Press Release: “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has revamped its Citizen Science website to provide new resources and success stories to assist the public in conducting scientific research and collecting data to better understand their local environment and address issues of concern. The website can be found at www.epa.gov/region2/citizenscience.
“Citizen Science is an increasingly important part of EPA’s commitment to using sound science and technology to protect people’s health and safeguard the environment,” said Judith A. Enck, EPA Regional Administrator. “The EPA encourages the public to use the new website as a tool in furthering their scientific investigations and developing solutions to pollution problems.”
The updated website now offers detailed information about air, water and soil monitoring, including recommended types of equipment and resources for conducting investigations. It also includes case studies and videotapes that showcase successful citizen science projects in New York and New Jersey, provides funding opportunities, quality assurance information and workshops and webinars.”
Google Global Impact Award Expands Zooniverse
Press Release: “A $1.8 million Google Global Impact Award will enable Zooniverse, a nonprofit collaboration led by the Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford, to make setting up a citizen science project as easy as starting a blog and could lead to thousands of innovative new projects around the world, accelerating the pace of scientific research.
The award supports the further development of the Zooniverse, the world’s leading ‘citizen science’ platform, which has already given more than 900,000 online volunteers the chance to contribute to science by taking part in activities including discovering planets, classifying plankton or searching through old ship’s logs for observations of interest to climate scientists. As part of the Global Impact Award, the Adler will receive $400,000 to support the Zooniverse platform.
With the Google Global Impact Award, Zooniverse will be able to rebuild their platform so that research groups with no web development expertise can build and launch their own citizen science projects.
“We are entering a new era of citizen science – this effort will enable prolific development of science projects in which hundreds of thousands of additional volunteers will be able to work alongside professional scientists to conduct important research – the potential for discovery is limitless,” said Michelle B. Larson, Ph.D., Adler Planetarium president and CEO. “The Adler is honored to join its fellow Zooniverse partner, the University of Oxford, as a Google Global Impact Award recipient.”
The Zooniverse – the world’s leading citizen science platform – is a global collaboration across several institutions that design and build citizen science projects. The Adler is a founding partner of the Zooniverse, which has already engaged more than 900,000 online volunteers as active scientists by discovering planets, mapping the surface of Mars and detecting solar flares. Adler-directed citizen science projects include: Galaxy Zoo (astronomy), Solar Stormwatch (solar physics), Moon Zoo (planetary science), Planet Hunters (exoplanets) and The Milky Way Project (star formation). The Zooniverse (zooniverse.org) also includes projects in environmental, biological and medical sciences. Google’s investment in the Adler and its Zooniverse partner, the University of Oxford, will further the global reach, making thousands of new projects possible.”
Making Europe's cities smarter
Press Release: “At a conference today hosted by the European Commission, city leaders, CEOs and civil society leaders discussed the actions outlined in the “Smart Cities Strategic Implementation Plan” and how to put them into practice. The Commission announced that it will launch an ‘Invitation for Smart City and Community Commitments’ in spring 2014 to mobilise work on the action plan’s priorities. The plan is part of Europe’s fifth “Innovation Partnership”.
Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas, in charge of transport, said: “I am very pleased to see transport operators, telecoms companies, vehicle manufacturers, city planners, energy companies and researchers all gathered in one room to discuss the future of our cities. The Smart Cities initiative is a great opportunity to make changes happen for less congestion and better business opportunities in our cities. We need to keep up the momentum and move from plan to action now.”
Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, said: “The future of infrastructure and city planning will be based on integrating ICT systems and using big data to make our cities better places to live and work. We need to base those new systems on open standards for hardware, software, data and services which this European Innovation Partnership will develop.”
Günther H. Oettinger, EU Commissioner for energy, said: “The European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities is about making investments in sustainable development in as many cities as possible. Creating equal partnerships between cities and companies based on synergies between ICT, energy and mobility will lead to projects that make a real difference in our everyday lives.”
The Commission intends to make available approximately EUR 200 million for Smart Cities and communities in the 2014-2015 budgets of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, to accelerate progress and enlarge the scale of roll-out of smart cities solutions. There will also be possibilities to access the European Structural and Investment Funds.
For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/”
White House Unveils Big Data Projects, Round Two
Information Week: “The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Networking and Information Technology R&D program (NITRD) on Tuesday introduced a slew of new big-data collaboration projects aimed at stimulating private-sector interest in federal data. The initiatives, announced at the White House-sponsored “Data to Knowledge to Action” event, are targeted at fields as varied as medical research, geointelligence, economics, and linguistics.
The new projects are a continuation of the Obama Administration’s Big Data Initiative, announced in March 2012, when the first round of big-data projects was presented.
Thomas Kalil, OSTP’s deputy director for technology and innovation, said that “dozens of new partnerships — more than 90 organizations,” are pursuing these new collaborative projects, including many of the best-known American technology, pharmaceutical, and research companies.
Among the initiatives, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and NASA have set up the NASA Earth eXchange, or NEX, a collaborative network to provide space-based data about our planet to researchers in Earth science. AWS will host much of NASA’s Earth-observation data as an AWS Public Data Set, making it possible, for instance, to crowdsource research projects.
