A Guide to Chicago’s Array of Things Initiative


Sean Thornton at Data-Smart City Solutions: “The 606, Chicago’s rails-to-trails project that stretches for 4.2 miles on the city’s northwest side, has been popular with residents and visitors ever since its launch last year.  The trail recently added a new art installationBlue Sky, that will greet visitors over the next five years with an array of lights and colors. Less noticed, but no less important, will be another array on display near the trail: a sensor node from Chicago’s Array of Things initiative.

If you’re a frequent reader of all things civic tech, then you may have already come across the Array of Things (AoT).  Launched in 2016, the project, which consists of a network of sensor boxes mounted on light posts, has now begun collecting a host of real-time data on Chicago’s environmental surroundings and urban activity.   After installing a small number of sensors downtown and elsewhere in 2016, Chicago is now adding additional sensors across the city and the city’s data portal currently lists locations for all of AoT’s active and yet-to-be installed sensors.  This year, data collected from AoT will be accessible online, providing valuable information for researchers, urban planners, and the general public.

AoT’s public engagement campaign has been picking up steam as well, with a recent community event held this fall. As a non-proprietary project, AoT is being implemented as a tool to improve not just urban planning and sustainability efforts, but quality of life for residents and communities. To engage with the public, project leaders have held meetings and workshops to build relationships with residents and identify community priorities. Those priorities, which vary from community to community, could range from monitoring traffic congestion around specific intersections to addressing air quality concerns at local parks and schoolyards.

The AoT project is a leading example of how new technology—and the Internet of Things (IoT) in particular—is transforming efforts for sustainable urban growth and “smart” city planning.  AoT’s truly multi-dimensional character sets it apart from other smart city efforts: complementing environmental sensor data collection, the initiative includes educational programming, community outreach, and R&D opportunities for academics, startups, corporations, and other organizations that could stand to benefit.

Launching a project like AoT, of course, isn’t as simple as installing sensor nodes and flipping on a switch. AoT has been in the works for years, and its recent launch marks a milestone event for its developers, the City of Chicago, and smart city technologies.  AoT has frequently appeared in the press  – yet often, coverage loses sight of the many facets of this unique project. How did AoT get to where it is today?  What is the project’s significance outside of Chicago? What are AoT’s implications for cities? Consider this article as your primer for all things AoT….(More)”.

Civic Technology: Open Data and Citizen Volunteers as a Resource for North Carolina Local Governments


Report by John B. Stephens: “Civic technology is an emergent area of practice where IT experts and citizens without specialized IT skills volunteer their time using government-provided open data to improve government services or otherwise create public benefit. Civic tech, as it is often referred to, draws on longer-standing practices, particularly e-government and civic engagement. It is also a new form of citizen–government co-production, building on the trend of greater government transparency.

This report is designed to help North Carolina local government leaders:

  • Define civic technology practices and describing North Carolina civic tech resources
  • Highlight accomplishments and ongoing projects in civic tech (in North Carolina and beyond)
  • Identify opportunities and challenges for North Carolina local governments in civic tech
  • Provide a set of resources for education and involvement in civic tech….(More)”.

SAM, the first A.I. politician on Messenger


 at Digital Trends: “It’s said that all politicians are the same, but it seems safe to assume that you’ve never seen a politician quite like this. Meet SAM, heralded as the politician of the future. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly shake this politician’s hand, or have her kiss your baby. Rather, SAM is the world’s first Virtual Politician (and a female presence at that), “driven by the desire to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve.”

The artificially intelligent chat bot is currently live on Facebook Messenger, though she probably is most helpful to those in New Zealand. After all, the bot’s website notes, “SAM’s goal is to act as a representative for all New Zealanders, and evolves based on voter input.” Capable of being reached by anyone at just about anytime from anywhere, this may just be the single most accessible politician we’ve ever seen. But more importantly, SAM purports to be a true representative, claiming to analyze “everyone’s views [and] opinions, and impact of potential decisions.” This, the bot notes, could make for better policy for everyone….(More)”.

