book – Page 135 – The Living Library

Five Headlines from a Big Month for the Data Revolution

Curated on May 4, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah T. Lucas at Post2015.org: “If the history of the data revolution were written today, it would include three major dates. May 2013, when theHigh Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda first coined the phrase “data revolution.” November 2014, when the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) set a vision for it. And April 2015, when five headliner stories pushed the data revolution from great idea to a concrete roadmap for action.

The April 2015 Data Revolution Headlines

1. The African Data Consensus puts Africa in the lead on bringing the data revolution to the regional level. TheAfrica Data Consensus (ADC) envisions “a profound shift in the way that data is harnessed to impact on development decision-making, with a particular emphasis on building a culture of usage.” The ADC finds consensus across 15 “data communities”—ranging from open data to official statistics to geospatial data, and is endorsed by Africa’s ministers of finance. The ADC gets top billing in my book, as the first contribution that truly reflects a large diversity of voices and creates a political hook for action. (Stay tuned for a blog from my colleague Rachel Quint on the ADC).

2. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) gets our minds (and wallets) around the data needed to measure the SDGs. The SDSN Needs Assessment for SDG Monitoring and Statistical Capacity Development maps the investments needed to improve official statistics. My favorite parts are the clear typology of data (see pg. 12), and that the authors are very open about the methods, assumptions, and leaps of faith they had to take in the costing exercise. They also start an important discussion about how advances in information and communications technology, satellite imagery, and other new technologies have the potential to expand coverage, increase analytic capacity, and reduce the cost of data systems.

3. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) calls on us to find the “missing millions.” ODI’s The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions presents the stark reality of data gaps and what they mean for understanding and addressing development challenges. The authors highlight that even that most fundamental of measures—of poverty levels—could be understated by as much as a quarter. And that’s just the beginning. The report also pushes us to think beyond the costs of data, and focus on how much good data can save. With examples of data lowering the cost of doing government business, the authors remind us to think about data as an investment with real economic and social returns.

4. Paris21 offers a roadmap for putting national statistic offices (NSOs) at the heart of the data revolution.Paris21’s Roadmap for a Country-Led Data Revolution does not mince words. It calls on the data revolution to “turn a vicious cycle of [NSO] underperformance and inadequate resources into a virtuous one where increased demand leads to improved performance and an increase in resources and capacity.” It makes the case for why NSOs are central and need more support, while also pushing them to modernize, innovate, and open up. The roadmap gets my vote for best design. This ain’t your grandfather’s statistics report!

5. The Cartagena Data Festival features real-live data heroes and fosters new partnerships. The Festival featured data innovators (such as terra-i using satellite data to track deforestation), NSOs on the leading edge of modernization and reform (such as Colombia and the Philippines), traditional actors using old data in new ways (such as the Inter-American Development Bank’s fantastic energy database), groups focused on citizen-generated data (such as The Data Shift and UN My World), private firms working with big data for social good (such asTelefónica), and many others—all reminding us that the data revolution is well underway and will not be stopped. Most importantly, it brought these actors together in one place. You could see the sparks flying as folks learned from each other and hatched plans together. The Festival gets my vote for best conference of a lifetime, with the perfect blend of substantive sessions, intense debate, learning, inspiration, new connections, and a lot of fun. (Stay tuned for a post from my colleague Kristen Stelljes and me for more on Cartagena).

This month full of headlines leaves no room for doubt—momentum is building fast on the data revolution. And just in time.

With the Financing for Development (FFD) conference in Addis Ababa in July, the agreement of Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September, and the Climate Summit in Paris in December, this is a big political year for global development. Data revolutionaries must seize this moment to push past vision, past roadmaps, to actual action and results…..(More)”

A Process Model for Crowdsourcing Design: A Case Study in Citizen Science

Curated on April 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Kazjon Grace et al in Design Computing and Cognition ’14: “Crowdsourcing design has been applied in various areas of graphic design, software design, and product design. This paper draws on those experiences and research in diversity, creativity and motivation to present a process model for crowdsourcing experience design. Crowdsourcing experience design for volunteer online communities serves two purposes: to increase the motivation of participants by making them stakeholders in the success of the project, and to increase the creativity of the design by increasing the diversity of expertise beyond experts in experience design. Our process model for crowdsourcing design extends the meta-design architecture, where for online communities is designed to be iteratively re-designed by its users. We describe how our model has been deployed and adapted to a citizen science project where nature preserve visitors can participate in the design of a system called NatureNet. The major contribution of this paper is a model for crowdsourcing experience design and a case study of how we have deployed it for the design and development of NatureNet….(More)”

Thinking Ahead – Essays on Big Data, Digital Revolution, and Participatory Market Society

Curated on April 16, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Dirk Helbing: “The rapidly progressing digital revolution is now touching the foundations of the governance of societal structures. Humans are on the verge of evolving from consumers to prosumers, and old, entrenched theories – in particular sociological and economic ones – are falling prey to these rapid developments. The original assumptions on which they are based are being questioned. Each year we produce as much data as in the entire human history – can we possibly create a global crystal ball to predict our future and to optimally govern our world? Do we need wide-scale surveillance to understand and manage the increasingly complex systems we are constructing, or would bottom-up approaches such as self-regulating systems be a better solution to creating a more innovative, more successful, more resilient, and ultimately happier society? Working at the interface of complexity theory, quantitative sociology and Big Data-driven risk and knowledge management, the author advocates the establishment of new participatory systems in our digital society to enhance coordination, reduce conflict and, above all, reduce the “tragedies of the commons,” resulting from the methods now used in political, economic and management decision-making….(More)”

The International Handbook Of Public Administration And Governance

Curated on April 14, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Andrew Massey and Karen Johnston: “…Handbook explores key questions around the ways in which public administration and governance challenges can be addressed by governments in an increasingly globalized world. World-leading experts explore contemporary issues of government and governance, as well as the relationship between civil society and the political class. The insights offered will allow policy makers and officials to explore options for policy making in a new and informed way.