An estimated 4.4 million jobs are being created between now and 2015 to support big-data projects. Employers, educational institutions, and government agencies are working to build the educational infrastructure to provide students with the skills they need to fill those jobs.
To help train new workers, IBM, for instance, has created a new assessment tool that gives university students feedback on their readiness for number-crunching careers in both the public and private sector. Eight universities that have a big data and analytics curriculum — Fordham, George Washington, Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Northwestern, Ohio State, Southern Methodist, and the University of Virginia — will receive the assessment tool.
OSTP is organizing an initiative to create a “weather service” for pandemics, Kalil said, a way to use big data to identify and predict pandemics as early as possible in order to plan and prepare for — and hopefully mitigate — their effects.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), meanwhile, is undertaking its ” Big Data to Knowledge” (BD2K) initiative to develop a range of standards, tools, software, and other approaches to make use of massive amounts of data being generated by the health and medical research community….”
See also:
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: Progress by Federal Agencies: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Fact Sheet: New Announcements: Data to Knowledge to Action
November 12, 2013 – Press Release: Data to Knowledge to Action Event
Crowdsourcing: Patient-Focused Drug Development Initiative
Press release: “Genetic Alliance and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) announced an initiative to explore the use of a technology-enabled, crowd-sourcing approach to patient engagement as a complement to ongoing patient-focused drug development efforts under the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA V).
As part of the reauthorization of PDUFA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) committed to gain the patient perspective on 20 disease areas in public meetings to be held between 2012 and 2017.
After issuing a Request for Proposals, Genetic Alliance chose advocacy organizations representing three disease areas that will be the focus of FDA patient-focused drug development public meetings in 2014 and 2015. The patient communities in these three disease areas will pilot a crowd-sourcing, technology-enabled approach to gathering input from a diverse set of patients on key benefit-risk questions.
“Using the Platform for Engaging Everyone Responsibly (PEER), there is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of a secure, crowd-sourced approach to provide additional insight into patients’ experience with a disease or condition,” stated Sharon Terry, President and CEO of Genetic Alliance. “The organizations we selected are expert at broad and diverse engagement from the very people that have a vested interest in patient-focused drug development. We are excited to engage these communities.”
For more information about this initiative, visit http://www.geneticalliance.org/pfdd.
The GovLab Academy: A Community and Platform for Learning and Teaching Governance Innovations
Press Release: “Today the Governance Lab (The GovLab) launches The GovLab Academy at the Open Government Partnership Annual Meeting in London.
Available at www.thegovlabacademy.org, the Academy is a free online community for those wanting to teach and learn how to solve public problems and improve lives using innovations in governance. A partnership between The GovLab at New York University and MIT Media Lab’s Online Learning Initiative, the site launching today offers curated videos, podcasts, readings and activities designed to enable the purpose driven learner to deepen his or her practical knowledge at her own pace.
The GovLab Academy is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “The GovLab Academy addresses a growing need among policy makers at all levels – city, federal and global – to leverage advances in technology to govern differently,” says Carol Coletta, Vice President of Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation. “By connecting the latest technological innovations to a community of willing mentors, the Academy has the potential to catalyze more experimentation in a sector that badly needs it.”
Initial topics include using data to improve policymaking and cover the role of big data, urban analytics, smart disclosure and open data in governance. A second track focuses on online engagement and includes practical strategies for using crowdsourcing to solicit ideas, organize distributed work and gather data. The site features both curated content drawn from a variety of sources and original interviews with innovators from government, civil society, the tech industry, the arts and academia talking about their work around the world implementing innovations in practice, what worked and what didn’t, to improve real people’s lives.
Beth Noveck, Founder and Director of The GovLab, describes its mission: “The Academy is an experiment in peer production where every teacher is a learner and every learner a teacher. Consistent with The GovLab’s commitment to measuring what works, we want to measure our success by the people contributing as well as consuming content. We invite everyone with ideas, stories, insights and practical wisdom to contribute to what we hope will be a thriving and diverse community for social change”.”
Open Data Barometer
Press Release by the Open Data Research Network: “New research by World Wide Web Foundation and Open Data Institute shows that 55% of countries surveyed have open data initiatives in place, yet less than 10% of key government datasets across the world are truly open to the public…the Open Data Barometer. This 77-country study, which considers the interlinked areas of policy, implementation and impact, ranks the UK at number one. The USA, Sweden, New Zealand, Denmark and Norway (tied) make up the rest of the top five. Kenya is ranked as the most advanced developing country, outperforming richer countries such as Ireland, Italy and Belgium in global comparisons.
The Barometer reveals that:
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55% of countries surveyed have formal open data policies in place.
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Valuable but potentially controversial datasets – such as company registers and land registers – are among the least likely to be openly released. It is unclear whether this stems from reluctance to drop lucrative access charges, or from desire to keep a lid on politically sensitive information, or both. However, the net effect is to severely limit the accountability benefits of open data.
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When they are released, government datasets are often issued in inaccessible formats. Across the nations surveyed, fewer that than 1 in 10 key datasets that could be used to hold governments to account, stimulate enterprise, and promote better social policy, are available and truly open for re-use.
