An interview with Scott Cody, Vice President, Mathematica Policy Research and GovInnovator Blog (Podcast: Play in new window | Download): “What are predictive analytics and rapid-cycle evaluation and how can public agencies and programs use them to improve program delivery and outcomes? To explore these questions, we’re joined by Scott Cody. He’s a Vice President of Mathematica Policy Research and the co-author, with Andrew Asher, of a recent paper “Smarter, Better, Faster: The Potential for Predictive Analytics and Rapid-Cycle Evaluation to Improve Program Development and Outcomes,” published by the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution.” ... (More >)
Selected Readings on Economic Impact of Open Data
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of open data was originally published in 2014. Open data is publicly available data – often released by governments, scientists, and occasionally private companies – that is made available for anyone to use, in a machine-readable format, free of charge. Considerable attention has been devoted to the economic potential of open data for businesses and other organizations, and it is now widely accepted that open... (More >)
Designing an Online Civic Engagement Platform: Balancing “More” vs. “Better” Participation in Complex Public Policymaking
Paper by Cynthia R. Farina et al in E-Politics: “A new form of online citizen participation in government decisionmaking has arisen in the United States (U.S.) under the Obama Administration. “Civic Participation 2.0” attempts to use Web 2.0 information and communication technologies to enable wider civic participation in government policymaking, based on three pillars of open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Thus far, the Administration has modeled Civic Participation 2.0 almost exclusively on a universalist/populist Web 2.0 philosophy of participation. In this model, content is created by users, who are enabled to shape the discussion and assess the value... (More >)
Towards Timely Public Health Decisions to Tackle Seasonal Diseases With Open Government Data
Paper by Vandana Srivastava and Biplav Srivastava for the Workshops at the Twenty-Eighth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence : “Improving public health is a major responsibility of any government, and is of major interest to citizens and scientific communities around the world. Here, one sees two extremes. On one hand, tremendous progress has been made in recent years in the understanding of causes, spread and remedies of common and regularly occurring diseases like Dengue, Malaria and Japanese Encephalistis (JE). On the other hand, public agencies treat these diseases in an ad hoc manner without learning from the experiences of... (More >)
Open Data for economic growth: the latest evidence
Andrew Stott at the Worldbank OpenData Blog: “One of the key policy drivers for Open Data has been to drive economic growth and business innovation. There’s a growing amount of evidence and analysis not only for the total potential economic benefit but also for some of the ways in which this is coming about. This evidence is summarised and reviewed in a new World Bank paper published today. There’s a range of studies that suggest that the potential prize from Open Data could be enormous – including an estimate of $3-5 trillion a year globally from McKinsey Global Institute... (More >)
Selected Readings on Sentiment Analysis
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of sentiment analysis was originally published in 2014. Sentiment Analysis is a field of Computer Science that uses techniques from natural language processing, computational linguistics, and machine learning to predict subjective meaning from text. The term opinion mining is often used interchangeably with Sentiment Analysis, although it is technically a subfield focusing on the extraction of opinions (the umbrella under which sentiment, evaluation, appraisal, attitude,... (More >)
Crowd-Sourced Augmented Realities: Social Media and the Power of Digital Representation
Pre-publication version of a chapter by Matthew Zook, Mark Graham and Andrew Boulton in S. Mains, J. Cupples, and C. Lukinbeal. Mediated Geographies/Geographies of Media. Springer Science International Handbooks in Human Geography, (Forthcoming): “A key and distinguishing feature of society today is that its increasingly documented by crowd-sourced social media discourse about public experiences. Much of this social media content is geo-referenced and exists in layers of information draped over the physical world, invisible to the naked eye but accessible to range of digital (and often) mobile devices. When we access these information layers, they mediate the mundane practices... (More >)
A framework for measuring smart cities
Paper by Félix Herrera Priano and Cristina Fajardo Guerra for the Proceedings of the 15th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research: “Smart cities are an international phenomenon. Many cities are actively working to build or transform their models toward that of a Smart City. There is constant research and reports devoted to measuring the intelligence of cities through establishing specific methodologies and indicators (grouped by various criteria). We believe the subject lacks a certain uniformity, which we aim to redress in this paper by suggesting a framework for properly measuring the smart level of a city. Cities are... (More >)
The People’s Platform
Book Review by Tim Wu in the New York Times: “Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker who has described her work as the “steamed broccoli” in our cultural diet. Her last film, “Examined Life,” depicted philosophers walking around and talking about their ideas. She’s the kind of creative person who was supposed to benefit when the Internet revolution collapsed old media hierarchies. But two decades since that revolution began, she’s not impressed: “We are at risk of starving in the midst of plenty,” Taylor writes. “Free culture, like cheap food, incurs hidden costs.” Instead of serving as the great... (More >)
Brief survey of crowdsourcing for data mining
Paper by Guo Xintong, Wang Hongzhi, Yangqiu Song, and Gao Hong in Expert Systems with Applications: “Crowdsourcing allows large-scale and flexible invocation of human input for data gathering and analysis, which introduces a new paradigm of data mining process. Traditional data mining methods often require the experts in analytic domains to annotate the data. However, it is expensive and usually takes a long time. Crowdsourcing enables the use of heterogeneous background knowledge from volunteers and distributes the annotation process to small portions of efforts from different contributions. This paper reviews the state-of-the-arts on the crowdsourcing for data mining in... (More >)
