Paper by Dirk Helbing; “Our society is fundamentally changing. These days, almost nothing works without a computer chip. Processing power doubles every 18 months and will exceed the capabilities of human brains in about ten years from now. Some time ago, IBM’s Big Blue computer already beat the best chess player. Meanwhile, computers perform about 70 percent of all financial transactions, and IBM’s Watson advises customers better than human telephone hotlines. Will computers and robots soon replace skilled labor? In many European countries, unemployment is reaching historical heights. The forthcoming economic and social impact of future information and communication technologies (ICT) will be huge – probably more significant than that caused by the steam engine, or by nano- or biotechnology.
The storage capacity for data is growing even faster than computational capacity. Within just a year we will soon generate more data than in the entire history of humankind. The “Internet of Things” will network trillions of sensors. Unimaginable amounts of data will be collected. Big Data is already being praised as the “oil of the 21st century”. What opportunities and risks does this create for our society, economy, and environment?”
Smart Governance: A Roadmap for Research and Practice
New report by Hans J. Scholl and Margit C. Scholl: “It has been the object of this article to make the case and present a roadmap for the study of the phenomena of smart governance as well as smart and open governance as an enactment of smart governance in practice. As a concept paper, this contribution aimed at sparking interest and at inspiring scholarly and practitioner discourse in this area of study inside the community of electronic government research and practice, and beyond. The roadmap presented here comprises and details seven elements of smart governance along with eight areas of focus in practice.
Smart governance along with its administrative enactment of smart and open government, it was argued, can help effectively address the three grand challenges to 21st century societal and individual well-being, which are (a) the Third Industrial Revolution with the information revolution at its core, (b) the rapidity of change and the lack of timely and effective government intervention, and (c) expansive government spending and exorbitant public debt financing. Although not seen as a panacea, it was also argued that smart governance principles could guide the relatively complex administrative enactment of smart and open government more intelligently than traditional static and inflexible governance approaches could do.
Since much of the road ahead metaphorically speaking leads through uncharted territory, dedicated research is needed that accompanies projects in this area and evaluates them. Research could further be embedded into practical projects providing for fast and systematic learning. We believe that such embedding of research into smart governance projects should become an integral part of smart projects’ agendas.”
The Web at 25 in the U.S.
Paper by Lee Rainie and Susannah Fox from Pew: “The overall verdict: The internet has been a plus for society and an especially good thing for individual users… This report is the first part of a sustained effort through 2014 by the Pew Research Center to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Lee wrote a paper on March 12, 1989 proposing an “information management” system that became the conceptual and architectural structure for the Web. He eventually released the code for his system—for free—to the world on Christmas Day in 1990. It became a milestone in easing the way for ordinary people to access documents and interact over a network of computers called the internet—a system that linked computers and that had been around for years. The Web became especially appealing after Web browsers were perfected in the early 1990s to facilitate graphical displays of pages on those linked computers.”
The Power of Knowledge,' by Jeremy Black
Book review by Roger Kimball: “It’s surprising to me that the English historian Jeremy Black isn’t better known on these shores. He has written dozens of books on subjects as various as the Battle of Waterloo, the history of the slave trade, both world wars and the rise of European power in the 18th century. His bibliography includes books about maps and naval power, and even “The Politics of James Bond.” What is more, he commands an engaging prose style and possesses an outlook appealingly grounded in the principles of a high but undoctrinaire Toryism. This combination of fluency and wide-ranging erudition are conspicuously on display in “The Power of Knowledge,” an ambitious, synoptic, “big idea” book that is likely to extend the frontiers of Mr. Black’s audience in this country.
The thesis of the book is neatly encapsulated in the title of Chapter 13: “Information Is All.” The idea that there is an intimate link between knowledge and what we might call administrative power is perennial. It is inscribed in the nature of things that the more you know, the more you control.
