StartUp Genome

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kauffman Foundation press release: “What are the fastest growing startups in my city? Which of them are hiring? Who are the founders and investors in my industry that I should meet given the stage I’m at in my entrepreneurial journey?

These are the questions local entrepreneurs and city leaders often ask, and finding the correct answers can be time-consuming, if not impossible.
The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced a grant to an organization that has a tool to help them find the answers. Startup Genome is a worldwide network of volunteer curators who create up-to-date and accurate maps of the entrepreneurial communities in which they live and work….
Startup Genome’s goal is to recruit 1,000 local curators who will populate startup community data in their city’s maps. Currently, 332 curators are curating maps in 271 cities and 57 countries. So far they’ve collected data on more than 26,000 founders, 84,000 startups, 5,800 investors and more than 18,000 deals. Curators can be entrepreneurs, investors, accelerator program managers, Startup Weekend organizers, community builders, students, journalists and more…
Startup Genome launched a new website last week at www.startupgenome.com with improved searches, speed, curator tools; updated statistics and industry pages; and responsive design for mobile phones. The site will continue to develop data automation tools, integrations and partnerships with other online sources such as CrunchBase, Angel List and LinkedIn.”

New Report Finds Cost-Benefit Analyses Improve Budget Choices & Taxpayer Results

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “A new report shows cost-benefit analyses have helped states make better investments of public dollars by identifying programs and policies that deliver high returns. However, the majority of states are not yet consistently using this approach when making critical decisions. This 50-state look at cost-benefit analysis, a method that compares the expense of public programs to the returns they deliver, was released today by the Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative, a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

The study, “States’ Use of Cost-benefit Analysis: Improving Results for Taxpayers”, comes at a time when states are under continuing pressure to direct limited dollars toward the most cost-effective programs and policies while curbing spending on those that do not deliver. The report is the first comprehensive study of how all 50 states and the District of Columbia analyze the costs and benefits of programs and policies, report findings, and incorporate the assessments into decision-making. It identifies key challenges states face in conducting and using the analyses and offers strategies to overcome those obstacles. The study includes a review of state statutes, a search for cost benefit analyses released between 2008 and 2011, and interviews with legislators, legislative and program evaluation staff, executive officials, report authors, and agency officials.”

Code for America: Announcing the 2013 Accelerator Class

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Code for America opened applications for the 2013 Accelerator knowing that the competition would be fierce. This year we received over 190 applications from amazing candidates. Today, we’re pleased to announce the five teams chosen to participate in the 2013 Accelerator.

The teams are articulate, knowledgeable, and passionate about their businesses. They come from all over the country — Texas, North Carolina, Florida, and California  — and we’re excited to get started with them. Teams include:

ArchiveSocial enables organizations to embrace social media by minimizing risk and eliminating compliance barriers. Specifically, it solves the challenge of retaining Gov 2.0 communications for compliance with FOIA and other public records laws. It currently automates business-grade record keeping of communications on networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Moving forward, ArchiveSocial will help further enforce social media policy and protect the organizational brand.

The Family Assessment Form (FAF) Web is a tool designed by social workers, researchers, and technology experts to help family support practitioners improve family functioning, service planning for families, and organizational performance. The FAF is ideal for use in organizations performing home visitation services for families that address comprehensive concerns about family well-being and child welfare. FAF Web enables all stakeholders to access essential data remotely from any internet-enabled device.

OpenCounter helps entrepreneurs to register their businesses with the local government. It does so through an online check-out experience that adapts to the applicant’s answers and asks for pertinent information only once. OpenCounter estimates licensing time and costs so entrepreneurs can understand what it will take to get their business off the ground. It’s the TurboTax of business permitting.

SmartProcure is an online information service that provides access to local, state, and federal government procurement data, with two public-interest goals: 1. Enable government agencies to make more efficient procurement decisions and save taxpayer dollars. 2. Empower businesses to sell more effectively and competitively to government agencies. The proprietary system provides access to data from more than 50 million purchase orders issued by 1,700 government agencies.

StreetCred Software helps police agencies manage their arrest warrants, eliminate warrant backlogs, and radically improve efficiency while increasing officer safety. It helps agencies understand their fugitive population, measure effectiveness, and make improvements. StreetCred Software, Inc., was founded by two Texas police officers. One is an 18-year veteran investigator and fugitive hunter, the other a technology industry veteran who became an cop in 2010.”