Use of the websites of parliaments to promote citizen deliberation in the process of public decision-making. Comparative study of ten countries


Santiago Giraldo Luquet in Communications and Society: “This study develops a longitudinal research (2010-2015) on 10 countries – 5 European countries (France, United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy and Spain) and 5 American countries (Argentina, Ecuador, Chile, Colombia and the USA). The aim is to compare how the parliaments use its official websites in order to promote the political participation process in the citizenship. The study focuses on the deliberation axe (Macintosh, 2004, Hagen, 2000, Vedel, 2003, 2007) and in the way that representative institutions define a digital strategy to create an online public sphere.

Starting with the recognition of Web 2.0 as a debate sphere and as a place of reconfiguration of the traditional –and utopian- Greek Agora, the study adopts the ‘deliberate’ political action axe to evaluate, qualitatively and quantitatively -using a content analysis methodology- the use of the Web 2.0 tools made by the legislative bodies of the analysed countries. The article shows how, which and what parliaments use Web 2.0 tools – integrated in their web page – as a scenario that allows deliberation at the different legislative processes that integrate the examined political systems. Finally, the comparative results show the main differences and similarities between the countries, as well as a tendency to reduce deliberation tools offering by representative institutions in the countries sampled…(More)”.

Are you doing what’s needed to get the state to respond to its citizens? Or are you part of the problem?


Vanessa Herringshaw at Making All Voices Count: ” …I’ve been reading over the incredibly rich and practically-orientated research and practice papers already on the Making All Voices Count website, and some of those coming out soon. There’s a huge amount of useful and challenging learning, and I’ll be putting out a couple of papers summarising some important threads later this year.

But as different civic tech and accountability actors prepare to come together in Brighton for Making All Voices Count’s final learning event later this week, I’m going to focus here on three things that really stood out and would benefit from the kind of ‘group grappling’ that such a gathering can best support. And I aim to be provocative!

  1. Improving state responsiveness to citizens is a complex business – even more than we realised – and a lot more complex than most interventions are designed to address. If we don’t address this complexity, our interventions won’t work. And that risks making things worse, not better.
  2. It’s clear we need to make more of a shift from narrow, ‘tactical’ approaches to more complex, systems-based ‘strategic’ approaches. Thinking is developing on how to do this in theory. But it’s not clear that our current institutional approaches will support, or even allow, a major shift in practice.
  3. So when we each look at our individual roles and those of our organisations, are we part of the solution, or part of the problem?

Let’s look at each of these in turn….(More)”

Political Ideology and Municipal Size as Incentives for the Implementation and Governance Models of Web 2.0 in Providing Public Services


Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar and Laura Alcaide Muñoz in the International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age: “The growing participation in social networking sites is altering the nature of social relations and changing the nature of political and public dialogue. This paper aims to contribute to the current debate on Web 2.0 technologies and their implications for local governance, through the identification of the perceptions of policy makers in local governments on the use of Web 2.0 in providing public services (reasons, advantages and risks) and on the change of the roles that these technologies could provoke in interactions between local governments and their stakeholders (governance models). This paper also analyzes whether the municipal size is a main factor that could influence on the policy makers’ perceptions regarding these main topics. Findings suggest that policy makers are willing to implement Web 2.0 technologies in providing public services, but preferably under the Bureaucratic model framework, thus retaining a leading role in this implementation. The municipal size is a factor that could influence on policy makers’ perceptions….(More)”.

Policy Analytics, Modelling, and Informatics


Book edited by J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Theresa A. Pardo and Luis F. Luna-Reyes: “This book provides a comprehensive approach to the study of policy analytics, modelling and informatics. It includes theories and concepts for understanding tools and techniques used by governments seeking to improve decision making through the use of technology, data, modelling, and other analytics, and provides relevant case studies and practical recommendations. Governments around the world face policy issues that require strategies and solutions using new technologies, new access to data and new analytical tools and techniques such as computer simulation, geographic information systems, and social network analysis for the successful implementation of public policy and government programs. Chapters include cases, concepts, methodologies, theories, experiences, and practical recommendations on data analytics and modelling for public policy and practice, and addresses a diversity of data tools, applied to different policy stages in several contexts, and levels and branches of government. This book will be of interest of researchers, students, and practitioners in e-government, public policy, public administration, policy analytics and policy informatics….(More)”.