The technological side of that syllogism, Mr. Black notes, didn’t really come to the fore until the 17th century. “Knowledge is Power,” wrote Francis Bacon, enunciating a principle that seems obvious only because we have been the beneficiaries of the processes he helped to define. Writing a few years later, René Descartes promised that his method of inquiry would make man “the master and possessor of nature.” Descartes looked forward to all manner of material benefits, not least in the realm of medicine. He was prescient.
Mr. Black touches on Bacon and Descartes in his chapter on the Scientific Revolution, but his focus is much more encompassing. He begins his story with the formation of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and describes how the Great Khan’s superior deployment of information, prominently including his command of trade along the Silk Road, stood behind the creation of the largest contiguous empire in history.
The technological side of that syllogism, Mr. Black notes, didn’t really come to the fore until the 17th century. “Knowledge is Power,” wrote Francis Bacon, enunciating a principle that seems obvious only because we have been the beneficiaries of the processes he helped to define. Writing a few years later, René Descartes promised that his method of inquiry would make man “the master and possessor of nature.” Descartes looked forward to all manner of material benefits, not least in the realm of medicine. He was prescient.
Mr. Black touches on Bacon and Descartes in his chapter on the Scientific Revolution, but his focus is much more encompassing. He begins his story with the formation of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century and describes how the Great Khan’s superior deployment of information, prominently including his command of trade along the Silk Road, stood behind the creation of the largest contiguous empire in history.
The guiding theme of this book is the complex linkage (what Mr. Black calls “synergies”) between information and power—political power, above all, but also military, economic and technological power. The increasingly sophisticated acquisition and manipulation of information, Mr. Black argues, is “a defining characteristic of modernity,” and it fueled the rise and shaped the distinctiveness of the West from the 18th century through the early 21st.
Part of what makes modernity modern—and a large part of what has made the West its crucible—is the interpenetration of information and technique under the guidance of an increasingly secularized idea of human flourishing. Other cultures made local contributions to this drama, but Mr. Black is right: The breathtaking spectacle of modern technological achievement has been overwhelmingly a Western achievement. This fact has been a source of great sadness for politically correct exponents of multiculturalism. Mr. Black knows this, but he early on hedges his account to avoid “triumphalism.”
As Mr. Black concedes, many of the master terms of his narrative are “porous.” What, after all, is information? It is data, yes, but also statistics, rumor, propaganda and practical know-how. All enter into the story he tells, but their aggregation makes for an argument that is more kaleidoscopic than discursive.
The very breadth of Mr. Black’s subject makes reading “The Power of Knowledge” partly thrilling, partly vertiginous. It is a long journey that Mr. Black engages here, but all of the stops are express stops. There is no lingering. In a section on advances in maritime charting, for example, he mentions that an equivalent was the development during the Renaissance of one-point perspective using mathematical rules. True enough, but that rich topic is confined to a few sentences. Still, the book bristles with interesting tidbits. I took some smuggish satisfaction in knowing that the term “bureaucracy” was coined by a Frenchman (de Gournay) but that we owe “scientist” to the British geologist William Whewell.
Although deeply grounded in history from the Middle Ages on down, this book also conjures with contemporary issues. Some are technical, like the vistas of information unraveled in the human genome project. Some are political. Until fairly recently, Mr. Black notes, central governments lacked the mechanisms to intervene consistently in everyday life. That, as anyone who can pronounce the acronym “NSA” knows, has changed dramatically. Mr. Black devotes an entire chapter to what he calls “the scrutinized society.” The effort to control public opinion and the flow of information has been most flagrant in totalitarian regimes, but he shows that in democracies, too, information is “filtered and deployed as part of the battle for public opinion.”…
Are bots taking over Wikipedia?
Kurzweil News: “As crowdsourced Wikipedia has grown too large — with more than 30 million articles in 287 languages — to be entirely edited and managed by volunteers, 12 Wikipedia bots have emerged to pick up the slack.
The bots use Wikidata — a free knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and bots — to exchange information between entries and between the 287 languages.
Which raises an interesting question: what portion of Wikipedia edits are generated by humans versus bots?
To find out (and keep track of other bot activity), Thomas Steiner of Google Germany has created an open-source application (and API): Wikipedia and Wikidata Realtime Edit Stats, described in an arXiv paper.
