White House Blog: “Technology evolves rapidly, and it can be challenging for policy and its implementation to evolve at the same pace. Last week, President Obama launched the Administration’s new Open Data Policy and Executive Order aimed at ensuring that data released by the government will be as accessible and useful as possible. To make sure this tech-focused policy can keep up with the speed of innovation, we created Project Open Data.
Project Open Data is an online, public repository intended to foster collaboration and promote the continual improvement of the Open Data Policy. We wanted to foster a culture change in government where we embrace collaboration and where anyone can help us make open data work better. The project is published on GitHub, an open source platform that allows communities of developers to collaboratively share and enhance code. The resources and plug-and-play tools in Project Open Data can help accelerate the adoption of open data practices. For example, one tool instantly converts spreadsheets and databases into APIs for easier consumption by developers. The idea is that anyone, from Federal agencies to state and local governments to private citizens, can freely use and adapt these open source tools—and that’s exactly what’s happening.
Within the first 24 hours after Project Open Data was published, more than two dozen contributions (or “pull requests” in GitHub speak) were submitted by the public. The submissions included everything from fixing broken links, to providing policy suggestions, to contributing new code and tools. One pull request even included new code that translates geographic data from locked formats into open data that is freely available for use by anyone…”
IRS: Turn over a new leaf, Open up Data
Beth Simone Noveck and Stefaan Verhulst in Forbes: “The core task for Danny Werfel, the new acting commissioner of the IRS, is to repair the agency’s tarnished reputation and achieve greater efficacy and fairness in IRS investigations. Mr. Werfel can show true leadership by restructuring how the IRS handles its tax-exempt enforcement processes.
One of Mr. Werfel’s first actions on the job should be the immediate implementation of the groundbreaking Presidential Executive Order and Open Data policy, released last week, that requires data captured and generated by the government be made available in open, machine-readable formats. Doing so will make the IRS a beacon to other agencies in how to use open data to screen any wrongdoing and strengthen law enforcement.
By sharing readily available IRS data on tax-exempt organizations, encouraging Congress to pass a budget proposal that mandates release of all tax-exempt returns in a machine-readable format, and increasing the transparency of its own processes, the agency can begin to turn the page on this scandal and help rebuild trust and partnership between government and its citizens.”
See full article here.
How Generation X is Shaping Government
Governing Magazine: “Local governments are in the midst of a sea change when it comes to public participation and citizen engagement. Forced by the recession and recovery of the last five years to make dramatic cuts to their budgets, they’ve reached out to try to understand better what their residents value most. Presented with a new and ever-evolving array of technological tools — Facebook, Twitter, text messaging and public-participation sites like MindMixer, Peak Democracy and Nextdoor — they’re using them to publicize their own concerns and, increasingly, to draw out public sentiment. They’ve discovered the “civic technology” movement, with its groups like Code for America and events like next month’s National Day of Civic Hacking, which encourage citizens with tech skills to use government data to build apps useful to residents, neighborhoods and cities.
What may be most interesting about all this, however, is that it’s occurring precisely as another momentous shift is taking place: As they go through their 30s and 40s, members of Generation X are moving into more active roles as citizens and into upper management ranks in local government. While it’s too much to say that this generational change is the force driving local governments’ more expansive view of public engagement, the blending of the two trends is no coincidence. It shouldn’t be surprising that this generation, which long ago shook off its disengaged-slacker stereotype to become known for its entrepreneurialism, DIY ethic, skepticism about bureaucracy and comfort with collaborating over far-flung networks, would now be pressing local government to think in new ways about the work of democracy.”
Intel Fuels a Rebellion Around Your Data
Antonio Regalado and Jessica Leber in MIT Technology Review:”Intel Labs, the company’s R&D arm, is launching an initiative around what it calls the “data economy”—how consumers might capture more of the value of their personal information, like digital records of their their location or work history. To make this possible, Intel is funding hackathons to urge developers to explore novel uses of personal data. It has also paid for a rebellious-sounding website called We the Data, featuring raised fists and stories comparing Facebook to Exxon Mobil.
Intel’s effort to stir a debate around “your data” is just one example of how some companies—and society more broadly—are grappling with a basic economic asymmetry of the big data age: they’ve got the data, and we don’t.
Slacktivism
A pejorative term that belittles easily performed activities that do not express a full–blown political commitment.
Research featured in the New Scientist focuses on the impact of so-called “slacktivism”, or “low-cost, low-risk online activism,” on subsequent civic action. A detailed analysis of slacktivism was developed by Henrik Serup Christensen in his 2011 paper in First Monday where he defined the concept and its origin as follows:
“Slacktivism has become somewhat of a buzzword when it comes to demeaning the electronic versions of political participation. The origins of the term slacktivism is debated, but Fred Clark takes credit for using the term in 1995 in a seminar series held together with Dwight Ozard. However, they used it to shorten slacker activism, which refer to bottom up activities by young people to affect society on a small personal scale used. In their usage, the term had a positive connotation.
Today, the term is used in a more negative sense to belittle activities that do not express a full–blown political commitment. The concept generally refer to activities that are easily performed, but they are considered more effective in making the participants feel good about themselves than to achieve the stated political goals. Slacktivism can take other expressions, such as wearing political messages in various forms on your body or vehicle, joining Facebook groups, or taking part in short–term boycotts such as Buy Nothing Day or Earth Hour.”
