Paper by Michalis N. Vafopoulos et al: “For decades, information related to public finances was out of reach for most of the people. Gradually, public budgets and tenders are becoming openly available and global initiatives promote fiscal transparency and open product and price data. But, the poor quality of economic open data undermines their potential to answer interesting questions (e.g. efficiency of public funds and market processes). Linked Open Economy (LOE) has been developed as a top-level conceptualization that interlinks the publicly available economic open data by modelling the flows incorporated in public procurement together with the market process to address complex policy issues. LOE approach is extensively used to enrich open economic data ranging from budgets and spending to prices. Developers, professionals, public administrations and any other interested party use and customize LOE model to develop new systems, to enable information exchange between systems, to integrate data from heterogeneous sources and to publish open data related to economic activities….(More)”
Another Tale of Two Cities: Understanding Human Activity Space Using Actively Tracked Cellphone Location Data
Paper by Yang Xu et al: “Activity space is an important concept in geography. Recent advancements of location-aware technologies have generated many useful spatiotemporal data sets for studying human activity space for large populations. In this article, we use two actively tracked cellphone location data sets that cover a weekday to characterize people’s use of space in Shanghai and Shenzhen, China. We introduce three mobility indicators (daily activity range, number of activity anchor points, and frequency of movements) to represent the major determinants of individual activity space. By applying association rules in data mining, we analyze how these indicators of an individual’s activity space can be combined with each other to gain insights of mobility patterns in these two cities. We further examine spatiotemporal variations of aggregate mobility patterns in these two cities. Our results reveal some distinctive characteristics of human activity space in these two cities: (1) A high percentage of people in Shenzhen have a relatively short daily activity range, whereas people in Shanghai exhibit a variety of daily activity ranges; (2) people with more than one activity anchor point tend to travel further but less frequently in Shanghai than in Shenzhen; (3) Shenzhen shows a significant north–south contrast of activity space that reflects its urban structure; and (4) travel distance in both cities is shorter around noon than in regular work hours, and a large percentage of movements around noon are associated with individual home locations. This study indicates the benefits of analyzing actively tracked cellphone location data for gaining insights of human activity space in different cities….(More)”
On Researching Data and Communication
Paper by Andrew Schrock: “We are awash in predictions about our data-driven future. Enthusiasts believe it will offer new ways to research behavior. Critics worry it will enable powerful regimes of institutional control. Both visions, although polar opposites, tend to downplay the importance of communication. As a result, the role of communication in human-centered data science has rarely been considered. This article fills this gap by outlining three perspectives on data that foreground communication. First, I briefly review the common social scientific perspective: “communication as data.” Next, I elaborate on two less explored perspectives. A “data as communication” perspective captures how data imperfectly carry meanings and guide action. “Communication around data” describes communication in organizational and institutional data cultures. I conclude that communication offers nuanced perspectives to inform human-centered data science. Researchers should embrace a robust agenda, particularly when researching the relationship between data and power…(More)”
Private Provision of Public Goods via Crowdfunding
Paper by Robert Chovanculiak and Marek Hudík: “Private provision of public goods is typically associated with three main problems: (1) high organization costs, (2) the assurance problem, and (3) the free-rider problem. We argue that technologies which enable crowdfunding (the method of funding projects by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people via the internet), have made the overall conditions for private provision of public goods more favorable: these technologies lowered the organization costs and enabled to employ more efficient mechanisms which reduce the assurance and free-rider problems. It follows that if the reason for government provision of public goods is higher efficiency as suggested by the standard theory, then with the emergence of crowdfunding we should observe a decline of the government role in this area….(More)”
Google Votes: A Liquid Democracy Experiment on a Corporate Social Network
Paper by Steve Hardt and Lia C. R. Lopes: “This paper introduces Google Votes, an experiment in liquid democracy built on Google’s internal corporate Google+ social network. Liquid democracy decision-making systems can scale to cover large groups by enabling voters to delegate their votes to other voters. This approach is in contrast to direct democracy systems where voters vote directly on issues, and representative democracy systems where voters elect representatives to vote on issues for them. Liquid democracy systems can provide many of the benefits of both direct and representative democracy systems with few of the weaknesses. Thus far, high implementation complexity and infrastructure costs have prevented widespread adoption. Google Votes demonstrates how the use of social-networking technology can overcome these barriers and enable practical liquid democracy systems. The case-study of Google Votes usage at Google over a 3 year timeframe is included, as well as a framework for evaluating vote visibility called the “Golden Rule of Liquid Democracy”….(More)”
Designing a toolkit for policy makers
Laurence Grinyer at UK’s Open Policy Making Blog: “At the end of the last parliament, the Cabinet Office Open Policy Making team launched the Open Policy Making toolkit. This was about giving policy makers the actual tools that will enable them to develop policy that is well informed, creative, tested, and works. The starting point was addressing their needs and giving them what they had told us they needed to develop policy in an ever changing, fast paced and digital world. In a way, it was the culmination of the open policy journey we have been on with departments for the past 2 years. In the first couple of months we saw thousands of unique visits….