BaltimoreCode.org

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The City of Baltimore’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Tonjes and the non-partisan, non-profit OpenGov Foundation announced today the launch of BaltimoreCode.org, a free software platform that empowers all Baltimore residents to discover, access, and use local laws when they want, and how they want.

BaltimoreCode.org lifts and ‘liberates’ the Baltimore City Charter and Code from unalterable, often hard to find online files —such as PDFs—by inserting them into user-friendly, organized and modern website formats.  This straightforward switch delivers significant results:  more clarity, context, and public understanding of the laws’ impact on Baltimore citizens’ daily lives. For the first-time, BaltimoreCode.org allows  uninhibited reuse of City law data by everyday Baltimore residents to use, share, and spread as they see fit. Simply, BaltimoreCode.org gives citizens the information they need, on their terms.”

Knight News Challenge on Open Gov

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Knight Foundation today named eight projects as winners of the Knight News Challenge on Open Gov, awarding the recipients more than $3.2 million for their ideas.
The projects will provide new tools and approaches to improve the way people and governments interact. They tackle a range of issues from making it easier to open a local business to creating a simulator that helps citizens visualize the impact of public policies on communities….
Each of the winning projects offers a solution to a real-world need. They include:
Civic Insight: Providing up-to-date information on vacant properties so that communities can find ways to make tangible improvements to local spaces;
OpenCounter: Making it easier for residents to register and create new businesses by building open source software that governments can use to simplify the process;
Open Gov for the Rest of Us: Providing residents in low-income neighborhoods in Chicago with the tools to access and demand better data around issues important to them, like housing and education;
Outline.com: Launching a public policy simulator that helps people visualize the impact that public policies like health care reform and school budget changes might have on local economies and communities;
Oyez Project: Making state and appellate court documents freely available and useful to journalists, scholars and the public, by providing straightforward summaries of decisions, free audio recordings and more;
Procur.io: Making government contract bidding more transparent by simplifying the way smaller companies bid on government work;
GitMachines: Supporting government innovation by creating tools and servers that meet government regulations, so that developers can easily build and adopt new technology;
Plan in a Box: Making it easier to discover information about local planning projects, by creating a tool that governments and contractors can use to easily create websites with updates that also allow public input into the process.
…
Now in its sixth year, the Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information. Winners receive a share of $5 million in funding and support from Knight’s network of influential peers and advisors to help advance their ideas. Past News Challenge winners have created a lasting impact. They include: DocumentCloud, which analyzes and annotates public documents – turning them into data; Tools for OpenStreetMap, which makes it easier to contribute to the editable map of the world; and Safecast, which helps people measure air quality and became the leading provider of pollution data following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
For more, visit newschallenge.org and follow #newschallenge on Twitter.

Data-Smart City Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School announced the launch of Data-Smart City Solutions, a new initiative aimed at using big data and analytics to transform the way local government operates. Bringing together leading industry, academic, and government officials, the initiative will offer city leaders a national depository of cases and best practice examples where cities and private partners use analytics to solve city problems. Data-Smart City Solutions is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Data-Smart City Solutions highlights best practices, curates resources, and supports cities embarking on new data projects. The initiative’s website contains feature-length articles on how data drives innovation in different policy areas, profile pieces on municipal leaders at the forefront of implementing data analytics in their cities, and resources for interested officials to begin data projects in their own communities.
Recent articles include an assessment of Boston’s Adopt-a-Hydrant program as a potential harbinger of future city work promoting civic engagement and infrastructure maintenance, and a feature on how predictive technology is transforming police work. The site also spotlights municipal use of data such as San Francisco’s efforts to integrate data from different social service departments to better identify and serve at-risk youth. In addition to visiting the initiative’s website, Data-Smart City Solutions’ work is chronicled in their newsletter as well as on their Twitter page.”

New certificates launched to help everyone discover, understand, and use open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Press Release from the Open Data Institute: “The ODI is today launching Open Data Certificates to help everyone find, understand and use open data that is being released. The new certificates are being announced by CEO Gavin Starks at a G8 Summit event: Open for Growth. The certificates have been created in response to business, government, and citizen needs to bring rigour to the publication, dissemination and usage of open data. Over the last six months, ODI has been collaborating with dozens of organisations around the world to define the certificates. Today sees their first Beta release.
The certificate is made up of two components:1)  a visual mark that shows the quality level of the data
2) a human and machine-readable description of the data being released
There are four levels of certificates:
Raw: A great start at the basics of publishing open data.
Pilot: Data users receive extra support from, and provide feedback to the publisher.
Standard: Regularly published open data with robust support that people can rely on.
Expert: An exceptional example of information infrastructure.
Benefits of the certificates include helping:

  • publishers of data understand how they can better connect with their users;
  • users of data to understand its quality, licensing, structure, and its usability;
  • businesses, entrepreneurs and innovators have confidence that the data has value to them;
  • policy-makers benchmark and compare the progress and quality of the data released.

