhile is incredibly valuable. The social networking company LinkedIn has built tools that provide prospective college students with valuable information about their potential career path, field of study and choice of school. By analyzing the education tracks and careers of its users, LinkedIn can offer students critical data-driven insights into how to make the best out of the enormous and costly decision to go to college. Through LinkedIn’s higher-education tools, students now have an unprecedented resource to develop data-supported education and career plans….(More)”

Untangling Complexity


Essay by Jacqueline Wallace at civicquarterly.com : “The next phase of the digital revolution will be defined by products and services that facilitate shared understanding, allowing concerted participation around complex issues. In working to show the way, civic designers will need to call upon the powers of systems research, design research, social science, and open data….
Creating next-gen civic applications will require designers to embody a systems-based approach to civic participation, marrying systems-based research, user-centered design, social science, and data. This article chronicles my own experience leveraging these tools to facilitate shared understand amongst my community vis. a vis. the Kinder Morgan pipeline….
I believe the contention around the pipeline evinces a bigger problem in our civic sphere: While individual issues such as the Kinder Morgan pipeline continue to absorb a great deal of energy from citizens, user-centered designers must use their unique skillset to address these issues more broadly. Because we’re not only failing our fellow citizens; we’re failing our representatives as well. In the words of digital strategist and civic design advocate Mike Connery: “there has been almost zero investment in giving our representatives the tools they need to understand feedback from citizens.”
The opportunity is two-fold. As previously stated, there is a need to develop tools that support citizens and representatives to understand and engage with complex social issues. There is also a need to develop processes, processes that cultivate our abilities to understand policy development in order to more efficiently spend our tax dollars. Writing about a recent project that used social science methods to analyze the long-term success of a welfare project, NPR correspondent Shankar Vedantam said, “it really makes no sense that marketers selling toys have better data on what works and what doesn’t than policy makers who are spending billions and billions of dollars.”…(More)

Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture


New book by Hilary Mason and DJ Patil: “Succeeding with data isn’t just a matter of putting Hadoop in your machine room, or hiring some physicists with crazy math skills. It requires you to develop a data culture that involves people throughout the organization. In this O’Reilly report, DJ Patil and Hilary Mason outline the steps you need to take if your company is to be truly data-driven—including the questions you should ask and the methods you should adopt.
You’ll not only learn examples of how Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook use their data, but also how Walmart, UPS, and other organizations took advantage of this resource long before the advent of Big Data. No matter how you approach it, building a data culture is the key to success in the 21st century.
You’ll explore:

  • Data scientist skills—and why every company needs a Spock
  • How the benefits of giving company-wide access to data outweigh the costs
  • Why data-driven organizations use the scientific method to explore and solve data problems
  • Key questions to help you develop a research-specific process for tackling important issues
  • What to consider when assembling your data team
  • Developing processes to keep your data team (and company) engaged
  • Choosing technologies that are powerful, support teamwork, and easy to use and learn …(More)”

R U There?


in the New Yorker on a new counselling service harnesses the power of the text message:” …. a person can contact Crisis Text Line without even looking at her phone. The number—741741—traces a simple, muscle-memory-friendly path down the left column of the keypad. Anyone who texts in receives an automatic response welcoming her to the service. Another provides a link to the organization’s privacy policy and explains that she can text “STOP” to end a conversation at any time. Meanwhile, the incoming message appears on the screen of Crisis Text Line’s proprietary computer system. The interface looks remarkably like a Facebook feed—pale background, blue banner at the top, pop-up messages in the lower right corner—a design that is intended to feel familiar and frictionless. The system, which receives an average of fifteen thousand texts a day, highlights messages containing words that might indicate imminent danger, such as “suicide,” “kill,” and “hopeless.”

Within five minutes, one of the counsellors on duty will write back. (Up to fifty people, most of them in their late twenties, are available at any given time, depending upon demand, and they can work wherever there’s an Internet connection.) An introductory message from a counsellor includes a casual greeting and a question about why the texter is writing in….(More)”

Moovit Crowdsources Public Transit Data, So You'll Never Get Stuck Waiting For The Bus Again


Ariel Schwartz at Co.Exist: “There are few things more frustrating than rushing to the bus, only to find out that it’s delayed indefinitely. Or arriving at the subway stop to find hundreds of others waiting for the same delayed train, making your chances of entry onto the next car nearly impossible.
In cities with open data, localized transit apps with real-time transit updates can alleviate the problem, but those apps aren’t available everywhere—and in most cases, they don’t offer up information about service alerts, like bus stops relocated due to construction.
Moovit, an Israeli startup that recently raised $50 million for its app, which takes a lot of the headache out of navigating public transportation. Available in over 500 cities globally, Moovit uses a combination of official transit information and crowdsourced live updates to provide accurate information on a city’s public transportation city at any given moment.
Getting started with the app is fairly intuitive; just put in your starting location and destination and Moovit spits out the best way to get there. It also notifies you when you’re getting close to your stop—a bonus in cities with transportation systems that don’t always make that clear (ahem, San Francisco)….
The vision for Moovit goes beyond public transportation (just look at the company’s investor list, which includes BMW i Ventures). “We want to make this an omni-search for non-car owners, including bike, taxi, and carsharing services,” says Erez. Later this year, Moovit plans to make a number of announcements around integrating multiple means of transportation into the app. (More)

Big Data and Discriminatory Pricing


White House: “In response to the big data and privacy report’s finding that these technologies and tools can enable new forms of discrimination, the White House Council of Economic Advisers conducted a study examining whether and how companies may use big data technologies to offer different prices to different consumers — a practice known as “discriminatory pricing.” The CEA found that many companies already use big data for targeted marketing, and others are experimenting in a limited way with personalized pricing, but this practice is not yet widespread. While the economic literature contends that discriminatory pricing will often, though not always, be welfare-enhancing for businesses and consumers, the CEA concludes that policymakers should be vigilant against the potential for discriminatory outcomes, particularly in cases where prices are not transparent and could give rise to fraud or scams….To read the Council of Economic Advisers report on discriminatory pricing, click here.