The percentages of bot vs. human edits as shown in the application is constantly changing. A KurzweilAI snapshot on Feb. 20 at 5:19 AM EST showed an astonishing 42% of Wikipedia being edited by bots. (The application lists the 12 bots.)
Anonymous vs. logged-In humans (credit: Thomas Steiner)
The percentages also vary by language. Only 5% of English edits were by bots; but for Serbian pages, in which few Wikipedians apparently participate, 96% of edits were by bots.
The application also tracks what percentage of edits are by anonymous users. Globally, it was 25 percent in our snapshot and a surprising 34 percent for English — raising interesting questions about corporate and other interests covertly manipulating Wikipedia information.
NatureNet: a model for crowdsourcing the design of citizen science systems
Paper in CSCW Companion ’14, the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing: “NatureNet is citizen science system designed for collecting bio-diversity data in nature park settings. Park visitors are encouraged to participate in the design of the system in addition to collecting bio-diversity data. Our goal is to increase the motivation to participate in citizen science via crowdsourcing: the hypothesis is that when the crowd plays a role in the design and development of the system, they become stakeholders in the project and work to ensure its success. This paper presents a model for crowdsourcing design and citizen science data collection, and the results from early trials with users that illustrate the potential of this approach.”
Choosing Not to Choose
New paper by Cass Sunstein: “Choice can be an extraordinary benefit or an immense burden. In some contexts, people choose not to choose, or would do so if they were asked. For example, many people prefer not to make choices about their health or retirement plans; they want to delegate those choices to a private or public institution that they trust (and may well be willing to pay a considerable amount for such delegations). This point suggests that however well-accepted, the line between active choosing and paternalism is often illusory. When private or public institutions override people’s desire not to choose, and insist on active choosing, they may well be behaving paternalistically, through a form of choice-requiring paternalism. Active choosing can be seen as a form of libertarian paternalism, and a frequently attractive one, if people are permitted to opt out of choosing in favor of a default (and in that sense not to choose); it is a form of nonlibertarian paternalism insofar as people are required to choose. For both ordinary people and private or public institutions, the ultimate judgment in favor of active choosing, or in favor of choosing not to choose, depends largely on the costs of decisions and the costs of errors. But the value of learning, and of developing one’s own preferences and values, is also important, and may argue on behalf of active choosing, and against the choice not to choose. For law and policy, these points raise intriguing puzzles about the idea of “predictive shopping,” which is increasingly feasible with the rise of large data sets containing information about people’s previous choices. Some empirical results are presented about people’s reactions to predictive shopping; the central message is that most (but not all) people reject predictive shopping in favor of active choosing.”
Structuring Big Data to Facilitate Democratic Participation in International Law
New paper by Roslyn Fuller: “This is an interdisciplinary article focusing on the interplay between information and communication technology (ICT) and international law (IL). Its purpose is to open up a dialogue between ICT and IL practitioners that focuses on the ways in which ICT can enhance equitable participation in international legal structures, particularly through capturing the possibilities associated with big data. This depends on the ability of individuals to access big data, for it to be structured in a manner that makes it accessible and for the individual to be able to take action based on it.”
Crowdsourcing and regulatory reviews: A new way of challenging red tape in British government?
New paper by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich in Regulation and Governance: “Much has been said about the appeal of digital government devices to enhance consultation on rulemaking. This paper explores the most ambitious attempt by the UK central government so far to draw on “crowdsourcing” to consult and act on regulatory reform, the “Red Tape Challenge.” We find that the results of this exercise do not represent any major change to traditional challenges to consultation processes. Instead, we suggest that the extensive institutional arrangements for crowdsourcing were hardly significant in informing actual policy responses: neither the tone of the crowdsourced comments, the direction of the majority views, nor specific comments were seen to matter. Instead, it was processes within the executive that shaped the overall governmental responses to this initiative. The findings, therefore, provoke wider debates about the use of social media in rulemaking and consultation exercises.”
