U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker Announces Expansion and Enhancement of Commerce Data Programs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release from the U.S. Secretary of Commerce:Department will hire first-ever Chief Data Officer

As “America’s Data Agency,” the Department of Commerce is prepared and well-positioned to foster the next phase in the open data revolution. In line with President Obama’s Year of Action, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker today announced a series of steps taken to enhance and expand the data programs at the Department.
“Data is a key pillar of the Department’s “Open for Business Agenda,” and for the first time, we have made it a department-wide strategic priority,” said Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker. “No other department can rival the reach, depth and breadth of the Department of Commerce’s data programs. The Department of Commerce is working to unleash more of its data to strengthen the nation’s economic growth; make its data easier to access, understand, and use; and maximize the return of data investments for businesses, entrepreneurs, government, taxpayers, and communities.”
Secretary Pritzker made a number of major announcements today as a special guest speaker at the Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (Esri) User Conference in San Diego, California. She discussed the power and potential of open data, recognizing that data not only enable start-ups and entrepreneurs, move markets, and empower companies large and small, but also touch the lives of Americans every day.
In her remarks, Secretary Pritzker outlined new ways the Department of Commerce is working to unlock the potential of even more open data to make government smarter, including the following:
Chief Data Officer
Today, Secretary Pritzker announced the Commerce Department will hire its first-ever Chief Data Officer. This leader will be responsible for developing and implementing a vision for the future of the diverse data resources at Commerce.
The new Chief Data Officer will pull together a platform for all data sets; instigate and oversee improvements in data collection and dissemination; and ensure that data programs are coordinated, comprehensive, and strategic.
The Chief Data Officer will hold the key to unlocking more government data to help support a data-enabled Department and economy.
Trade Developer Portal
The International Trade Administration has launched its “Developer Portal,” an online toolkit to put diverse sets of trade and investment data in a single place, making it easier for the business community to use and better tap into the 95 percent of American customers that live overseas.
In creating this portal, the Commerce Department is making its data public to software developers, giving them access to authoritative information on U.S. exports and international trade to help U.S. businesses export and expand their operations in overseas markets. The developer community will be able to integrate the data into applications and mashups to help U.S. business owners compete abroad while also creating more jobs here at home.
Data Advisory Council
Open data requires open dialogue. To facilitate this, the Commerce Department is creating a data advisory council, comprised of 15 private sector leaders that will advise the Department on the best use of government data.
This new advisory council will help Commerce maximize the value of its data by:

  • discovering how to deliver data in more usable, timely, and accessible ways;
  • improving how data is utilized and shared to make businesses and governments more responsive, cost-effective, and efficient;
  • better anticipating customers’ needs; and
  • collaborating with the private sector to develop new data products and services.

The council’s primary focus will be on the accessibility and usability of Commerce data, as well as the transformation of the Department’s supporting infrastructure and procedures for managing data.
These data leaders will represent a broad range of business interests—reflecting the wide range of scientific, statistical, and other data that the Department of Commerce produces. Members will serve two-year terms and will meet about four times a year. The advisory council will be housed within the Economics and Statistics Administration.”
Commerce data inform decisions that help make government smarter, keep businesses more competitive and better inform citizens about their own communities – with the potential to guide up to $3.3 trillion in investments in the United States each year.

The open data imperative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Geoffrey Boulton in Insights: the UKSG journal: “The information revolution of recent decades is a world historical event that is changing the lives of individuals, societies and economies and with major implications for science, research and learning. It offers profound opportunities to explore phenomena that were hitherto beyond our power to resolve, and at the same time is undermining the process whereby concurrent publication of scientific concept and evidence (data) permitted scrutiny, replication and refutation and that has been the bedrock of scientific progress and of ‘self-correction’ since the inception of the first scientific journals in the 17th century. Open publication, release and sharing of data are vital habits that need to be redefined and redeveloped for the modern age by the research community if it is to exploit technological opportunities, maintain self-correction and maximize the contribution of research to human understanding and welfare.”

GitHub: A Swiss Army knife for open government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

FCW: “Today, more than 300 government agencies are using the platform for public and private development. Cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco), states (New York, Washington, Utah) and countries (United Kingdom, Australia) are sharing code and paving a new road to civic collaboration….