The research also makes the case that:
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Efforts should be made to empower civil society, entrepreneurs and members of the public to use government data made available, rather than simply publishing data online.
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Business activity and innovation can be boosted by strong open data policies. In Denmark, for example, free of charge access to address data has had a significant economic impact. In 2010, an evaluation recorded an estimated financial benefit to society of EUR 62 million against costs of EUR 2million.”
Open Data Index provides first major assessment of state of open government data
Press Release from the Open Knowledge Foundation: “In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.
The UK and US top the 2013 Index, which is a result of community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.
The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.
Rufus Pollock, Founder and CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation said:
Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this Index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.
The UK and US are leaders on open government data but even they have room for improvement: the US for example does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, while the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.
There is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence, and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons – including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.
Less than half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to legally and technically use, reuse and redistribute data. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
To see the full results: https://index.okfn.org. For graphs of the data: https://index.okfn.org/visualisations.”
Bright Spots of open government to be recognised at global summit
Press Release of the UK Cabinet Office: “The 7 shortlisted initiatives vying for the Bright Spots award show how governments in Open Government Partnership countries are working with citizens to sharpen governance, harness new technologies to increase public participation and improve government responsiveness.
At the Open Government Partnership summit in London on 31 October 2013 and 1 November 2013, participants will be able to vote for one of the shortlisted projects. The winning project – the Bright Spot – will be announced in the summit’s final plenary session….
The shortlisted entries for the Bright Spots prize – which will be awarded at the London summit – are:
- Chile – ChileAtiende
The aim of ChileAtiende has been to simplify government to citizens by providing a one-stop shop for accessing public services. Today, ChileAtiende has more than 190 offices across the whole country, a national call centre and a digital platform, through which citizens can access multiple services and benefits without having to navigate multiple government offices.
- Estonia – People’s Assembly
The People’s Assembly is a deliberative democracy tool, designed to encourage input from citizens on the government’s legislative agenda. This web-based platform allows ordinary citizens to propose policy solutions to problems including fighting corruption. Within 3 weeks, 1,800 registered users posted nearly 6,000 ideas and comments. Parliament has since set a timetable for the most popular proposals to be introduced in the formal proceedings.
- Georgia – improvements to the Freedom of Information Act
Civil society organisations in Georgia have successfully used the government’s participation in OGP to advocate improvements to the country’s Freedom of Information legislation. Government agencies are now obliged to proactively publish information in a way that is accessible to anyone, and to establish an electronic request system for information.
- Indonesia – complaints portal
LAPOR! (meaning “to report” in Indonesian) is a social media channel where Indonesian citizens can submit complaints and enquiries about development programmes and public services. Comments are transferred directly to relevant ministries or government agencies, which can respond via the website. LAPOR! now has more than 225,350 registered users and receives an average of 1,435 inputs per day.
- Montenegro – Be Responsible app
“Be Responsible” is a mobile app that allows citizens to report local problems – from illegal waste dumps, misuse of official vehicles and irregular parking, to failure to comply with tax regulations and issues over access to healthcare and education.
- Philippines – citizen audits
The Citizen Participatory Audit (CPA) project is exploring ways in which citizens can be directly engaged in the audit process for government projects and contribute to ensuring greater efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public resources. 4 pilot audits are in progress, covering public works, welfare, environment and education projects.
- Romania – transparency in public sector recruitment
The PublicJob.ro website was set up to counter corruption and lack of transparency in civil service recruitment. PublicJob.ro takes recruitment data from public organisations and e-mails it to more than 20,000 subscribers in a weekly newsletter. As a result, it has become more difficult to manipulate the recruitment process.”
Crowdfunding in the EU – exploring the added value of potential EU action
Press Release: “Following the Workshop on Crowdfunding organised on 3 June 2013 in Brussels, the European Commission has today launched a consultation inviting stakeholders to share their views about crowdfunding: its potential benefits, risks, and the design of an optimal policy framework to untap the potential of this new form of financing…
Whereas many crowdfunding campaigns are local in nature, others would benefit from easier access to financing within a single European market. But to make sure crowdfunding is not just a momentary trend that fades away, but rather a sustainable source of financing for new European projects, certain safeguards are needed, in particular to ensure people’s trust. The ultimate objective of this consultation is to gather data about the needs of market participants and to identify the areas in which there is a potential added value in EU action to encourage the growth of this new industry, either through facilitative, soft-law measures or legislative action.
The consultation covers all forms of crowdfunding, ranging from donations and rewards to financial investments. Everyone is invited to share their opinion and fill in the on-line questionnaire, including citizens who might contribute to crowdfunding campaigns and entrepreneurs who might launch such campaigns. National authorities and crowdfunding platforms are also particularly encouraged to reply. The consultation will run until 31 December 2013.
See also MEMO/13/847
The consultation is available at:
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/consultations/2013/crowdfunding/index_en.htm
Further information:
Workshop on Crowdfunding – 3 June 2013
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/conferences/2013/0603-crowdfunding-workshop/
Commissioner Barnier’s speech at the Workshop on Crowdfunding
SPEECH/13/492″