Open Data (Updated and Expanded)
As part of an ongoing effort to build a knowledge base for the field of opening governance by organizing and disseminating its learnings, the GovLab Selected Readings series provides an annotated and curated collection of recommended works on key opening governance topics. We start our series with a focus on Open Data. To suggest additional readings on this or any other topic, please email [email protected].
Open data refers to data that is publicly available for anyone to use and which is licensed in a way that allows for its re-use. The common requirement that open data be machine-readable not only means that data is distributed via the Internet in a digitized form, but can also be processed by computers through automation, ensuring both wide dissemination and ease of re-use. Much of the focus of the open data advocacy community is on government data and government-supported research data. For example, in May 2013, the US Open Data Policy defined open data as publicly available data structured in a way that enables the data to be fully discoverable and usable by end users, and consistent with a number of principles focused on availability, accessibility and reusability.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Mark S. Fox – City Data: Big, Open and Linked – a paper exploring the concepts underlying Big City Data and potential for wider impact as more people are given the opportunity to analyze big and small data.
- Muriel Foulonneau, Sébastien Martin, and Slim Turki – How Open Data Are Turned into Services? – a book chapter proposing a means for evaluating the impact of open data initiatives, especially in regard to improving service delivery.
- Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson – Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation – a multi-authored book exploring the broad open data landscape from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
- Karolis Granickas – Understanding the Impact of Releasing and Re-using Open Government Data – a paper exploring the open data research field with an eye toward enabling an environment that maximizes the benefits of open data.
- Joel Gurin – Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation – a book describing the realized and potential benefit, especially related its power to transform business, government, and society.
- Thorhildur Jetzek, Michel Avital, and Niels Bjørn-Andersen – Generating Value from Open Government Data – a paper proposing a new conceptual model for creating value (broadly understood) from open government data.
- Maxat Kassen – A promising phenomenon of open data: A case study of the Chicago open data project – a case study demonstrating the empowering potential of open data through the examination of Chicago’s open data efforts.
- Justin Keen, Radu Calinescu, Richard Paige and John Rooksby – Big data + politics = open data: The case of health care data in England – a paper exploring challenges and assumptions related to open datasets data, technological infrastructure and levels of access through the study of the U.K.’s National Health Service.
- Stefan Kulk and Bastiaan Van Loenen – Brave New Open Data World? – a paper examining the tensions between open data initiatives and European privacy regulations.
- Vivek Kundra – Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect – a paper describing the impacts to date of open data as well as recommendations for maximizing future impact.
- David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten – Government Data and the Invisible Hand – a paper focusing on the open data movement’s evolving impact on entrepreneurs.
- Barbara Ubaldi – Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives – a report offering a framework for empirically evaluating open government data initiatives.
- Ben Worthy – David Cameron’s Transparency Revolution? The Impact of Open Data in the UK – a paper evaluating the U.K.’s open data efforts in relation to their effects on accountability, participation and better informing citizens.
- Anneke Zuiderwijk, Marijn Janssen, Sunil Choenni, Ronald Meijer and Roexsana Sheikh Alibaks – Socio-technical Impediments of Open Data – a paper describing the socio-technical challenges of opening data based on a review of the literature, workshops and interviews.
- Anneke Zuiderwijk and Marijn Janssen – Open Data Policies, Their Implementation and Impact: A Framework for Comparison – a paper proposing a comparison and evaluation framework for open government initiatives across governments levels.
Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Fox, Mark S. “City Data: Big, Open and Linked.” Working Paper, Enterprise Integration Laboratory (2013). http://bit.ly/1bFr7oL.
- This paper examines concepts that underlie Big City Data using data from multiple cities as examples. It begins by explaining the concepts of Open, Unified, Linked, and Grounded data, which are central to the Semantic Web. Fox then explore Big Data as an extension of Data Analytics, and provide case examples of good data analytics in cities.
- Fox concludes that we can develop the tools that will enable anyone to analyze data, both big and small, by adopting the principles of the Semantic Web:
- Data being openly available over the internet,
- Data being unifiable using common vocabularies,
- Data being linkable using International Resource Identifiers,
- Data being accessible using a common data structure, namely triples,
- Data being semantically grounded using Ontologies.
