OpEd by Hudson Hollister in Forbes: “Even as the debate over official secrecy grows on Capitol Hill, basic information about our government’s spending remains hidden in plain sight.
Information that is technically public — federal finance, awards, and expenditures — is effectively locked within a disconnected disclosure system that relies on outdated paper-based technology. Budgets, grants, contracts, and disbursements are reported manually and separately, using forms and spreadsheets. Researchers seeking insights into federal spending must invest time and resources crafting data sets out of these documents. Without common data standards across all government spending, analyses of cross-agency spending trends require endless conversions of apples to oranges.
For a nation whose tech industry leads the world, there is no reason to allow this antiquated system to persist.
That’s why we’re excited to welcome Thursday’s unanimous Senate approval of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act — known as the DATA Act.
The DATA Act will mandate government-wide standards for federal spending data. It will also require agencies to publish this information online, fully searchable and open to everyone.
Watchdogs and transparency advocates from across the political spectrum have endorsed the DATA Act because all Americans will benefit from clear, accessible information about how their tax dollars are being spent.
It is darkly appropriate that the only organized opposition to this bill took place behind closed doors. In January, Senate sponsors Mark Warner (D-VA) and Rob Portman (R-OH) rejected amendments offered privately by the White House Office of Management and Budget. These nonpublic proposals would have gutted the DATA Act’s key data standards requirement. But Warner and Portman went public with their opposition, and Republicans and Democrats agreed to keep a strong standards mandate.
We now await swift action by the House of Representatives to pass this bill and put it on the President’s desk.
The tech industry is already delivering the technology and expertise that will use federal spending data, once it is open and standardized, to solve problems.
If the DATA Act is fully enforced, citizens will be able to track government spending on a particular contractor or from a particular program, payment by payment. Agencies will be able to deploy sophisticated Big Data analytics to illuminate, and eliminate, waste and fraud. And states and universities will be able to automate their complex federal grant reporting tasks, freeing up more tax dollars for their intended use. Our industry can perform these tasks — as soon as we get the data.
Chairman Earl Devaney’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board proved this is possible. Starting in 2009, the Recovery Board applied data standards to track stimulus spending. Our members’ software used that data to help inspectors general prevent and recover over $100 million in spending on suspicious grantees and contractors. The DATA Act applies that approach across the whole of government spending.
Congress is now poised to pass this landmark legislative mandate to transform spending from disconnected documents into open data. Next , the executive branch must implement that mandate.
So our Coalition’s work continues. We will press the Treasury Department and the White House to adopt robust, durable, and nonproprietary data standards for federal spending.
And we won’t stop with spending transparency. The American people deserve access to open data across all areas of government activity — financial regulatory reporting, legislative actions, judicial filings, and much more….”
In defense of “slacktivism”: The Human Rights Campaign Facebook logo as digital activism
Stephanie Vie in First Monday: “This paper examines the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) Marriage Equality logo as an example of a meme to further understandings of memetic transmission in social media technologies. The HRC meme is an important example of how even seemingly insignificant moves such as adopting a logo and displaying it online can serve to combat microaggressions, or the damaging results of everyday bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. This article suggests that even small moves of support, such as changing one’s Facebook status to a memetic image, assist by demonstrating a supportive environment for those who identify with marginalized groups and by drawing awareness to important causes. Often dismissed as “slacktivism,” I argue instead that the digital activism made possible through social media memes can build awareness of crucial issues, which can then lead to action.”
Benchmarking open government: An open data perspective
Paper by N Veljković, S Bogdanović-Dinić, and L Stoimenov in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper presents a benchmark proposal for the Open Government and its application from the open data perspective using data available on the U.S. government’s open data portal (data.gov). The benchmark is developed over the adopted Open Government conceptual model, which describes Open Government through data openness, transparency, participation and collaboration. Resulting in two measures, that is, one known as the e-government openness index (eGovOI) and the other Maturity, the benchmark indicates the progress of government over time, the efficiency of recognizing and implementing new concepts and the willingness of the government to recognize and embrace innovative ideas.”
How government can promote open data
Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, and Kate Jackson from McKinsey: “Institutions and companies across the public and private sectors have begun to release and share vast amounts of information in recent years, and the trend is only accelerating. Yet while some information is easily accessible, some is still trapped in paper records. Data may be free or come at a cost. And there are tremendous differences in reuse and redistribution rights. In short, there are degrees when it comes to just how “open” data is and, as a result, how much value it can create.