Polish activists turn to digital democracy


 in the Financial Times: “Opponents of the Polish government have mounted a series of protests on issues ranging from reform of the judiciary to an attempt to ban abortion. In February, they staged yet another, less public but intensely emotive, battle — to save the country’s trees.

At the beginning of the year, a new law allowed property owners to cut trees on their land without official permission. As a result, hundreds of trees disappeared from the centres of Polish cities as more valuable treeless plots were sold off to developers. In parallel, the government authorised extensive logging of the ancient forest in Bialowieza, a Unesco world heritage site.

“People reacted very emotionally to these practices,” says Wojciech Sanko, a co-ordinator at Code for Poland, a programme run by ePanstwo (eState), the country’s biggest non-governmental organisation in this field.

The group aims to deploy new technology tools designed to explain local and national policies, and to make it easier for citizens to take part in public life. As no one controlled the tree-cutting, for example, Mr Sanko thought technology could at least help to monitor it. First, he wanted to set up a simple digital map of trees cut in Warsaw. But as the controversial liberalisation of tree-cutting was reversed, the NGO together with local activists decided to work on another project — to map trees still standing, along with data about species and their absorption of carbon dioxide associated with climate change.

The group has also started to create an app for activists in Bialowieza forest: an open-source map that will gather all documentation from civic patrols monitoring the site, and will indicate the exact places of logging.

A trend towards recruiting technology for civic projects has been slowly gathering pace in a country that is hard to describe as socially-engaged: only 59 per cent of Poles say they have done volunteer work for the community, according to a 2016 survey by the Centre of Public Opinion Research.

Election turnout barely surpasses 50 per cent. Yet since the election of the rightwing Law and Justice government in 2015, which has introduced rapid and controversial reforms across all domains of public life, citizens have started to take a closer look at politicians and their actions.

In addition to the tree map, Code for Poland has developed a website that aggregates public data, such as tax spending or air pollution.

Mr Sanko underlines, however, that Code for Poland is much more about local communities than national politics. Many of the group’s projects are small scale, ranging from a mobile app for an animal shelter in Gdansk and a tool that shows people where they can take their garbage.

Piotr Micula, board member of Miasto Jest Nasze (The City is Ours), an urban movement in Warsaw, says that increasing access to data is fuelling the development of civic tech. “Even as a small organisation, we try to use big data and visualise it,” he says….(More)”.

The role of eGovernment in deepening the single market


Briefing by the European Parliamentary Research Service: “This briefing recognises the role of cross-border and cross-sector use of electronic identification (eID) and trust services in advancing the digitisation of public services in Europe as well as the potential impact of the implementation of the ‘once-only’ principle in public administrations. The eGovernment Action Plan 2016-2020 includes several concrete actions to help boost the Digital Single Market, underpinned by the ‘digital-by-default, ‘once-only’ and ‘cross-border by default’ principles. The publication comes at a relevant time, when Member States are preparing for a ministerial meeting and to sign a Ministerial Declaration (on eGovernment) early next month….The role of eGovernment in deepening the single market briefing is available and accesible through the link….(More)”.

Civic Tech in the Global South


New book edited by Tiago Peixoto: “Civic Tech in the Global South is comprised of one study and three field evaluations of civic tech initiatives in developing countries. The study reviews evidence on the use of 23 digital platforms designed to amplify citizen voices to improve service delivery, highlighting citizen uptake and the degree of responsiveness by public service providers. The initiatives are an SMS-based polling platform run by UNICEF in Uganda, a complaints-management system run by the water sector in Kenya, and an internet-based participatory budgeting program in Brazil. Based on these experiences, the authors examine: i) the extent to which technologies have promoted inclusiveness, ii) the effect of these initiatives on public service delivery, and iii) the extent to which these effects can be attributed to technology….(More)”.