GovLab Seeks Open Data Success Stories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Wyatt Kash in InformationWeek: “A team of open government advocates, led by former White House aide Beth Novek, has launched a campaign to identify 500 examples of how freely available government data is being put to profitable use in the private sector.Open Data 500 is part of a broader effort by New York University’s Governance Lab (GovLab) to conduct the “first real, comprehensive study of the use of open government data in the private sector,” said Joel Gurin, founder of OpenDataNow.com and senior adviser at GovLab.
Novek, who served in the White House as the first U.S. deputy CTO and led the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011, founded GovLab while also teaching at the MIT Media Lab and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In an interview with InformationWeek Government, Gurin explained that the goal of GovLab, and the Open Data 500 project, is to show how technology and new uses of data can make government more effective, and create more of a partnership between government and the public. “We’re also trying to draw on more public expertise to solve government problems,” he said….
Gurin said Open Data 500 will primarily look at U.S.-based, revenue-producing companies or organizations where government data is a key resource for their business. While the GovLab will focus initially on the use of federal data, it will also look at cases where entrepreneurs are making use of state or local data, but in scalable fashion.
“This goes one step further than the datapaloozas” championed by U.S. CTO Todd Park to showcase tools developed by the private sector using government data. “We’re trying to show how we can make data sets even more impactful and useful.”
Gurin said the GovLab team hopes to complete the study by the end of this year. The team has already identified 150 companies as candidates. To submit your company for consideration, visit thegovlab.org/submit-your-company; to submit another company, visit thegovlab.org/open500“

A Manifesto for Smart Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Frank Kresin from the Waag Society: “We, citizens of all cities, take the fate of the places we live in into our own hands. We care about the familiar buildings and the parks, the shops, the schools, the roads and the trees, but far more about the quality of the life we live in them. About the casual interactions, uncalled for encounters, the craze and the booze and the love we lost and found. We know that our lives are interconnected, and what we do here will impact the outcomes over there. While we can never predict the eventual effect of our actions, we take full responsibility to make this world a better place.
Therefore, we will refuse to be consumers, client and informants only, and reclaim agency towards the processes, algorithms and systems that shape our world. We need to know how decisions are made, we need to have the information that is at hand; we need to have direct access to the people in power, and be involved in the crafting of laws and procedures that we grapple with everyday.
Fortunately, we are not alone. We are well educated and have appropriated the tools to connect at the touch of a button, organize ourselves, make our voices heard. We have the tools to measure ourselves and our environment, to visualize and analyse the data, to come to conclusions and take action. We have continuous access to the best of learning in the world, to powerful phones and laptops and software, and to home-grown labs that help us make the things that others won’t. Furthermore we were inspired by such diverse examples as the 1% club, Avaaz, Kickstarter, Couchsurfing, Change by Us, and many, many more.
We are ready. But government is not. It was shaped in the 18th century, but increasingly struggles with 21st century problems it cannot solve. It lost touch with its citizens and is less and less equipped to provide the services and security it had pledged to offer. While it tries to build ‘smart cities’ that reinforce or strengthen the status quo – that was responsible for the problems in the first place – it loses sight of the most valuable resource it can tap into: the smart citizen.
Smart Citizens:

  • Will take responsibility for the place they live, work and love in;
  • Value access over ownership, contribution over power;
  • Will ask forgiveness, not permission;
  • Know where they can get the tools, knowledge and support they need;
  • Value empathy, dialogue and trust;
  • Appropriate technology, rather than accept it as is;
  • Will help the people that struggle with smart stuff;
  • Ask questions, then more questions, before they come up with answers;
  • Actively take part in design efforts to come up with better solutions;
  • Work agile, prototype early, test quickly and know when to start over;
  • Will not stop in the face of seemingly huge boundariesbarriers;
  • Unremittingly share their knowledge and their learning, because they know this is where true value comes from.