Our first version toolkit has been used by 20,000 policy makers. This gave us a huge audience to talk to to make sure that we continue to meet the needs of policy makers and keep the toolkit relevant and useful. Although people have really enjoyed using the toolkit, user testing quickly showed us a few problems…
We knew what we needed to do. Help people understand what Open Policy Making was, how it impacted their policy making, and then to make it as simple as possible for them to know exactly what to do next.
So we came up with some quick ideas on pen and paper and tested them with people. We quickly discovered what not to do. People didn’t want a philosophy— they wanted to know exactly what to do, practical answers, and when to do it. They wanted a sort of design manual for policy….
How do we make user-centered design and open policy making as understood as agile?
We decided to organise the tools around the journey of a policy maker. What might a policy maker need to understand their users? How could they co-design ideas? How could they test policy? We looked at what tools and techniques they could use at the beginning, middle and end of a project, and organised tools accordingly.
We also added sections to remove confusion and hesitation. Our opening section ‘Getting started with Open Policy Making’ provides people with a clear understanding of what open policy making might mean to them, but also some practical considerations. Sections for limited timeframes and budgets help people realise that open policy can be done in almost any situation.
And finally we’ve created a much cleaner and simpler design that lets people show as much or little of the information as they need….
So go and check out the new toolkit and make more open policy yourselves….(More)”
Innovating and changing the policy-cycle: Policy-makers be prepared!
Marijn Janssen and Natalie Helbig in Government Information Quarterly: “Many policy-makers are struggling to understand participatory governance in the midst of technological changes. Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have an impact on the ways that policy-makers and citizens engage with each other throughout the policy-making process. A set of developments in the areas of opening government data, advanced analytics, visualization, simulation, and gaming, and ubiquitous citizen access using mobile and personalized applications is shaping the interactions between policy-makers and citizens. Yet the impact of these developments on the policy-makers is unclear. The changing roles and need for new capabilities required from the government are analyzed in this paper using two case studies. Salient new roles for policy-makers are outlined focused on orchestrating the policy-making process. Research directions are identified including understand the behavior of users, aggregating and analyzing content from scattered resources, and the effective use of the new tools. Understanding new policy-makers roles will help to bridge the gap between the potential of tools and technologies and the organizational realities and political contexts. We argue that many examples are available that enable learning from others, in both directions, developed countries experiences are useful for developing countries and experiences from the latter are valuable for the former countries…(More)”
The Smart City and its Citizens
Paper by Carlo Francesco Capra on “Governance and Citizen Participation in Amsterdam Smart City…Smart cities are associated almost exclusively with modern technology and infrastructure. However, smart cities have the possibility to enhance the involvement and contribution of citizens to urban development. This work explores the role of governance as one of the factors influencing the participation of citizens in smart cities projects. Governance characteristics play a major role in explaining different typologies of citizen participation. Through a focus on Amsterdam Smart City program as a specific case study, this research examines the characteristics of governance that are present in the overall program and within a selected sample of projects, and how they relate to different typologies of citizen participation. The analysis and comprehension of governance characteristics plays a crucial role both for a better understanding and management of citizen participation, especially in complex settings where multiple actors are interacting….(More)”
7 Ways Local Governments Are Getting Creative with Data Mapping
Ben Miller at GovTech: “As government data collection expands, and as more of that data becomes publicly available, more people are looking to maps as a means of expressing the information.
And depending on the type of application, a map can be useful for both the government and its constituents. Many maps help government servants operate more efficiently and savemoney, while others will answer residents’ questions so they don’t have to call a government worker for theanswer…..
Here are seven examples of state and local governments using maps to help themselves and the people they serve.
1. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, IOWA GET LOCAL AND CURRENT WITH THE WEATHER
As Winter Storm Jonas was busy dropping nearly 30 inches of snow on the nation’s capital, officials in D.C. were working to clear it. And thanks to a mapping application they launched, citizens could see exactly how the city was going about that business.
The District of Columbia’s snow map lets users enter an address, and then shows what snow plows did near that address within a given range of days. The map also shows where the city received 311 requests for snow removal and gives users a chance to look at recent photos from road cameras showing driving conditions…..
2. LOS ANGELES MAPS EL NIÑO RESOURCES, TRENDS
Throughout the winter, weather monitoring experts warned the public time and again that an El Niño system was brewing in the Pacific Ocean that looked to be one of the largest, if not the largest, ever. That would mean torrents of rain for a parched state that’s seen mudslides and flooding during storms in the past.
