Chapter by Thakuriah, P., Dirks, L., and Keita, Y. in Seeing Cities Through Big Data: Research Methods and Applications in Urban Informatics (forthcoming): “This paper assesses non-traditional urban digital infomediaries who are pushing the agenda of urban Big Data and Open Data. Our analysis identified a mix of private, public, non-profit and informal infomediaries, ranging from very large organizations to independent developers. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identified four major groups of organizations within this dynamic and diverse sector: general-purpose ICT providers, urban information service providers, open and civic data infomediaries, and independent and open source developers. A total of nine organizational types are identified within these four groups. We align these nine organizational types along five dimensions accounts for their mission and major interests, products and services, as well activities they undertake: techno-managerial, scientific, business and commercial, urban engagement, and openness and transparency. We discuss urban ICT entrepreneurs, and the role of informal networks involving independent developers, data scientists and civic hackers in a domain that historically involved professionals in the urban planning and public management domains. Additionally, we examine convergence in the sector by analyzing overlaps in their activities, as determined by a text mining exercise of organizational webpages. We also consider increasing similarities in products and services offered by the infomediaries, while highlighting ideological tensions that might arise given the overall complexity of the sector, and differences in the backgrounds and end-goals of the participants involved. There is much room for creation of knowledge and value networks in the urban data sector and for improved cross-fertilization among bodies of knowledge….(More)”
Big data privacy: the datafication of personal information
Jens-Erik Mai in The Information Society: “In the age of big data we need to think differently about privacy. We need to shift our thinking from definitions of privacy (characteristics of privacy) to models of privacy (how privacy works). Moreover, in addition to the existing models of privacy—surveillance model and capture model, we need to also consider a new model —the datafication model presented in this paper, wherein new personal information is deduced by employing predictive analytics on already-gathered data. These three models of privacy supplement each other; they are not competing understandings of privacy. This broadened approach will take our thinking beyond current preoccupation with whether or not individuals’ consent was secured for data collection to privacy issues arising from the development of new information on individuals’ likely behavior through analysis of already collected data – this new information can violate privacy but does not call for consent….(More)”
EU e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020. Accelerating the digital transformation of government
Q and A: “The e-Government Action Plan includes 20 initiatives to be launched in 2016 and 2017 (full list). Several of them aim to accelerate the implementation of existing legislation and related take-up of online public services. The Commission will notably support the transition of Member States towards full e-procurement, use of contract registers and interoperable e-signatures.
Another part of this set of initiatives focuses on cross-border digital public services. For example, the Commission will submit a proposal to create a Single Digital Gateway as a one-stop entry point for business and people to all Digital Single Market related information, assistance, advice and problem-solving services and making sure that the most frequently used procedures for doing business across borders can be completed fully online. The ESSI (Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information) will help national administrations to electronically share personal social information between Member States, thereby making it easier for people to live and work across borders.
Finally, the action plan aims to ensure that high-quality digital public services are designed for users and encourage their participation.
The plan will be regularly reviewed and if needed completed. An online platform for users will ensure that ideas and feedback are collected.
What is the “once-only” principle?
The “once-only” principle means that citizens and businesses should supply the same information only once to a public administration. Public administration internally shares this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses. It calls for a reorganisation of public sector internal processes, rather than forcing businesses and citizens to fit around these processes.
The Commission will launch a pilot project with Member States to apply once-only principle across borders, with €8 million funding from Horizon 2020. This pilot will test out a technical once-only solution for businesses working in different EU Member States. Another activity will explore the once-only concept for citizens, and support networking and discussions on how this could be implemented, in due respect of the legal framework on personal data protection and privacy.
What is the digitisation of company law?
A number of EU company rules were conceived in a pre-digital era, when every form had to be completed on paper. As a result, many companies cannot fully benefit from digital tools where it comes to fulfilling company law requirements or interacting with business registers because many of the rules and processes are still paper-based.
The Commission will work on ways to achieve simpler and less burdensome solutions for companies, by facilitating the use of digital solutions throughout a company’s lifecycle in the interaction between companies and business registers, including in cross-border situations.