Adopting global perspectives of governance and public sector management, the Handbook includes scrutiny of current issues such as: public policy capacity, wicked policy problems, public sector reforms, the challenges of globalization and complexity management. Practitioners and scholars of public administration deliver a range of perspectives on the abiding wicked issues and challenges to delivering public services, and the way that delivery is structured. The Handbook uniquely provides international coverage of perspectives from Africa, Asia, North and South America, Europe and Australia.

Practitioners and scholars of public administration, public policy, public sector management and international relations will learn a great deal from this Handbook about the issues and structures of government and governance in an increasingly complex world. (Full table of contents)… (More).”

Big Data, Little Data, No Data

Curated on April 14, 2015November 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Christine L. Borgman: “Big Data” is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in this examination of data and scholarly research, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. In many cases, there are no data—because relevant data don’t exist, cannot be found, or are not available. Moreover, data sharing is difficult, incentives to do so are minimal, and data practices vary widely across disciplines.

Borgman, an often-cited authority on scholarly communication, argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure—an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. After laying out the premises of her investigation—six “provocations” meant to inspire discussion about the uses of data in scholarship—Borgman offers case studies of data practices in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and then considers the implications of her findings for scholarly practice and research policy. To manage and exploit data over the long term, Borgman argues, requires massive investment in knowledge infrastructures; at stake is the future of scholarship….(More)”

We, the government

Curated on March 31, 2015October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Davied van Berlo has published a new book about the role of government in the network society. It has not yet been published in English but can be downloaded in Dutch at boek.ambtenaar20.nl.

The Civil Servant 2.0 book is available in English.”

About “We, the government”:

“The network society. Everybody’s talking about it, but what does it really mean? What effect does the networking age in society have on government? The public good is no longer just a government issue but a cocreation between government and society. However, what will this collaboration look like and will we be able to execute political goals in such a networked society?

In his third book Davied van Berlo, writer of Civil Servant 2.0 and Civil Servant 2.0 beta, explores the role of government in the network society. “We, the government” gives a new perspective on the working of government and offers civil servants and public officials a hand in shaping their new role in society.”…

Davied has used parts of his new book in the presentation he gave to the Dutch chapter of the Internet Society, see the video. Below the video an english version of the Prezi is available….(More)”

Modeling Mobility with Open Data

Curated on March 27, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Behrisch, Michael, and Weber, Melanie: “This contributed volume contains the conference proceedings of the Simulation of Urban Mobility (SUMO) conference 2014, Berlin. The included research papers cover a wide range of topics in traffic planning and simulation, including open data, vehicular communication, e-mobility, urban mobility, multimodal traffic as well as usage approaches. The target audience primarily comprises researchers and experts in the field, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

Information transparency of public administrations. The right of the people to know and the duty to disseminate public information actively

Curated on March 22, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Miguel Angel Blanes Climent:”El presente trabajo de investigación analiza la situación legal y judicial existente en las principales democracias del mundo y en el ámbito de Naciones Unidas, Consejo de Europa y Unión Europea. Se trata, por tanto, de una poderosa herramienta para saber quién, cómo, cuándo, dónde y a qué tipo de información financiada con fondos públicos se puede acceder por parte de los ciudadanos. Y lo que es más importante: qué recursos administrativos y judiciales se pueden presentar cuando la información no es facilitada y cuáles son sus consecuencias disciplinarias, patrimoniales y penales. El trabajo examina con detalle la nueva Ley 19/2013, de 9 de diciembre, de transparencia, acceso a la información pública y buen gobierno, así como la normativa autonómica existente en la materia.
Es objeto de especial estudio el acceso a la información sensible: adjudicatarios y coste final de los contratos públicos; datos urbanísticos y medioambientales; presupuesto y cuentas públicas; sueldos, dietas y viajes de los cargos electos y funcionarios; financiación de partidos políticos, sindicatos y organizaciones empresariales; listas de espera sanitarias y de vivienda; beneficiarios de subvenciones; publicidad institucional; los servicios públicos de interés general prestados por entidades privadas -telecomunicaciones, electricidad, gas, servicios postales- y los concesionarios de servicios públicos -agua, residuos, transporte, sanidad- etc.
La información que se resiste a ser publicada es toda aquella que permite a los ciudadanos controlar la gestión de los asuntos públicos, exigir la rendición de cuentas y denunciar casos de despilfarro o corrupción. El autor acuña el lema: «la transparencia es como la sinceridad: se exige la ajena y se limita la propia».” …(More)

Turning Government Data into Better Public Service

Curated on March 21, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

OMB Blog: “Every day, millions of people use their laptops, phones, and tablets to check the status of their tax refund, get the latest forecast from the National Weather Service, book a campsite at one of our national parks, and much more. There were more than 1.3 billion visits to websites across the Federal Government in just the past 90 days.

Today, during Sunshine Week when we celebrate openness and transparency in government, we are pleased to release the Digital Analytics Dashboard, a new window into the way people access the government online. For the first time, you can see how many people are using a Federal Government website, which pages are most popular, and which devices, browsers, and operating systems people are using. We’ll use the data from the Digital Analytics Program to focus our digital service teams on the services that matter most to the American people, and analyze how much progress we are making. The Dashboard will help government agencies understand how people find, access, and use government services online to better serve the public – all while protecting privacy. The program does not track individuals. It anonymizes the IP addresses of all visitors and then uses the resulting information in the aggregate….(More)