In addition to a rapidly growing code collection, the General Services Administration’s new IT development shop has created a “/Developer program” to “provide comprehensive support for any federal agency engaged in the production or use of APIs.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has built a full-blown website on GitHub to showcase the software and design work its employees are doing.
Most of the White House’s repos relate to Drupal-driven websites, but the Obama administration has also shared its iOS and Android apps, which together have been forked nearly 400 times.

Civic-focused organizations — such as the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation — are also actively involved with original projects on GitHub. Those projects include the OpenGov Foundation’s Madison document-editing tool touted by the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN, which powers hundreds of government data platforms around the world.
According to GovCode, an aggregator of public government open-source projects hosted on GitHub, there have been hundreds of individual contributors and nearly 90,000 code commits, which involve making a set of tentative changes permanent.
The nitty-gritty
Getting started on GitHub is similar to the process for other social networking platforms. Users create individual accounts and can set up “organizations” for agencies or cities. They can then create repositories (or repos) to collaborate on projects through an individual or organizational account. Other developers or organizations can download repo code for reuse or repurpose it in their own repositories (called forking), and make it available to others to do the same.
Collaborative aspects of GitHub include pull requests that allow developers to submit and accept updates to repos that build on and grow an open-source project. There are wikis, gists (code snippet sharing) and issue tracking for bugs, feature requests, or general questions and answers.
GitHub provides free code hosting for all public repos. Upgrade offerings include personal and organizational plans based on the number of private repos. For organizations that want a self-hosted GitHub development environment, GitHub Enterprise, used by the likes of CFPB, allows for self-hosted, private repos behind a firewall.
GitHub’s core user interface can be unwelcoming or even intimidating to the nondeveloper, but GitHub’s Pages package offers Web-hosting features that include domain mapping and lightweight content management tools such as static site generator Jekyll and text editor Atom.
Notable government projects that use Pages are the White House’s Project Open Data, 18F’s /Developer Program, CFPB’s Open Tech website and New York’s Open Data Handbook. Indeed, Wired recently commented that the White House’s open-data GitHub efforts “could help fix government.”…
See also: GitHub for Government (GovLab)

Meet the UK start-ups changing the world with open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sophie Curtis in The Telegraph: “Data is more accessible today than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. From corporate databases to social media and embedded sensors, data is exploding, with total worldwide volume expected to reach 6.6 zettabytes by 2020.
Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. For example, the Department for Education publishes open data about the performance of schools in England, so that companies can create league tables and citizens can find the best-performing schools in their catchment area.
Governments worldwide are working to open up more of their data. Since January 2010, more than 18,500 UK government data sets have been released via the data.gov.uk web portal, creating new opportunities for organisations to build innovative digital services.
Businesses are also starting to realise the value of making their non-personal data freely available, with open innovation leading to the creation products and services that they can benefit from….

Now a range of UK start-ups are working with the ODI to build businesses using open data, and have already unlocked a total of £2.5 million worth of investments and contracts.
Mastodon C joined the ODI start-up programme at its inception in December 2012. Shortly after joining, the company teamed up with Ben Goldacre and Open Healthcare UK, and embarked on a project investigating the use of branded statins over the far cheaper generic versions.
The data analysis identified potential efficiency savings to the NHS of £200 million. The company is now also working with the Technology Strategy Board and Nesta to help them gain better insight into their data.
Another start-up, CarbonCulture is a community platform designed to help people use resources more efficiently. The company uses high-tech metering to monitor carbon use in the workplace and help clients save money.
Organisations such as 10 Downing Street, Tate, Cardiff Council, the GLA and the UK Parliament are using the company’s digital tools to monitor and improve their energy consumption. CarbonCulture has also helped the Department of Energy and Climate Change reduce its gas use by 10 per cent.
Spend Network’s business is built on collecting the spend statements and tender documents published by government in the UK and Europe and then publishing this data openly so that anyone can use it. The company currently hosts over £1.2 trillion of transactions from the UK and over 1.8 million tenders from across Europe.
One of the company’s major breakthroughs was creating the first national, open spend analysis for central and local government. This was used to uncover a 45 per cent delay in the UK’s tendering process, holding up £22 billion of government funds to the economy.
Meanwhile, TransportAPI uses open data feeds from Traveline, Network Rail and Transport for London to provide nationwide timetables, departure and infrastructure information across all modes of public transport.
TransportAPI currently has 700 developers and organisations signed up to its platform, including individual taxpayers and public sector organisations like universities and local authorities. Travel portals, hyperlocal sites and business analytics are also integrating features, such as the ‘nearest transport’ widget, into their websites.
These are just four examples of how start-ups are using open data to create new digital services. The ODI this week announced seven new open data start-ups joining the programme, covering 3D printed learning materials, helping disabled communities, renewable energy markets, and smart cities….”