While businesses and other private organizations can make more information public, we believe that government has a critical role in unleashing the economic potential of open data. A recent McKinsey report, Open data: Unlocking innovation and performance with liquid information,1 identified more than $3 trillion in economic value globally that could be generated each year in seven domains through increasingly “liquid” information that is machine readable, accessible to a broad audience at little or no cost, and capable of being shared and distributed. These sources of value include new or increased revenue, savings, and economic surplus that flow from the insights provided by data as diverse as census demographics, crop reports, and information on product recalls.
Sitting at the nexus of key stakeholders—citizens, businesses, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—government is ideally positioned to extract value from open data and to help others do the same. We believe government can spur value creation at all levels of society by concurrently fulfilling four important open-data roles (exhibit):
Government can serve as an open-data provider, catalyst, user, and policy maker to create value and mitigate risks.
Quizz: Targeted Crowdsourcing with a Billion (Potential) Users
Paper by PG. Ipeirotis and E Gabrilovich: “We describe Quizz, a gamified crowdsourcing system that simultaneously assesses the knowledge of users and acquires new knowledge from them. Quizz operates by asking users to complete short quizzes on specific topics; as a user answers the quiz questions, Quizz estimates the user’s competence. To acquire new knowledge, Quizz also incorporates questions for which we do not have a known answer; the answers given by competent users provide useful signals for selecting the correct answers for these questions. Quizz actively tries to identify knowledgeable users on the Internet by running advertising campaigns, effectively leveraging the targeting capabilities of existing, publicly available, ad placement services. Quizz quantifies the contributions of the users using information theory and sends feedback to the advertising system about each user. The feedback allows the ad targeting mechanism to further optimize ad placement.
Our experiments, which involve over ten thousand users, confirm that we can crowdsource knowledge curation for niche and specialized topics, as the advertising network can automatically identify users with the desired expertise and interest in the given topic. We present controlled experiments that examine the effect of various incentive mechanisms, highlighting the need for having short-term rewards as goals, which incentivize the users to contribute. Finally, our cost-quality analysis indicates that the cost of our approach is below that of hiring workers through paid-crowdsourcing platforms, while offering the additional advantage of giving access to billions of potential users all over the planet, and
being able to reach users with specialized expertise that is not typically available through existing labor marketplaces.”
Using Social Media to Measure Labor Market Flows
Paper by Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Margaret C. Levenstein, Christopher Ré, and Matthew D. Shapiro: “Social media enable promising new approaches to measuring economic activity and analyzing economic behavior at high frequency and in real time using information independent from standard survey and administrative sources. This paper uses data from Twitter to create indexes of job loss, job search, and job posting. Signals are derived by counting job-related phrases in Tweets such as “lost my job.” The social media indexes are constructed from the principal components of these signals. The University of Michigan Social Media Job Loss Index tracks initial claims for unemployment insurance at medium and high frequencies and predicts 15 to 20 percent of the variance of the prediction error of the consensus forecast for initial claims. The social media indexes provide real-time indicators of events such as Hurricane Sandy and the 2013 government shutdown. Comparing the job loss index with the search and posting indexes indicates that the Beveridge Curve has been shifting inward since 2011.
The University of Michigan Social Media Job Loss index is update weeklyand is available at http://econprediction.eecs.umich.edu/.”
Public Procurement as a Means to Stimulate Innovation for a Better World: A Matter of Knowledge Management
Paper by Max Rolfstam: “Public procurement is the central sourcing mechanism evoked to directly secure the delivery of public services. It may however also be used to achieve certain social outcomes and secondary effects. This paper attempts to contribute with knowledge regarding a particular secondary effect, the role of public procurement as a means to stimulate innovation. The paper discusses public procurement of innovation as a knowledge policy in the learning economy, and scrutinizes it from a knowledge management perspective, eventually to connect aspects of learning to institutional levels.”
Why Are Rich Countries Democratic?
Ricardo Hausmann at Project Syndicate: “When Adam Smith was 22, he famously proclaimed that, “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” Today, almost 260 years later, we know that nothing could be further from the truth.
The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 shows how wrong Smith was, for it highlights the intricate interaction between modern production and the state. To make air travel feasible and safe, states ensure that pilots know how to fly and that aircraft pass stringent tests. They build airports and provide radar and satellites that can track planes, air traffic controllers to keep them apart, and security services to keep terrorists on the ground. And, when something goes wrong, it is not peace, easy taxes, and justice that are called in to assist; it is professional, well-resourced government agencies.
All advanced economies today seem to need much more than the young Smith assumed. And their governments are not only large and complex, comprising thousands of agencies that administer millions of pages of rules and regulations; they are also democratic – and not just because they hold elections every so often. Why?
By the time he published The Wealth of Nations, at age 43, Smith had become the first complexity scientist. He understood that the economy was a complex system that needed to coordinate the work of thousands of people just to make things as simple as a meal or a suit.