All over the world, smart citizens take action. We self-organise, form cooperations, share resources and take back full responsibility for the care of our children and elderly. We pop up restaurants, harvest renewable energy, maintain urban gardens, build temporary structures and nurture compassion and trust. We kickstart the products and services we care about, repair and upcycle, or learn how to manufacture things ourselves. We even coined new currencies in response to events that recently shook our comfortable world, but were never solved by the powers that be.
Until now, we have mostly worked next to governments, sometimes against them, but hardly ever with them. As a result, many of the initiatives so far have been one-offs, inspiring but not game changing. We have put lots of energy into small-scale interventions that briefly flared and then returned to business as usual. Just imagine what will happen if our energy, passion and knowledge are teamed up by governments that know how to implement and scale up. Governments that take full responsibility for participating in the open dialogue that is needed to radically rethink the systems that were built decades ago.
One day we will wake up and realise WE ARE OUR GOVERNMENT. Without us, there is nobody there. As it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a people to craft a society. We know it can be done; it was done before. And with the help of new technologies it is easier than ever. So let’s actively set out to build truly smart cities, with smart citizens at their helms, and together become the change that we want to see in this world.”

Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide? Navigating the Evolving Information Environment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IFLA Trend Report: “In the global information environment, time moves quickly and there’s an abundance of commentators trying to keep up. With each new technological development, a new report emerges assessing its impact on different sectors of society. The IFLA Trend Report takes a broader approach and identifies five high level trends shaping the information society, spanning access to education, privacy, civic engagement and transformation. Its findings reflect a year’s consultation with a range of experts and stakeholders from different disciplines to map broader societal changes occurring, or likely to occur in the information environment.
The IFLA Trend Report is more than a single document – it is a selection of resources to help you understand where libraries fit into a changing society.
From Five Key Trends Which Will Change Our Information Environment:
Trend 1:
New Technologies Will Both Expand and Limit Who Has Access to Information…
Trend 2:
Online Education Will Democratise and Disrupt Global Learning…
Trend 3:
The Boundaries of Privacy and Data Protection Will Be Redefined…
Trend 4:
Hyper-Connected Societies Will Listen to and Empower New Voices and Groups…In hyper-connected societies more opportunities for collective action are being realised – enabling the rise of new voices and promoting the growth of single-issue movements at the expense of traditional political parties. Open government initiatives and access to public sector data are leading to more transparency and citizen-focused public services.
Trend 5:
The Global Information Economy Will Be Transformed by New Technologies…”

A Theory of Creepy: Technology, Privacy and Shifting Social Norms

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Omer Tene and Jules Polonetsky in Yale Journal of Law & Technology:  “The rapid evolution of digital technologies has hurled to the forefront of public and legal discourse dense social and ethical dilemmas that we have hardly begun to map and understand. In the near past, general community norms helped guide a clear sense of ethical boundaries with respect to privacy. One does not peek into the window of a house even if it is left open. One does not hire a private detective to investigate a casual date or the social life of a prospective employee. Yet with technological innovation rapidly driving new models for business and inviting new types of personal socialization, we often have nothing more than a fleeting intuition as to what is right or wrong. Our intuition may suggest that it is responsible to investigate the driving record of the nanny who drives our child to school, since such tools are now readily available. But is it also acceptable to seek out the records of other parents in our child’s car pool or of a date who picks us up by car? Alas, intuitions and perceptions of “creepiness” are highly subjective and difficult to generalize as social norms are being strained by new technologies and capabilities. And businesses that seek to create revenue opportunities by leveraging newly available data sources face huge challenges trying to operationalize such subjective notions into coherent business and policy strategies.
This article presents a set of social and legal considerations to help individuals, engineers, businesses and policymakers navigate a world of new technologies and evolving social norms. These considerations revolve around concepts that we have explored in prior work, including enhanced transparency; accessibility to information in usable format; and the elusive principle of context.”