For instance, in order to set up as a company in a Member State, it is necessary to register that company in a business register. The Commission will look at how and in what ways online registration procedures could be made available in order to reduce the administrative burden and costs of founding a new company. Also, under EU law, companies are obliged to file a number of documents and information in business registers. Cost and time savings for companies could be generated through better use of digital tools when a company needs to submit and disclose new documents or up-date those throughout its lifecycle, for instance when the company name changes.
How will the Single Digital Gateway help European businesses and citizens?
The Single Digital Gateway will link up (not replace) relevant EU and national websites, portals, assistance services and procedures in a seamless and user-friendly way. Over time it will offer users a streamlined, comprehensive portal to find information, initiate and complete transactions with Member States’ administrations across the EU. The most frequently used administrative procedures will be identified and be brought fully online, so that no offline steps like printing and sending documents on paper will be needed.
This will save time and thereby costs for businesses and citizens when they want to engage in cross-border activities like setting up a business, exporting, moving or studying in another EU Member State.
How will interconnecting businesses registers, insolvency registers, and making the e-Justice portal a one-stop shop for justice help businesses?
These initiatives will help businesses trade within the EU with much more confidence. Not only will they be able to find the relevant information on other businesses themselves, but also on their possible insolvency, through the different interconnections of registers. This will increase transparency and enhance confidence in the Digital Single Market.
Interconnecting business registers will also ensure that business registers can communicate to each other electronically in a safe and secure way and that information is up-to-date without any additional red tape for companies.
The European e-Justice Portal provides a lot of additional information in case of problems, including tools to find a lawyer or notary, and tools for the exercise of their rights. It gives businesses easy access to information needed before entering into a business arrangement, as well as the confidence that if things go wrong, a solution is near at hand…. (More)”
Crowdsourcing healthcare costs: Opportunities and challenges for patient centered price transparency
Paper by Zachary F. Meisel, Lauren A. Houdek VonHoltz, and Raina M. Merchant in Healthcare: “Efforts to improve health care price transparency have garnered significant attention from patients, policy makers, and health insurers. In response to increasing consumer demand, state governments, insurance plans, and health care providers are reporting health care prices. However, such data often do not provide consumers with the most salient information: their own actual out-of-pocket cost for medical care. Although untested, crowdsourcing, a mechanism for the public to help answer complex questions, represents a potential solution to the problem of opaque hospital costs. This article explores, the challenges and potential opportunities for crowdsourcing out-of-pocket costs for healthcare consumers….(More)”.
The Secret in the Information Society
Philosophy & Technology: “Who can still keep a secret in a world in which everyone and everything are connected by technology aimed at charting and cross-referencing people, objects, movements, behaviour, relationships, tastes and preferences? The possibilities to keep a secret have come under severe pressure in the information age. That goes for the individual as well as the state. This development merits attention as secrecy is foundational for individual freedom as well as essential to the functioning of the state. Building on Simmel’s work on secrecy, this paper argues that the individual’s secrets should be saved from the ever-expanding digital transparency. The legitimate function of state secrecy in turn needs rescuing from a culture of secrecy and over-classification that has exploded in recent years. Contrary to popular expectation, the digital revolution adds another layer of secrecy that is increasingly hidden behind the facade of the ‘big usable systems’ we work and play with every day. Our dependence on information systems and their black-boxed algorithmic analytical core leads to a certain degree of Weberian (re) enchantment that may increase the disconnect between the system, user and object….(More)”
Simplexity
Paper by Joshua D. Blank and Leigh Osofsky: “In recent years, federal government agencies have increasingly attempted to use plain language in written communications with the public. The Plain Writing Act of 2010, for instance, requires agencies to incorporate “clear and simple” explanations of rules and regulations into their official publications. In the tax context, as part of its “customer service” mission, the Internal Revenue Service bears a “duty to explain” the tax law to hundreds of millions of taxpayers who file tax returns each year. Proponents of the plain language movement have heralded this form of communication as leading to simplicity in tax compliance, more equitable access to federal programs and increased open government.