Commercial and public sector organisations have already committed to the certificates including:
– Open Corporates: corporate information for over 50 million companies worldwide
– OpenStreetMap: the free wiki world map offering worldwide open geodata
–  legislation.gov.uk: 500 years of UK legislation information
– amee: an environmental score for each of the 2.7 million companies in Britain
– MastodonC:  energy monitoring data analysis from Retrofit for the Future projects
– Placr: transport data covering all 360,000 stops and stations nationwide
Certificates are created online, for free, at http://certificates.theodi.org/. The process involves publishers answering a series of questions, each of which affect the certificate generated at the end.Read Minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude’s opening remarks at the conference, with the emphasis firmly on open data and transparency”

Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “The Commission today unveiled plans for the Global Internet Policy Observatory (GIPO), an online platform to improve knowledge of and participation of all stakeholders across the world in debates and decisions on Internet policies. GIPO will be developed by the Commission and a core alliance of countries and Non Governmental Organisations involved in Internet governance. Brazil, the African Union, Switzerland, the Association for Progressive Communication, Diplo Foundation and the Internet Society have agreed to cooperate or have expressed their interest to be involved in the project.
The Global Internet Policy Observatory will act as a clearinghouse for monitoring Internet policy, regulatory and technological developments across the world.
It will:

  • automatically monitor Internet-related policy developments at the global level, making full use of “big data” technologies;
  • identify links between different fora and discussions, with the objective to overcome “policy silos”;
  • help contextualise information, for example by collecting existing academic information on a specific topic, highlighting the historical and current position of the main actors on a particular issue, identifying the interests of different actors in various policy fields;
  • identify policy trends, via quantitative and qualitative methods such as semantic and sentiment analysis;
  • provide easy-to-use briefings and reports by incorporating modern visualisation techniques;”

Innovations in American Government Award

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University announced the Top 25 programs in this year’s Innovations in American Government Award competition. These government initiatives represent the dedicated efforts of city, state, federal, and tribal governments and address a host of policy issues including crime prevention, economic development, environmental and community revitalization, employment, education, and health care. Selected by a cohort of policy experts, researchers, and practitioners, four finalists and one winner of the Innovations in American Government Award will be announced in the fall. A full list of the Top 25 programs is available here.
…A Culture of Innovation
A number of this year’s Top 25 programs foster a new culture of innovation through online collaboration and crowdsourcing. Signaling a new trend in government, these programs encourage the generation of smart solutions to existing and seemingly intractable public policy problems. LAUNCH—a partnership among NASA, USAID, the State Department, and NIKE—identifies and scales up promising global sustainability innovations created by individual citizens and organizations. The General Services Administration’s Challenge.gov uses crowdsourcing contests to solve government issues: government agencies post challenges, and the broader American public is awarded for submitting winning ideas. The Department of Transportation’s IdeaHub also uses an online platform to encourage its employees to communicate new ideas for making the department more adaptable and enterprising.”

Open Data Research Announced

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WWW Foundation Press Release:  “Speaking at an Open Government Partnership reception last night in London, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation (Web Foundation) and inventor of the Web, unveiled details of the first ever in-depth study into how the power of open data could be harnessed to tackle social challenges in the developing world. The 14 country study is funded by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and will be overseen by the Web Foundation’s world-leading open data experts. An interim progress update will be made at an October 2013 meeting of the Open Government Partnership, with in-depth results expected in 2014…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and inventor of the Web said:

“Open Data, accessed via a free and open Web, has the potential to create a better world. However, best practice in London or New York is not necessarily best practice in Lima or Nairobi.  The Web Foundation’s research will help to ensure that Open Data initiatives in the developing world will unlock real improvements in citizens’ day-to-day lives.”

José M. Alonso, program manager at the World Wide Web Foundation, added:

“Through this study, the Web Foundation hopes not only to contribute to global understanding of open data, but also to cultivate the ability of developing world researchers and development workers to understand and apply open data for themselves.”

Further details on the project, including case study outlines are available here: http://oddc.opendataresearch.org/