open data

AskThem

Curated on October 9, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“AskThem is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. AskThem is supported by a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative.
AskThem is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. It’s a not-for-profit tool for a stronger democracy, with open data for informed and engaged communities.
AskThem allows you to:

Find and ask questions to over 142,000 elected officials nationwide: federal, state and city levels of government.
Get signatures for your question or petition, have it delivered over email or Twitter, and push for a public response.
See questions from people near you, sign-on to questions you care about, and review answers from public figures.

It’s like a version of “We The People” for every elected official, from local city council members all the way up to U.S. senators. Enter your email above to be the first to ask a question when we launch and see previews of the site this Fall.
Elected officials: enter your email above and we’ll send you more information about signing up to answer questions on AskThem. It’s a free and non-partisan service to respond to your constituents in an open public forum and update them over email about your work. Or, be a leader in open-government and sign up now.
Issue-based organizations and media: sign up to help promote questions to government from people in your area. We’re working to launch with partnerships that build greater public accountability.
Previously known as the OpenGovernment.org project, AskThem is open-source and uses open government data – our code is available on GitHub – contributions welcome. For more development updates & discussion, join our low-traffic Google Group.
We’re a small non-profit organization actively seeking charitable funding support – help us launch this powerful new tool for public dialogue! Email us for a copy of our non-profit funding prospectus. If you can make a tax-exempt gift to support our work, please donate to PPF via OpenCongress. More background on the project is available on our Knight NewsChallenge proposal from March 2013.
Questions, feedback, ideas? Email David Moore, Executive Director of PPF – david at ppolitics.org, Twitter: @ppolitics; like our page on Facebook & follow @AskThemPPF on Twitter. Stay tuned!”

The Brave New World of Good

Curated on October 8, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brad Smith: “Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic foundations that fund them, today the terrain of good is disputed by social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks. Their tools of choice are markets, open data, innovation, hackathons, and disruption. They cross borders, social classes, and paradigms with the swipe of a touch screen. We seemed poised to unleash a whole new era of social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity.
As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be against it? It is virtually impossible to write an even mildly skeptical blog post about good without sounding well, bad — or at least a bit old-fashioned. For the record, I firmly believe there is much in the brave new world of good that is helping us find our way out of the tired and often failed models of progress and change on which we have for too long relied. Still, there are assumptions worth questioning and questions worth answering to ensure that the good we seek is the good that can be achieved.
…
Open Data
Second only to “good” in terms of marketing genius is the concept of “open data.” An offspring of previous movements such as “open source,” “open content,” and “open access,” open data in the Internet age has come to mean data that is machine-readable, free to access, and free to use, re-use, and re-distribute, subject to attribution. Fully open data goes way beyond posting your .pdf document on a Web site (as neatly explained by Tim Berners Lee’s five-star framework).
When it comes to government, there is a rapidly accelerating movement around the world that is furthering transparency by making vast stores of data open. Ditto on the data of international aid funders like the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The push has now expanded to the tax return data of nonprofits and foundations (IRS Forms 990). Collection of data by government has a business model; it’s called tax dollars. However, open data is not born pure. Cleaning that data, making it searchable, and building and maintaining reliable user interfaces is complex, time-consuming, and often expensive. That requires a consistent stream of income of the kind that can only come from fees, subscriptions, or, increasingly less so, government.
Foundation grants are great for short-term investment, experimentation, or building an app or two, but they are no substitute for a scalable business model. Structured, longitudinal data are vital to social, environmental, and economic progress. In a global economy where government is retreating from the funding of public goods, figuring how to pay for the cost of that data is one of our greatest challenges.”

Global Open Data Initiative moving forward

Curated on October 8, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Global Open Data Initiative will serve as a guiding voice internationally on open data issues. Civil society groups who focus on open data have often been isolated to single national contexts, despite the similar challenges and opportunities repeating themselves in countries across the globe. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help share valuable resources, guidance and judgment, and to clarify the potential for government open data across the world.
Provide a leading vision for how governments approach open data. Open data commitments are among the most popular commitments for countries participating in the Open Government Partnership. The Global Open Data Initiative recommendations and resources will help guide open data initiatives and others as they seek to design and implement strong, effective open data initiatives and policies. Global Open Data Initiative resources will also help civil society actors who will be evaluating government initiatives.
Increase awareness of open data. Global Open Data Initiative will work to advance the understanding of open data issues, challenges, and resources by promoting best practices, engaging in online and offline dialogue, and supporting networking between organizations both new and familiar to the open data arena.
Support the development of the global open data community especially in civil society. Civil society organizations (CSOs) have a key role to play as suppliers, intermediaries, and users of open data, though at present, relatively few organizations are engaging with open data and the opportunities it presents. Most CSOs lack the awareness, skills and support needed to be active users and providers of open data in ways that can help them meet their goals. The Global Open Data Initiative aims to help CSOs, to engage with and use open data whether whatever area they work on – be it climate change, democratic rights, land governance or financial reform.
Our immediate focus is on two activities:

To consult with members of the CSO community around the world about what they think is important in this area
Develop a set of principles in collaboration with the CSO community to guide open government data policies and approaches and to help initiate, strengthen and further elevate conversations between governments and civil society.”