This Article casts plain language efforts in a different light. As we argue, rather than achieving simplicity, which would involve reform of the underlying law, the use of plain language to describe complex legal rules and regulations often yields “simplexity.” As we define it, simplexity occurs when the government presents clear and simple explanations of the law without highlighting its underlying complexity or reducing this complexity through formal legal changes. We show that in its numerous taxpayer publications, the IRS frequently uses plain language to transform complex, often ambiguous tax law into seemingly simple statements that (1) present contested tax law as clear tax rules, (2) add administrative gloss to the tax law and (3) fail to fully explain the tax law, including possible exceptions. Sometimes these plain language explanations benefit the government; at other times, they benefit taxpayers.
While simplexity offers a number of potential tax administration benefits, such as making the tax law understandable and even bolstering the IRS’s ability to collect tax revenue, it can also threaten vital values of transparency and democratic governance and can result in inequitable treatment of different taxpayers. We offer approaches for preserving some of the benefits of simplexity while also responding to some of its drawbacks. We also forecast the likely emergence of simplexity in potential future tax compliance measures, such as government-prepared tax returns, interactive tax return filing and increased third-party reporting….(More)”.
Infomediaries and accountability
Paper by Becky Carter: “A synthesis of what the existing evidence says (and where there are gaps) on:
1) What role might ‘infomediaries’, and specifically the media have in helping translate transparency into greater government accountability? In generating that accountability? In empowering citizens?
2) In what contexts or types of contexts do ‘infomediaries’ and media play such a facilitating role, and why?
3) What enabling factors contributed to success?
4) What role, if any, have donors had in supporting these sectors in this capacity?
5) What risks exist in this space?…(More)”
Open Data and Beyond
Paper by Frederika Welle Donker, Bastiaan van Loenen and Arnold K. Bregt: “In recent years, there has been an increasing trend of releasing public sector information as open data. Governments worldwide see the potential benefits of opening up their data. The potential benefits are more transparency, increased governmental efficiency and effectiveness, and external benefits, including societal and economic benefits. The private sector also recognizes potential benefits of making their datasets available as open data. One such company is Liander, an energy network administrator in the Netherlands. Liander views open data as a contributing factor to energy conservation. However, to date there has been little research done into the actual effects of open data. This research has developed a monitoring framework to assess the effects of open data, and has applied the framework to Liander’s small-scale energy consumption dataset….(More)“
OpenTrials: towards a collaborative open database of all available information on all clinical trials
Paper Ben Goldacre and Jonathan Gray at BioMed Central: “OpenTrials is a collaborative and open database for all available structured data and documents on all clinical trials, threaded together by individual trial. With a versatile and expandable data schema, it is initially designed to host and match the following documents and data for each trial: registry entries; links, abstracts, or texts of academic journal papers; portions of regulatory documents describing individual trials; structured data on methods and results extracted by systematic reviewers or other researchers; clinical study reports; and additional documents such as blank consent forms, blank case report forms, and protocols. The intention is to create an open, freely re-usable index of all such information and to increase discoverability, facilitate research, identify inconsistent data, enable audits on the availability and completeness of this information, support advocacy for better data and drive up standards around open data in evidence-based medicine. The project has phase I funding. This will allow us to create a practical data schema and populate the database initially through web-scraping, basic record linkage techniques, crowd-sourced curation around selected drug areas, and import of existing sources of structured and documents. It will also allow us to create user-friendly web interfaces onto the data and conduct user engagement workshops to optimise the database and interface designs. Where other projects have set out to manually and perfectly curate a narrow range of information on a smaller number of trials, we aim to use a broader range of techniques and attempt to match a very large quantity of information on all trials. We are currently seeking feedback and additional sources of structured data….(More)”
What Should We Do About Big Data Leaks?
Paul Ford at the New Republic: “I have a great fondness for government data, and the government has a great fondness for making more of it. Federal elections financial data, for example, with every contribution identified, connected to a name and address. Or the results of the census. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of downloading census data but it’s pretty exciting. You can hold America on your hard drive! Meditate on the miracles of zip codes, the way the country is held together and addressable by arbitrary sets of digits.
