Global Pulse Blog: “The winners of the Data for Development challenge – an international research challenge using a massive anonymized dataset provided by telecommunications company Orange – were announced at the NetMob 2013 Conference in Boston last week….
In this post we’ll look at the winners and how their research could be put to use.
Measuring Impact of Open and Transparent Governance
Mark Robinson @ OGP blog: “Eighteen months on from the launch of the Open Government Partnership in New York in September 2011, there is growing attention to what has been achieved to date. In the recent OGP Steering Committee meeting in London, government and civil society members were unanimous in the view that the OGP must demonstrate results and impact to retain its momentum and wider credibility. This will be a major focus of the annual OGP conference in London on 31 October and 1 November, with an emphasis on showcasing innovations, highlighting results and sharing lessons.
Much has been achieved in eighteen months. Membership has grown from 8 founding governments to 58. Many action plan commitments have been realised for the majority of OGP member countries. The Independent Reporting Mechanism has been approved and launched. Lesson learning and sharing experience is moving ahead….
The third type of results are the trickiest to measure: What has been the impact of openness and transparency on the lives of ordinary citizens? In the two years since the OGP was launched it may be difficult to find many convincing examples of such impact, but it is important to make a start in collecting such evidence.
Impact on the lives of citizens would be evident in improvements in the quality of service delivery, by making information on quality, access and complaint redressal public. A related example would be efficiency savings realised from publishing government contracts. Misallocation of public funds exposed through enhanced budget transparency is another. Action on corruption arising from bribes for services, misuse of public funds, or illegal procurement practices would all be significant results from these transparency reforms. A final example relates to jobs and prosperity, where the utilisation of government data in the public domain by the private sector to inform business investment decisions and create employment.
Generating convincing evidence on the impact of transparency reforms is critical to the longer-term success of the OGP. It is the ultimate test of whether lofty public ambitions announced in country action plans achieve real impacts to the benefit of citizens.”
An API for "We the People"
The White House Blog: “We can’t talk about We the People without getting into the numbers — more than 8 million users, more than 200,000 petitions, more than 13 million signatures. The sheer volume of participation is, to us, a sign of success.
And there’s a lot we can learn from a set of data that rich and complex, but we shouldn’t be the only people drawing from its lessons.
So starting today, we’re making it easier for anyone to do their own analysis or build their own apps on top of the We the People platform. We’re introducing the first version of our API, and we’re inviting you to use it.
Get started here: petitions.whitehouse.gov/developers
This API provides read-only access to data on all petitions that passed the 150 signature threshold required to become publicly-available on the We the People site. For those who don’t need real-time data, we plan to add the option of a bulk data download in the near future. Until that’s ready, an incomplete sample data set is available for download here.”
Department of Better Technology
Next City reports: “…opening up government can get expensive. That’s why two developers this week launched the Department of Better Technology, an effort to make open government tools cheaper, more efficient and easier to engage with.
As founder Clay Johnson explains in a post on the site’s blog, a federal website that catalogues databases on government contracts, which launched last year, cost $181 million to build — $81 million more than a recent research initiative to map the human brain.
“I’d like to say that this is just a one-off anomaly, but government regularly pays millions of dollars for websites,” writes Johnson, the former director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation and author the 2012 book The Information Diet.
The first undertaking of Johnson and his partner, GovHub co-founder Adam Becker, is a tool meant to make it simpler for businesses to find government projects to bid on, as well as help officials streamline the process of managing procurements. In a pilot experiment, Johnson writes, the pair found that not only were bids coming in faster and at a reduced price, but more people were doing the bidding.
Per Johnson, “many of the bids that came in were from businesses that had not ordinarily contracted with the federal government before.”
The Department of Better Technology will accept five cities to test a beta version of this tool, called Procure.io, in 2013.”
Demystifying data centers
Wired: “If you walk into the lobby of the data center Facebook operates in the high desert in Prineville, Oregon, you’ll find a flatscreen display on the wall where you can check the pulse of this massive computing facility.
The display tracks the efficiency of the operation, which spans 333,400-square feet and tens of thousands of computer servers. Facebook built this data center in an effort to significantly reduce the power and dollars needed to serve up the world’s most popular social network, and — driven by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s deep-seeded belief in the free exchange of ideas — the company aims to push the computing world in a similar direction. The display — which shows much the same information Facebook engineers use to monitor the facility — is an advertisement for the Facebook way.
Now, the company is taking this idea a step further. On Thursday, Facebook uncloaked a pair of web services that let anyone in the world track the efficiency of the Prineville data center and its sister facility in Forest City, North Carolina. “We’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day,” Facebook’s Lyrica McTiernan said in a blog post. “We think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like.”
Surfing Logs Reveal Global Eating Patterns
From the The Physics arXiv Blog: “The way we view online recipes reveals how our eating habits change over time, say computational sociologists….it’s no surprise that computational sociologists have begun to mine the data associated with our browsing habits to discover more about our diets and eating habits. Last year we looked at some fascinating work examining networks of ingredients and the flavours they contain, gathered from online recipe websites. It turns out this approach gives fascinating insights into the way recipes vary geographically and into the possibility of unexplored combinations of flavours.
Today, Robert West at Stanford University and Ryen White and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research in Redmond, take a deeper look at the electronic trails we leave when we hunt for food on the web. They say the data reveals important trends in the way our diets change with the season, with our geographical location and with certain special days such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. And they conclude that the data could become an important tool for monitoring public health.”
See also : arxiv.org/abs/1304.3742: From Cookies to Cooks: Insights on Dietary Patterns via Analysis of Web Usage Logs
Africa’s digital divide: still gaping
Peter Vanham in the FT’s Beyond Brics blog: “Don’t let success stories like M-Pesa in Kenya fool you: the worldwide digital divide is still increasing and Africa remains the biggest victim.” So says Soumitra Dutta, Dean of Cornells’ Johnson School of Management, talking to beyondbrics at the launch of the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report 2013.
M-Pesa, the highly successful mobile payments service in Kenya, has attracted global attention. Used by the vast majority of Kenyans, M-Pesa is so successful that, according to Quartz, a massive 31 per cent of Kenya’s GDP is spent through mobile phones.
It was proof that technological progress could happen in low-income countries with poor infrastructure. It has been copied in other emerging markets, leading some to believe the so-called digital divide between the developed and the developing world was ready to fall.
But the opposite is true, says the Indian born Dutta, a founding author of the WEF’s IT report….
To support his claim, Dutta refers to the latest available data on access to different mobile technologies (see graph – click to enlarge).”:
The Science of What We Do (and Don't) Know About Data Visualization
Robert Kosara on the HBR Blog Network: “Visualization is easy, right? After all, it’s just some colorful shapes and a few text labels. But things are more complex than they seem, largely due to the the ways we see and digest charts, graphs, and other data-driven images. While scientifically-backed studies do exist, there are actually many things we don’t know about how and why visualization works. To help you make better decisions when visualizing your data, here’s a brief tour of the research.”