Foulonneau, Muriel, Sébastien Martin, and Slim Turki. “How Open Data Are Turned into Services?” In Exploring Services Science, edited by Mehdi Snene and Michel Leonard, 31–39. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 169. Springer International Publishing, 2014. http://bit.ly/1fltUmR.
- In this chapter, the authors argue that, considering the important role the development of new services plays as a motivation for open data policies, the impact of new services created through open data should play a more central role in evaluating the success of open data initiatives.
- Foulonneau, Martin and Turki argue that the following metrics should be considered when evaluating the success of open data initiatives: “the usage, audience, and uniqueness of the services, according to the changes it has entailed in the public institutions that have open their data…the business opportunity it has created, the citizen perception of the city…the modification to particular markets it has entailed…the sustainability of the services created, or even the new dialog created with citizens.”
Goldstein, Brett, and Lauren Dyson. Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation. 1 edition. (Code for America Press: 2013). http://bit.ly/15OAxgF
- This “cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape” features stories from practitioners in the open data space — including Michael Flowers, Brett Goldstein, Emer Colmeman and many others — discussing what they’ve accomplished with open civic data. The book “seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving.”
- The book’s editors seek to accomplish the following objectives:
- Help local governments learn how to start an open data program
- Spark discussion on where open data will go next
- Help community members outside of government better engage with the process of governance
- Lend a voice to many aspects of the open data community.
- The book is broken into five sections: Opening Government Data, Building on Open Data, Understanding Open Data, Driving Decisions with Data and Looking Ahead.
Granickas, Karolis. “Understanding the Impact of Releasing and Re-using Open Government Data.” European Public Sector Information Platform, ePSIplatform Topic Report No. 2013/08, (2013). http://bit.ly/GU0Nx4.
- This paper examines the impact of open government data by exploring the latest research in the field, with an eye toward enabling an environment for open data, as well as identifying the benefits of open government data and its political, social, and economic impacts.
- Granickas concludes that to maximize the benefits of open government data: a) further research is required that structure and measure potential benefits of open government data; b) “government should pay more attention to creating feedback mechanisms between policy implementers, data providers and data-re-users”; c) “finding a balance between demand and supply requires mechanisms of shaping demand from data re-users and also demonstration of data inventory that governments possess”; and lastly, d) “open data policies require regular monitoring.”
Gurin, Joel. Open Data Now: The Secret to Hot Startups, Smart Investing, Savvy Marketing, and Fast Innovation, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014). http://amzn.to/1flubWR.
- In this book, GovLab Senior Advisor and Open Data 500 director Joel Gurin explores the broad realized and potential benefit of Open Data, and how, “unlike Big Data, Open Data is transparent, accessible, and reusable in ways that give it the power to transform business, government, and society.”
- The book provides “an essential guide to understanding all kinds of open databases – business, government, science, technology, retail, social media, and more – and using those resources to your best advantage.”
- In particular, Gurin discusses a number of applications of Open Data with very real potential benefits:
- “Hot Startups: turn government data into profitable ventures;
- Savvy Marketing: understanding how reputational data drives your brand;
- Data-Driven Investing: apply new tools for business analysis;
- Consumer Information: connect with your customers using smart disclosure;
- Green Business: use data to bet on sustainable companies;
- Fast R&D: turn the online world into your research lab;
- New Opportunities: explore open fields for new businesses.”
Jetzek, Thorhildur, Michel Avital, and Niels Bjørn-Andersen. “Generating Value from Open Government Data.” Thirty Fourth International Conference on Information Systems, 5. General IS Topics 2013. http://bit.ly/1gCbQqL.
- In this paper, the authors “developed a conceptual model portraying how data as a resource can be transformed to value.”
- Jetzek, Avital and Bjørn-Andersen propose a conceptual model featuring four Enabling Factors (openness, resource governance, capabilities and technical connectivity) acting on four Value Generating Mechanisms (efficiency, innovation, transparency and participation) leading to the impacts of Economic and Social Value.