You can download whole books, in PDF format, about the foreign policy of the Reagan Administration as it related to Russia. Negotiations over which door the Soviet ambassador would use to enter a building. Gigabytes and gigabytes of pure joy for the ephemeralist. The government is the greatest creator of ephemera ever.
Consider the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, or FCIC, created in 2009 to figure out exactly how the global economic pooch was screwed. The FCIC has made so much data, and has done an admirable job (caveats noted below) of arranging it. So much stuff. There are reams of treasure on a single FCIC web site, hosted at Stanford Law School: Hundreds of MP3 files, for example, with interviews with Jamie Dimonof JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs. I am desperate to find time to write some code that automatically extracts random audio snippets from each and puts them on top of a slow ambient drone with plenty of reverb, so that I can relax to the dulcet tones of the financial industry explaining away its failings. (There’s a Paul Krugman interview that I assume is more critical.)
The recordings are just the beginning. They’ve released so many documents, and with the documents, a finding aid that you can download in handy PDF format, which will tell you where to, well, find things, pointing to thousands of documents. That aid alone is 1,439 pages.
Look, it is excellent that this exists, in public, on the web. But it also presents a very contemporary problem: What is transparency in the age of massive database drops? The data is available, but locked in MP3s and PDFs and other documents; it’s not searchable in the way a web page is searchable, not easy to comment on or share.
Consider the WikiLeaks release of State Department cables. They were exhausting, there were so many of them, they were in all caps. Or the trove of data Edward Snowden gathered on aUSB drive, or Chelsea Manning on CD. And the Ashley Madison leak, spread across database files and logs of credit card receipts. The massive and sprawling Sony leak, complete with whole email inboxes. And with the just-released Panama Papers, we see two exciting new developments: First, the consortium of media organizations that managed the leak actually came together and collectively, well, branded the papers, down to a hashtag (#panamapapers), informational website, etc. Second, the size of the leak itself—2.5 terabytes!—become a talking point, even though that exact description of what was contained within those terabytes was harder to understand. This, said the consortia of journalists that notably did not include The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc., is the big one. Stay tuned. And we are. But the fact remains: These artifacts are not accessible to any but the most assiduous amateur conspiracist; they’re the domain of professionals with the time and money to deal with them. Who else could be bothered?
If you watched the movie Spotlight, you saw journalists at work, pawing through reams of documents, going through, essentially, phone books. I am an inveterate downloader of such things. I love what they represent. And I’m also comfortable with many-gigabyte corpora spread across web sites. I know how to fetch data, how to consolidate it, and how to search it. I share this skill set with many data journalists, and these capacities have, in some ways, become the sole province of the media. Organs of journalism are among the only remaining cultural institutions that can fund investigations of this size and tease the data apart, identifying linkages and thus constructing informational webs that can, with great effort, be turned into narratives, yielding something like what we call “a story” or “the truth.”
Spotlight was set around 2001, and it features a lot of people looking at things on paper. The problem has changed greatly since then: The data is everywhere. The media has been forced into a new cultural role, that of the arbiter of the giant and semi-legal database. ProPublica, a nonprofit that does a great deal of data gathering and data journalism and then shares its findings with other media outlets, is one example; it funded a project called DocumentCloud with other media organizations that simplifies the process of searching through giant piles of PDFs (e.g., court records, or the results of Freedom of Information Act requests).
At some level the sheer boredom and drudgery of managing these large data leaks make them immune to casual interest; even the Ashley Madison leak, which I downloaded, was basically an opaque pile of data and really quite boring unless you had some motive to poke around.
If this is the age of the citizen journalist, or at least the citizen opinion columnist, it’s also the age of the data journalist, with the news media acting as product managers of data leaks, making the information usable, browsable, attractive. There is an uneasy partnership between leakers and the media, just as there is an uneasy partnership between the press and the government, which would like some credit for its efforts, thank you very much, and wouldn’t mind if you gave it some points for transparency while you’re at it.
Pause for a second. There’s a glut of data, but most of it comes to us in ugly formats. What would happen if the things released in the interest of transparency were released in actual transparent formats?…(More)”