But Smith also understood that while the economy was too intricate to be organized by anybody, it has the capacity to self-organize. It possesses an “invisible hand,” which operates through market prices to provide an information system that can be used to calculate whether using resources for a given purpose is worthwhile – that is, profitable.
Profit is an incentive system that leads firms and individuals to respond to the information provided by prices. And capital markets are a resource-mobilization system that provides money to those companies and projects that are expected to be profitable – that is, the ones that respond adequately to market prices.
But modern production requires many inputs that markets do not provide. And, as in the case of airlines, these inputs – rules, standards, certifications, infrastructure, schools and training centers, scientific labs, security services, among others – are deeply complementary to the ones that can be procured in markets. They interact in the most intricate ways with the activities that markets organize.
So here’s the question: Who controls the provision of the publicly provided inputs? The prime minister? The legislature? Which country’s top judges have read the millions of pages of legislation or considered how they complement or contradict each other, much less applied them to the myriad different activities that comprise the economy? Even a presidential executive cannot be fully aware of the things that are done or not done by the thousands of government agencies and how they affect each part of society.
This is an information-rich problem, and, like the social-coordination challenge that the market addresses, it does not allow for centralized control. What is needed is something like the invisible hand of the market: a mechanism for self-organization. Elections clearly are not enough, because they typically occur at two- or four-year intervals and collect very little information per voter.
Instead, successful political systems have had to create an alternative invisible hand – a system that decentralizes the power to identify problems, propose solutions, and monitor performance, such that decisions are made with much more information.
To take just one example, the United States’ federal government accounts for just 537 of the country’s roughly 500,000 elected positions. Clearly, there is much more going on elsewhere.
The US Congress has 100 senators with 40 aides each, and 435 representatives with 25 aides each. They are organized into 42 committees and 182 subcommittees, meaning that there are 224 parallel conversations going on. And this group of more than 15,000 people is not alone. Facing them are some 22,000 registered lobbyists, whose mission is (among other goals) to sit down with legislators and draft legislation.
This, together with a free press, is part of the structure that reads the millions of pages of legislation and monitors what government agencies do and do not do. It generates the information and the incentives to respond to it. It affects the allocation of budgetary resources. It is an open system in which anybody can create news or find a lobbyist to make his case, whether it is to save the whales or to eat them.
Without such a mechanism, the political system cannot provide the kind of environment that modern economies need. That is why all rich countries are democracies, and it is why some countries, like my own (Venezuela), are becoming poorer. Although some of these countries do hold elections, they tend to stumble at even the simplest of coordination problems. Lining up to vote is no guarantee that citizens will not also have to line up for toilet paper.”
Browser extension automates citations of online material
Springwise: “Plagiarism is a major concern for colleges today, meaning when it comes to writing a thesis or essay, college students can often spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring their bibliographies are up to scratch, to the detriment of the quality of the actual writing. In the past, services such as ReadCube have made it easier to annotate and search online articles, and now Citelighter automatically generates a citation for any web resource, along with a number of tools to help students organize their research.
The service is a toolbar that sits at the top of the user’s browser while they search for material for their paper. When they’ve found a fact or quote that’s useful, users simply highlight the text and click the Capture button, which saves the clipping to the project they’re working on. Citelight automatically captures the bibliographic information necessary to create a citation that reaches academic standards, and users can also add their own comments for when they come to use the quote in their essay. Citations can be re-ordered within each project to enable students to plot out a rough version of their paper before sitting down to write…”
Infomediary Business Models for Connecting Open Data Providers and Users
Paper by Marijn Janssen and Anneke Zuiderwijk in Social Science Computer Review: “Many public organizations are opening their data to the general public and embracing social media in order to stimulate innovation. These developments have resulted in the rise of new, infomediary business models, positioned between open data providers and users. Yet the variation among types of infomediary business models is little understood. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of the diversity of existing infomediary business models that are driven by open data and social media. Cases presenting different modes of open data utilization in the Netherlands are investigated and compared. Six types of business models are identified: single-purpose apps, interactive apps, information aggregators, comparison models, open data repositories, and service platforms. The investigated cases differ in their levels of access to raw data and in how much they stimulate dialogue between different stakeholders involved in open data publication and use. Apps often are easy to use and provide predefined views on data, whereas service platforms provide comprehensive functionality but are more difficult to use. In the various business models, social media is sometimes used for rating and discussion purposes, but it is rarely used for stimulating dialogue or as input to policy making. Hybrid business models were identified in which both public and private organizations contribute to value creation. Distinguishing between different types of open data users was found to be critical in explaining different business models.”