- The authors argue that their research supports that “all four of the identified mechanisms positively influence value, reflected in the level of education, health and wellbeing, as well as the monetary value of GDP and environmental factors.”
Kassen, Maxat. “A promising phenomenon of open data: A case study of the Chicago open data project.” Government Information Quarterly (2013). http://bit.ly/1ewIZnk.
- This paper uses the Chicago open data project to explore the “empowering potential of an open data phenomenon at the local level as a platform useful for promotion of civic engagement projects and provide a framework for future research and hypothesis testing.”
- Kassen argues that “open data-driven projects offer a new platform for proactive civic engagement” wherein governments can harness “the collective wisdom of the local communities, their knowledge and visions of the local challenges, governments could react and meet citizens’ needs in a more productive and cost-efficient manner.”
- The paper highlights the need for independent IT developers to network in order for this trend to continue, as well as the importance of the private sector in “overall diffusion of the open data concept.”
Keen, Justin, Radu Calinescu, Richard Paige, John Rooksby. “Big data + politics = open data: The case of health care data in England.” Policy and Internet 5 (2), (2013): 228–243. http://bit.ly/1i231WS.
- This paper examines the assumptions regarding open datasets, technological infrastructure and access, using healthcare systems as a case study.
- The authors specifically address two assumptions surrounding enthusiasm about Big Data in healthcare: the assumption that healthcare datasets and technological infrastructure are up to task, and the assumption of access to this data from outside the healthcare system.
- By using the National Health Service in England as an example, the authors identify data, technology, and information governance challenges. They argue that “public acceptability of third party access to detailed health care datasets is, at best, unclear,” and that the prospects of Open Data depend on Open Data policies, which are inherently political, and the government’s assertion of property rights over large datasets. Thus, they argue that the “success or failure of Open Data in the NHS may turn on the question of trust in institutions.”
Kulk, Stefan and Bastiaan Van Loenen. “Brave New Open Data World?” International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, May 14, 2012. http://bit.ly/15OAUYR.
- This paper examines the evolving tension between the open data movement and the European Union’s privacy regulations, especially the Data Protection Directive.
- The authors argue, “Technological developments and the increasing amount of publicly available data are…blurring the lines between non-personal and personal data. Open data may not seem to be personal data on first glance especially when it is anonymised or aggregated. However, it may become personal by combining it with other publicly available data or when it is de-anonymised.”
Kundra, Vivek. “Digital Fuel of the 21st Century: Innovation through Open Data and the Network Effect.” Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard College: Discussion Paper Series, January 2012, http://hvrd.me/1fIwsjR.
- In this paper, Vivek Kundra, the first Chief Information Officer of the United States, explores the growing impact of open data, and argues that, “In the information economy, data is power and we face a choice between democratizing it and holding on to it for an asymmetrical advantage.”
- Kundra offers four specific recommendations to maximize the impact of open data: Citizens and NGOs must demand open data in order to fight government corruption, improve accountability and government services; Governments must enact legislation to change the default setting of government to open, transparent and participatory; The press must harness the power of the network effect through strategic partnerships and crowdsourcing to cut costs and provide better insights; and Venture capitalists should invest in startups focused on building companies based on public sector data.
Noveck, Beth Simone and Daniel L. Goroff. “Information for Impact: Liberating Nonprofit Sector Data.” The Aspen Institute Philanthropy & Social Innovation Publication Number 13-004. 2013. http://bit.ly/WDxd7p.
- This report is focused on “obtaining better, more usable data about the nonprofit sector,” which encompasses, as of 2010, “1.5 million tax-exempt organizations in the United States with $1.51 trillion in revenues.”
- Toward that goal, the authors propose liberating data from the Form 990, an Internal Revenue Service form that “gathers and publishes a large amount of information about tax-exempt organizations,” including information related to “governance, investments, and other factors not directly related to an organization’s tax calculations or qualifications for tax exemption.”