Three Paradoxes of Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Neil M. Richards and Jonathan H. King in the Stanford Law Review Online: “Big data is all the rage. Its proponents tout the use of sophisticated analytics to mine large data sets for insight as the solution to many of our society’s problems. These big data evangelists insist that data-driven decisionmaking can now give us better predictions in areas ranging from college admissions to dating to hiring to medicine to national security and crime prevention. But much of the rhetoric of big data contains no meaningful analysis of its potential perils, only the promise. We don’t deny that big data holds substantial potential for the future, and that large dataset analysis has important uses today. But we would like to sound a cautionary note and pause to consider big data’s potential more critically. In particular, we want to highlight three paradoxes in the current rhetoric about big data to help move us toward a more complete understanding of the big data picture. First, while big data pervasively collects all manner of private information, the operations of big data itself are almost entirely shrouded in legal and commercial secrecy. We call this the Transparency Paradox. Second, though big data evangelists talk in terms of miraculous outcomes, this rhetoric ignores the fact that big data seeks to identify at the expense of individual and collective identity. We call this the Identity Paradox. And third, the rhetoric of big data is characterized by its power to transform society, but big data has power effects of its own, which privilege large government and corporate entities at the expense of ordinary individuals. We call this the Power Paradox. Recognizing the paradoxes of big data, which show its perils alongside its potential, will help us to better understand this revolution. It may also allow us to craft solutions to produce a revolution that will be as good as its evangelists predict.”

OECD's Revised Guidelines on Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD: “Over many decades the OECD has played an important role in promoting respect for privacy as a fundamental value and a condition for the free flow of personal data across borders. The cornerstone of OECD work on privacy is its newly revised Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data (2013).
Another key component of work in this area aims to improve cross-border co-operation among privacy law enforcement authorities.  This work produced an OECD Recommendation on Cross-border Co-operation in the Enforcement of Laws Protecting Privacy in 2007 and inspired the formation of the Global Privacy Enforcement Network, to which the OECD provides support.
Other projects have examined privacy notices and considered privacy in the context of horizontal issues such as radio frequency indentification (RFID), digital identity management, and looked at metrics to inform policy making in these areas. The important role of privacy is also addressed in the OECD Recommendation on Principles for Internet Policy Making (2011) and the Seoul Ministerial Declaration on the Future of the Internet Economy (2008).
Current work is examining privacy-related issues raised by large-scale data use and analytics. It is part of a broader project on the data-driven innovation and growth, which already produced a preliminary report identifying key issues.”

Here’s how the Recovery Act became a test case for open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrea Peterson in the Washington Post: “Making sure that government money is spent efficiently and without fraud can be difficult. You need to collect the right data, get the information to the right people, and deal with the sheer volume of projects that need tracking. Open data make the job easier to draw comparisons across programs and agencies. And when data are released to the public, everyone can help be a government watchdog.
When President Obama was first elected in 2008, he promised transparency. Almost immediately after he was sworn into office, he had an opportunity to test that promise with the implementation of the Recovery Act. And it worked….
Recovery.gov used geospatial technology to “allow Americans to drill down to their zip codes exactly where government money was being spent in their neighborhood.” It’s this micro-level of attention that increased accountability, according to Devaney.
“The degree of transparency forced them to get it right because they didn’t want to be embarrassed by their neighbors who they knew were going to these Web sites and could see what they were doing with the money.”
As to the second question of what data to collect: “I finally put my foot down and said no more than 100 pieces of data,” Devaney recalls, “So naturally, we came up to 99.” Of course, even with limiting themselves to that number of data points, transparency and fraud prevention was a daunting task, with the 300,000 some grantees to keep tabs on.
But having those data points in an open format was what allowed investigators to use “sophisticated cyber-technology and software to review and analyze Recovery-related data and information for any possible concerns or issues.” And they were remarkably successful on that end. A status report in October, 2010 showed “less than 0.2 percent of all reported awards currently have active fraud investigations.” Indeed, for Devaney’s  tenure leading the board he says the level of fraud hovered somewhere below half of one percent of all awards.”

OpenPrism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
thomas levine: “There are loads of open data portals There’s even portal about data portals. And each of these portals has loads of datasets.
OpenPrism is my most recent attempt at understanding what is going on in all of these portals. Read on if you want to see why I made it, or just go to the site and start playing with it.

People don’t know much about open data

Nobody seems to know what is in the data portals. Many people know about datasets that are relevant to their work, municipality, &c., but nobody seems to know about the availability of data on broader topics, and nobody seems to have a good way of finding out what is available.
If someone does know any of this, he probably works for an open data portal. Still, he probably doesn’t know much about what is going on in other portals.

Naive search method

One difficulty in discovering open data is the search paradigm.
Open data portals approach searching data as if data were normal prose; your search terms are some keywords, a category, &c., and your results are dataset titles and descriptions.
There are other approaches. For example, AppGen searches for datasets with the same variables as each other, and the results are automatically generated app prototypes.