So to prepare its residents, the city of Los Angeles published a map in January that lets users see both decision-informing trends and the location of resources. Using the application, one can toggle layers that let them know what the weather is doing around the city, where traffic is backed up, where the power is out, where they can find sand bags to prevent flood damage and more….
3. CALIFORNIA DIVES DEEP INTO AIR POLLUTION RISKS
….So, faced with a legislative mandate to identify disadvantaged communities, the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment decided that it wouldn’t just examine smog levels — it also would also take a look at the prevalence of at-risk people across the state.
The result is a series of three maps, the first two examining both factors and the third combining them. That allows the state and its residents to see the places where air pollution is the biggest problem for people it poses a greater risk to….
4. STREAMLINING RESIDENT SERVICE INFORMATION
The city of Manassas, Va., relied on an outdated paper map and a long-time, well-versed staffer to answer questions about municipal curbside pickup services until they launched this map in 2014. The map allows users to enter their address, and then gives them easy-to-read information about when to put out various things on their curb for pickup.
That’s useful because the city’s fall leaf collection schedule changes every year. So the map not only acts as a benefit to residents who want information, but to city staff who don’t have to deal with as many calls.
The map also shows users the locations of resources they can use and gives them city phone numbers in case they still have questions, and displays it all in a popup pane at the bottom of the map.
5. PLACING TOOLS IN THE HANDS OF THE PUBLIC
A lot of cities and counties have started publishing online maps showing city services and releasing government data.
But Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia stand out as examples of maps that take the idea one step further — because each one offers a staggering amount of choices for users.
Chicago’s new OpenGrid map, just launched in January, is a versatile map that lets users search for certain data like food inspection reports, street closures, potholes and more. That’s enough to answer a lot of questions, but what adds even more utility is the map’s various narrowing tools. Users can narrow searches to a zip code, or they can draw a shape on the map and only see results within that shape. They can perform sub-searches within results and they can choose how they’d like to see the data displayed.
Philadelphia’s platform makes use of buttons, icons and categories to help users sift through the spatially-enabled data available to them. Options include future lane closures, bicycle paths, flu shots, city resources, parks and more.
Boston’s platform is open for users to submit their own maps. And submit they have. The city portal offers everything from maps of bus stops to traffic data pulled from the Waze app.
6. HOUSTON TRANSFORMS SERVICE REQUEST DATA
A 311 service functions as a means of bringing problems to city staff’s attention. But the data itself only goes so far — it needs interpretation.
Houston’s 311 service request map helps users easily analyze the data so as to spot trends. The tool offers lots of ways to narrow data down, and can isolate many different kinds of request so users can see whether one problem is reported more often in certain areas.
7. GUIDING BUSINESS GROWTH
For the last several years, the city of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., has been designing all sorts of maps through its Rancho Enterprise Geographic Information Systems (REGIS) project. Many of them have served specific city purposes, such as tracking code enforcement violations and offering police a command system tool for special events.
The utilitarian foundation of REGIS extends to its public-facing applications as well. One example is INsideRancho, a map built with economic development efforts in mind. The map lets users search and browse available buildings to suit business needs, narrowing results by square footage, zoning and building type. Users can also find businesses by name or address, and look at property exteriors via an embedded connection with Google Street View….(More)”
Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain
UK Government Office for Science: “In a major report on distributed ledgers published today (19 January 2016), the Government Chief Scientist, Sir Mark Walport, sets out how this technology could transform the delivery of public services and boost productivity.
A distributed ledger is a database that can securely record financial, physical or electronic assets for sharing across a network through entirely transparent updates of information.
Its first incarnation was ‘Blockchain’ in 2008, which underpinned digital cash systems such as Bitcoin. The technology has now evolved into a variety of models that can be applied to different business problems and dramatically improve the sharing of information.
Distributed ledger technology could provide government with new tools to reduce fraud, error and the cost of paper intensive processes. It also has the potential to provide new ways of assuring ownership and provenance for goods and intellectual property.
Distributed ledgers are already being used in the diamond markets and in the disbursing of international aid payments.
Sir Mark Walport said:
Distributed ledger technology has the potential to transform the delivery of public and private services. It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust and make a leading contribution to the government’s digital transformation plan.
Any new technology creates challenges, but with the right mix of leadership, collaboration and sound governance, distributed ledgers could yield significant benefits for the UK.
The report makes a number of recommendations which focus on ministerial leadership, research, standards and the need for proof of concept trials.
They include:
- government should provide ministerial leadership to ensure that it provides the vision, leadership and the platform for distributed ledger technology within government; this group should consider governance, privacy, security and standards
- government should establish trials of distributed ledgers in order to assess the technology’s usability within the public sector
- government could support the creation of distributed ledger demonstrators for local government that will bring together all the elements necessary to test the technology and its application.
- the UK research community should invest in the research required to ensure that distributed ledgers are scalable, secure and provide proof of correctness of their contents….View the report ‘Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain’.”