Liberating Data to Transform Health Care

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Erika G. Martin,  Natalie Helbig, and  Nirav R. Shah on New York’s Open Data Experience in JAMA: “The health community relies on governmental survey, surveillance, and administrative data to track epidemiologic trends, identify risk factors, and study the health care delivery system. Since 2009, a quiet “open data” revolution has occurred. Catalyzed by President Obama’s open government directive, federal, state, and local governments are releasing deidentified data meeting 4 “open” criteria: public accessibility, availability in multiple formats, free of charge, and unlimited use and distribution rights.1 As of February 2014, HealthData.gov, the federal health data repository, has more than 1000 data sets, and Health Data NY, New York’s health data site, has 48 data sets with supporting charts and maps. Data range from health interview surveys to administrative transactions. The implicit logic is that making governmental data readily available will improve government transparency; increase opportunities for research, mobile health application development, and data-driven quality improvement; and make health-related information more accessible. Together, these activities have the potential to improve health care quality, reduce costs, facilitate population health planning and monitoring, and empower health care consumers to make better choices and live healthier lives.”

Mass Big Data Report

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Mass Tech: “The 2014 Mass Big Data Report: A Foundation for Global Leadership has been assembled and released with support from the Innovation Institute at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership.  This report represents a foundational analysis of the regional Mass Big Data ecosystem and its position as a global leader in the expanding fields of big data, open data, and analytics.
As a special project of the Governor’s Mass Big Data Initiative, this report seeks to provide an initial baseline understanding of the landscape of the Mass Big Data ecosystem and its challenges, opportunities, and strong potential for growth.
Through this work, we are pleased to report that the Mass Big Data ecosystem represents an extraordinarily fertile region for growth in data-driven enterprise and offers a unique combination of advantages on which to build the future of our data-rich world.
With strengths across the spectrum of big data industry sectors and in key supporting areas such as talent development, research, and innovation, our region is producing the people, businesses, and products that fuel the explosive growth in this expanding field.
To download the report, click on the image below:

Open Governments, Open Data: A New Lever for Transparency, Citizen Engagement, and Economic Growth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to principles that include releasing government data as open data—that is, free public data in forms that can be readily used. Hundreds of businesses are using open data to create jobs and build economic value. Up to now, however, most of this activity has taken place in developed countries, with the United States and United Kingdom in the lead. The use of open data faces more obstacles in developing countries, but has growing promise there, as well.”

The Impact of Open: Keeping you healthy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

of Sunlight: “In healthcare, the goal-set shared widely throughout the field is known as “the Triple Aim”: improving individual experience of care, improving population health, and reducing the cost of care. Across the wide array of initiatives undertaken by health care data users, the great majority seem to fall within the scope of at least one aspect of the Triple Aim. Below is a set of examples that reveal how data — both open and not — is being used to achieve its elements.

The use of open data to reduce costs:

The use of open data to improve quality of care:

  • Using open data on a substantial series of individual hospital quality measures, CMS created a hospital comparison tool that allows consumers to compare average quality of care outcomes across their local hospitals.

  • Non-profit organizations survey hospitals and have used this data to provide another national measure of hospital quality that consumers can use to select a high-quality hospital.

  • In New York state, widely-shared data on cardiac surgery outcomes associated with individual providers has led to improved outcomes and better understanding of successful techniques.

  • In the UK, the National Health Service is actively working towards defining concrete metrics to evaluate how the system as a whole is moving towards improved quality. …

  • The broad cultural shift towards data-sharing in healthcare appears to have facilitated additional secured sharing in order to achieve the joint goal of improving healthcare quality and effectiveness. The current effort to securely network of millions of patient data records through the federal PCORI system has the potential to advance understanding of disease treatment at an unprecedented pace.

  • Through third-party tools, people are able to use the products of aggregated patient data in order to begin diagnosing their own symptoms more accurately, giving them a head start in understanding how to optimize their visit to a provider.

The use of open data to improve population health:

  • Out of the three elements of the triple aim, population health may have the longest and deepest relationship with open data. Public datasets like those collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the US Census have for decades been used to monitor disease prevalence, verify access to health insurance, and track mortality and morbidity statistics.