The research featured in the New Scientist comprises work by Yu-Hao Lee and Gary Hsieh, both from Michigan State University, who analyzed the effects of slacktivism following (using the description of the New Scientist) “the Colorado cinema shootings in 2012, which had prompted wide debate over access to firearms. Hsieh’s team recruited 759 US participants from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace and surveyed them for their position on gun control. They asked people if they would sign an e-petition to either ban assault rifles or expand access to guns. Some of the participants then had the opportunity to donate to a group that was pro or against gun control. Another group, including people from both sides of the gun debate, were asked to donate to an education charity.”
“We found that participants who signed the online petition were significantly more likely to donate money to a related charity, demonstrating a consistency effect. We also found that participants who did not sign the petition donated significantly more money to an unrelated charity , demonstrating a moral balancing effect. The results suggest that exposure to an online activism influences individual decision on subsequent civic actions.”
These two psychological effects provide additional insight on whether or not slacktivism is damaging real citizen engagement and potentially replacing meaningful action – as suggested in the below UNICEF video–part of a series titled “Likes Don’t Save Lives”:
Mapping the global Twitter heartbeat: The geography of Twitter
A new paper by Kalev Leetaru, Shaowen Wang, Guofeng Cao, Anand Padmanabhan, Eric Shook in First Monday: “In just under seven years, Twitter has grown to count nearly 3% of the entire global population among its active users who have sent more than 170 billion 140-character messages. Today the service plays such a significant role in American culture that the Library of Congress has assembled a permanent archive of the site back to its first tweet, updated daily. With its open API, Twitter has become one of the most popular data sources for social research, yet the majority of the literature has focused on it as a text or network graph source, with only limited efforts to date focusing exclusively on the geography of Twitter, assessing the various sources of geographic information on the service and their accuracy. More than 3% of all tweets are found to have native location information available, while a naive geocoder based on a simple major cities gazetteer and relying on the user-provided Location and Profile fields is able to geolocate more than a third of all tweets with high accuracy when measured against the GPS-based baseline. Geographic proximity is found to play a minimal role both in who users communicate with and what they communicate about, providing evidence that social media is shifting the communicative landscape.”
Use of Social Network Diagrams
New York Times: “Consulting companies like Activate Networks create social network diagrams to help pharmaceutical marketers identify prescribing histories and relationships among doctors. Such diagrams can help marketers pinpoint highly connected physicians, the best potential targets for marketing.”
Data Edge
Steven Weber, professor in the School of Information and Political Science department at UC Berkeley, in Policy by the Numbers: “It’s commonly said that most people overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact over the longer term.
Where is Big Data in 2013? Starting to get very real, in our view, and right on the cusp of underestimation in the long term. The short term hype cycle is (thankfully) burning itself out, and the profound changes that data science can and will bring to human life are just now coming into focus. It may be that Data Science is right now about where the Internet itself was in 1993 or so. That’s roughly when it became clear that the World Wide Web was a wind that would blow across just about every sector of the modern economy while transforming foundational things we thought were locked in about human relationships, politics, and social change. It’s becoming a reasonable bet that Data Science is set to do the same—again, and perhaps even more profoundly—over the next decade. Just possibly, more quickly than that….
Can data, no matter how big, change the world for the better? It may be the case that in some fields of human endeavor and behavior, the scientific analysis of big data by itself will create such powerful insights that change will simply have to happen, that businesses will deftly re-organize, that health care will remake itself for efficiency and better outcomes, that people will adopt new behaviors that make them happier, healthier, more prosperous and peaceful. Maybe. But almost everything we know about technology and society across human history argues that it won’t be so straightforward.
…join senior industry and academic leaders at DataEDGE at UC Berkeley on May 30-31 to engage in what will be a lively and important conversation aimed at answering today’s questions about the data science revolution—and formulating tomorrow’s.
Social media, personality traits and civic engagement
New Paper on “Influence of Social Media Use on Discussion Network Heterogeneity and Civic Engagement: The Moderating Role of Personality Traits” in Journal of Communication: “Using original national survey data, we examine how social media use affects individuals’ discussion network heterogeneity and their level of civic engagement. We also investigate the moderating role of personality traits (i.e., extraversion and openness to experiences) in this association. Results support the notion that use of social media contributes to heterogeneity of discussion networks and activities in civic life. More importantly, personality traits such as extraversion and openness to experiences were found to moderate the influence of social media on discussion network heterogeneity and civic participation, indicating that the contributing role of social media in increasing network heterogeneity and civic engagement is greater for introverted and less open individuals.”
Economic effects of open data policy still 'anecdotal'
Adam Mazmanian in FCW:’ A year after the launch of the government’s digital strategy, there’s no official tally of the economic activity generated by the release of government datasets for use in commercial applications.
“We have anecdotal examples, but nothing official yet,” said federal CIO Steven VanRoekel in an invitation-only meeting with reporters at the FOSE conference on May 15. “It’s an area where we have an opportunity to start to talk about this, because it’s starting to tick up a bit, and the numbers are looking pretty good.” (Related story: APIs help agencies say yes)…
The Obama administration is banking on an explosion in the use of federal datasets for commercial and government applications alike. Last week’s executive order and accompanying directive from the Office of Management and Budget tasks agencies with making open and machine readable data the new default setting for government information.
VanRoekel said that the merits of the open data standard don’t necessarily need to be justified by economic activity….
The executive order also spells out privacy concerns arising from the so-called “mosaic effect,’ by which information from disparate datasets can be overlaid to decipher personally identifiable information.”