Siloed open data portals

Another issue is that people tend to use data from only one portal; they use their local government’s portals or their organizations’ portals.
Let me give you a couple examples of why this should maybe be different. Perhaps I’m considering making an app to help people find parking, and I want to see what parking lot data are available before I put much work into the app. Or maybe I want to find all of the data about sewer overflows so that I can expand my initiative to reduce water pollution.
OpenPrism is one small attempt at making it easier to search. Rather than going to all of the different portals and making a separate search for each portal, you type your search in one search bar, and you get results from a bunch of different Socrata, CKAN and Junar portals.”

(Appropriate) Big Data for Climate Resilience?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Amy Luers at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “The answer to whether big data can help communities build resilience to climate change is yes—there are huge opportunities, but there are also risks.

Opportunities

  • Feedback: Strong negative feedback is core to resilience. A simple example is our body’s response to heat stress—sweating, which is a natural feedback to cool down our body. In social systems, feedbacks are also critical for maintaining functions under stress. For example, communication by affected communities after a hurricane provides feedback for how and where organizations and individuals can provide help. While this kind of feedback used to rely completely on traditional communication channels, now crowdsourcing and data mining projects, such as Ushahidi and Twitter Earthquake detector, enable faster and more-targeted relief.
  • Diversity: Big data is enhancing diversity in a number of ways. Consider public health systems. Health officials are increasingly relying on digital detection methods, such as Google Flu Trends or Flu Near You, to augment and diversify traditional disease surveillance.
  • Self-Organization: A central characteristic of resilient communities is the ability to self-organize. This characteristic must exist within a community (see the National Research Council Resilience Report), not something you can impose on it. However, social media and related data-mining tools (InfoAmazonia, Healthmap) can enhance situational awareness and facilitate collective action by helping people identify others with common interests, communicate with them, and coordinate efforts.

Risks

  • Eroding trust: Trust is well established as a core feature of community resilience. Yet the NSA PRISM escapade made it clear that big data projects are raising privacy concerns and possibly eroding trust. And it is not just an issue in government. For example, Target analyzes shopping patterns and can fairly accurately guess if someone in your family is pregnant (which is awkward if they know your daughter is pregnant before you do). When our trust in government, business, and communities weakens, it can decrease a society’s resilience to climate stress.
  • Mistaking correlation for causation: Data mining seeks meaning in patterns that are completely independent of theory (suggesting to some that theory is dead). This approach can lead to erroneous conclusions when correlation is mistakenly taken for causation. For example, one study demonstrated that data mining techniques could show a strong (however spurious) correlation between the changes in the S&P 500 stock index and butter production in Bangladesh. While interesting, a decision support system based on this correlation would likely prove misleading.
  • Failing to see the big picture: One of the biggest challenges with big data mining for building climate resilience is its overemphasis on the hyper-local and hyper-now. While this hyper-local, hyper-now information may be critical for business decisions, without a broader understanding of the longer-term and more-systemic dynamism of social and biophysical systems, big data provides no ability to understand future trends or anticipate vulnerabilities. We must not let our obsession with the here and now divert us from slower-changing variables such as declining groundwater, loss of biodiversity, and melting ice caps—all of which may silently define our future. A related challenge is the fact that big data mining tends to overlook the most vulnerable populations. We must not let the lure of the big data microscope on the “well-to-do” populations of the world make us blind to the less well of populations within cities and communities that have more limited access to smart phones and the Internet.”

Transparent Predictions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Paper by Tal Zarsky: “Can human behavior be predicted? A broad variety of governmental initiatives are using computerized processes to try. Vast datasets of personal information enhance the ability to engage in these ventures and the appetite to push them forward. Governments have a distinct interest in automated individualized predictions to foresee unlawful actions. Novel technological tools, especially data-mining applications, are making governmental predictions possible. The growing use of predictive practices is generating serious concerns regarding the lack of transparency. Although echoed across the policy, legal, and academic debate, the nature of transparency, in this context, is unclear. Transparency flows from different, even competing, rationales, as well as very different legal and philosophical backgrounds. This Article sets forth a unique and comprehensive conceptual framework for understanding the role transparency must play as a regulatory concept in the crucial and innovative realm of automated predictive modeling.”