  • Population health improvement has been a major focus for newer developments as well. Health data has been a regular feature in tech efforts to improve the ways that governments — including local health departments — reach their constituencies. The use of data in new communication tools improves population health by increasing population awareness of local health trends and disease prevention opportunities. Two examples of this work in action include the Chicago Health Atlas, which combines health data and healthcare consumer problem-solving, and Philadelphia’s map interface to city data about available flu vaccines.

One final observation for open data advocates to take from health data concerns the way that the sector encourages the two-way information flow: it embraces the notion that data users can also be data producers. Open data ecosystems are properly characterized by multi-directional relationships among governmental and non-governmental actors, with opportunities for feedback, correction and augmentation of open datasets. That this happens at the scale of health data is important and meaningful for open data advocates who can face push-back when they ask their governments to ingest externally-generated data….”

15 Ways to bring Civic Innovation to your City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chris Moore at AcuitasGov: “In my previous blog post I wrote about a desire to see our Governments transform to be part of the  21st century.  I saw a recent reference to how governments across Canada have lost their global leadership, how government in Canada at all levels is providing analog services to a digital society.  I couldn’t agree more.  I have been thinking lately about some practical ways that Mayors and City Managers could innovate in their communities.  I realize that there are a number of municipal elections happening this fall across Canada, a time when leadership changes and new ideas emerge.  So this blog is also for Mayoral candidates who have a sense that technology and innovation have a role to play in their city and in their administration.
I thought I would identify 15 initiatives that cities could pursue as part of their Civic Innovation Strategy.   For the last 50 years technology in local government in Canada has been viewed as an expense, as a necessary evil, not always understood by elected officials and senior administrators.  Information and Technology is part of every aspect of a city, it is critical in delivering services.  It is time to not just think of this as an expense but as an investment, as a way to innovate, reduce costs, enhance citizen service delivery and transform government operations.
Here are my top 15 ways to bring Civic Innovation to your city:
1. Build 21st Century Digital Infrastructure like the Chattanooga Gig City Project.
2. Build WiFi networks like the City of Edmonton on your own and in partnership with others.
3. Provide technology and internet to children and youth in need like the City of Toronto.
4. Connect to a national Education and Research network like Cybera in Alberta and CANARIE.
5. Create a Mayors Task-force on Innovation and Technology leveraging your city’s resources.
6. Run a hackathon or two or three like the City of Glasgow or maybe host a hacking health event like the City of Vancouver.
7. Launch a Startup incubator like Startup Edmonton or take it to the next level and create a civic lab like the City of Barcelona.
8. Develop an Open Government Strategy, I like to the Open City Strategy from Edmonton.
9. If Open Government is too much then just start with Open Data, Edmonton has one of the best.
10. Build a Citizen Dashboard to showcase your cities services and commitment to the public.
11. Put your Crime data online like the Edmonton Police Service.
12. Consider a pilot project with sensor technology for parking like the City of Nice or for  waste management like the City of Barcelona.
13. Embrace Car2Go, Modo and UBER as ways to move people in your city.
14. Consider turning your IT department into the Innovation and Technology Department like they did at the City of Chicago.
15. Partner with other near by local governments to create a shared Innovation and Technology agency.
Now more than ever before cities need to find ways to innovate, to transform and to create a foundation that is sustainable.  Now is the time for both courage and innovations in government.  What is your city doing to move into the 21st Century?”

Opening Public Transportation Data in Germany

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Kaufmann, Stefan: “Open data has been recognized as a valuable resource, and public institutions have taken to publishing their data under open licenses, also in Germany. However, German public transit agencies are still reluctant to publish their schedules as open data. Also, two widely used data exchange formats used in German transit planning are proprietary, with no documentation publicly available. Through this work, one of the proprietary formats was reverse-engineered, and a transformation process into the open GTFS schedule format was developed. This process allowed a partnering transit operator to publish their schedule as open data. Also, through a survey taken with German transit authorities and operators, the prevalence of transit data exchange formats, and reservations concerning open transit data were evaluated. The survey brought a series of issues to light which serve as obstacles for opening up transit data. Addressing the issues found through this work, and partnering with open-minded transit authorities to further develop transit data publishing processes can serve as a foundation for wider adoption of publishing open transit data in Germany”