- The authors recommend a two-track strategy: “Pursuing the longer-term goal of legislation that would mandate electronic filing to create open 990 data, and pursuing a shorter-term strategy of developing a third party platform that can demonstrate benefits more immediately.”
Robinson, David G., Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, and Edward W. Felten, “Government Data and the Invisible Hand.” Yale Journal of Law & Technology 11 (2009), http://bit.ly/1c2aDLr.
- This paper proposes a new approach to online government data that “leverages both the American tradition of entrepreneurial self-reliance and the remarkable low-cost flexibility of contemporary digital technology.”
- “In order for public data to benefit from the same innovation and dynamism that characterize private parties’ use of the Internet, the federal government must reimagine its role as an information provider. Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, it should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that ‘exposes’ the underlying data.”
Ubaldi, Barbara. “Open Government Data: Towards Empirical Analysis of Open Government Data Initiatives.” OECD Working Papers on Public Governance. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, May 27, 2013. http://bit.ly/15OB6qP.
- This working paper from the OECD seeks to provide an all-encompassing look at the principles, concepts and criteria framing open government data (OGD) initiatives.
- Ubaldi also analyzes a variety of challenges to implementing OGD initiatives, including policy, technical, economic and financial, organizational, cultural and legal impediments.
- The paper also proposes a methodological framework for evaluating OGD Initiatives in OECD countries, with the intention of eventually “developing a common set of metrics to consistently assess impact and value creation within and across countries.”
Worthy, Ben. “David Cameron’s Transparency Revolution? The Impact of Open Data in the UK.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, November 29, 2013. http://bit.ly/NIrN6y.
- In this article, Worthy “examines the impact of the UK Government’s Transparency agenda, focusing on the publication of spending data at local government level. It measures the democratic impact in terms of creating transparency and accountability, public participation and everyday information.”
- Worthy’s findings, based on surveys of local authorities, interviews and FOI requests, are disappointing. He finds that:
- Open spending data has led to some government accountability, but largely from those already monitoring government, not regular citizens.
- Open Data has not led to increased participation, “as it lacks the narrative or accountability instruments to fully bring such effects.”
- It has also not “created a new stream of information to underpin citizen choice, though new innovations offer this possibility. The evidence points to third party innovations as the key.
- Despite these initial findings, “Interviewees pointed out that Open Data holds tremendous opportunities for policy-making. Joined up data could significantly alter how policy is made and resources targeted. From small scale issues e.g. saving money through prescriptions to targeting homelessness or health resources, it can have a transformative impact. “
Zuiderwijk, Anneke, Marijn Janssen, Sunil Choenni, Ronald Meijer and Roexsana Sheikh Alibaks. “Socio-technical Impediments of Open Data.” Electronic Journal of e-Government 10, no. 2 (2012). http://bit.ly/17yf4pM.
- This paper to seeks to identify the socio-technical impediments to open data impact based on a review of the open data literature, as well as workshops and interviews.
- The authors discovered 118 impediments across ten categories: 1) availability and access; 2) find-ability; 3) usability; 4) understandability; 5) quality; 6) linking and combining data; 7) comparability and compatibility; 8) metadata; 9) interaction with the data provider; and 10) opening and uploading.
Zuiderwijk, Anneke and Marijn Janssen. “Open Data Policies, Their Implementation and Impact: A Framework for Comparison.” Government Information Quarterly 31, no. 1 (January 2014): 17–29. http://bit.ly/1bQVmYT.
- In this article, Zuiderwijk and Janssen argue that “currently there is a multiplicity of open data policies at various levels of government, whereas very little systematic and structured research [being] done on the issues that are covered by open data policies, their intent and actual impact.”
- With this evaluation deficit in mind, the authors propose a new framework for comparing open data policies at different government levels using the following elements for comparison:
- Policy environment and context, such as level of government organization and policy objectives;
- Policy content (input), such as types of data not publicized and technical standards;
- Performance indicators (output), such as benefits and risks of publicized data; and
- Public values (impact).
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Did we miss anything? Please submit reading recommendations to [email protected] or in the comments below.