Defining Open Data

Curated on October 4, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog: “Open data is data that can be freely used, shared and built-on by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose. This is the summary of the full Open Definition which the Open Knowledge Foundation created in 2005 to provide both a succinct explanation and a detailed definition of open data.
As the open data movement grows, and even more governments and organisations sign up to open data, it becomes ever more important that there is a clear and agreed definition for what “open data” means if we are to realise the full benefits of openness, and avoid the risks of creating incompatibility between projects and splintering the community.

Open can apply to information from any source and about any topic. Anyone can release their data under an open licence for free use by and benefit to the public. Although we may think mostly about government and public sector bodies releasing public information such as budgets or maps, or researchers sharing their results data and publications, any organisation can open information (corporations, universities, NGOs, startups, charities, community groups and individuals).

Read more about different kinds of data in our one page introduction to open data
There is open information in transport, science, products, education, sustainability, maps, legislation, libraries, economics, culture, development, business, design, finance …. So the explanation of what open means applies to all of these information sources and types. Open may also apply both to data – big data and small data – or to content, like images, text and music!
So here we set out clearly what open means, and why this agreed definition is vital for us to collaborate, share and scale as open data and open content grow and reach new communities.

What is Open?

The full Open Definition provides a precise definition of what open data is. There are 2 important elements to openness:

Legal openness: you must be allowed to get the data legally, to build on it, and to share it. Legal openness is usually provided by applying an appropriate (open) license which allows for free access to and reuse of the data, or by placing data into the public domain.
Technical openness: there should be no technical barriers to using that data. For example, providing data as printouts on paper (or as tables in PDF documents) makes the information extremely difficult to work with. So the Open Definition has various requirements for “technical openness,” such as requiring that data be machine readable and available in bulk.”…

Imagining Data Without Division

Curated on October 4, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Thomas Lin in Quanta Magazine: “As science dives into an ocean of data, the demands of large-scale interdisciplinary collaborations are growing increasingly acute…Seven years ago, when David Schimel was asked to design an ambitious data project called the National Ecological Observatory Network, it was little more than a National Science Foundation grant. There was no formal organization, no employees, no detailed science plan. Emboldened by advances in remote sensing, data storage and computing power, NEON sought answers to the biggest question in ecology: How do global climate change, land use and biodiversity influence natural and managed ecosystems and the biosphere as a whole?…
For projects like NEON, interpreting the data is a complicated business. Early on, the team realized that its data, while mid-size compared with the largest physics and biology projects, would be big in complexity. “NEON’s contribution to big data is not in its volume,” said Steve Berukoff, the project’s assistant director for data products. “It’s in the heterogeneity and spatial and temporal distribution of data.”
Unlike the roughly 20 critical measurements in climate science or the vast but relatively structured data in particle physics, NEON will have more than 500 quantities to keep track of, from temperature, soil and water measurements to insect, bird, mammal and microbial samples to remote sensing and aerial imaging. Much of the data is highly unstructured and difficult to parse — for example, taxonomic names and behavioral observations, which are sometimes subject to debate and revision.
And, as daunting as the looming data crush appears from a technical perspective, some of the greatest challenges are wholly nontechnical. Many researchers say the big science projects and analytical tools of the future can succeed only with the right mix of science, statistics, computer science, pure mathematics and deft leadership. In the big data age of distributed computing — in which enormously complex tasks are divided across a network of computers — the question remains: How should distributed science be conducted across a network of researchers?
Part of the adjustment involves embracing “open science” practices, including open-source platforms and data analysis tools, data sharing and open access to scientific publications, said Chris Mattmann, 32, who helped develop a precursor to Hadoop, a popular open-source data analysis framework that is used by tech giants like Yahoo, Amazon and Apple and that NEON is exploring. Without developing shared tools to analyze big, messy data sets, Mattmann said, each new project or lab will squander precious time and resources reinventing the same tools. Likewise, sharing data and published results will obviate redundant research.
To this end, international representatives from the newly formed Research Data Alliance met this month in Washington to map out their plans for a global open data infrastructure.”

The transition towards transparency

Curated on September 30, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Roland Harwood at the Open Data Institute Blog: “It’s a very exciting time for the field of open data, especially in the UK public sector which is arguably leading the world in this emerging discipline right now, in no small part thanks to the efforts to the Open Data Institute . There is a strong push to release public data and to explore new innovations that can be created as a result.

For instance, the Ordnance Survey have been leading the way with opening up half of their data for others to use, complemented by their GeoVation programme which provides support and incentive for external innovators to develop new products and services.
More recently the Technology Strategy Board have been working with the likes of NERC, Met Office, Environment Agency and other public agencies to help solve business problems using environmental data.…
It goes without saying that data won’t leap up and create any value by itself any more than a pile of discarded parts outside a factory will assemble themselves into a car. We’ve found that the secret of successful open data innovation is to be with people working to solve some specific problem. Simply releasing the data is not enough. See below a summary of our Do’s and Don’ts of opening up data
Do…

Make sure data quality is high (ODI Certificates can help!)
Promote innovation using data sets. Transparency is only a means to an end
Enhance communication with external innovators
Make sure your co-creators are incentivised
Get organised, create a community around an issue
Pass on learnings to other similar organisations
Experiement – open data requires new mindsets and business models
Create safe spaces – Innovation Airlocks – to share and prototype with trusted partners
Be brave – people may do things with the data that you don’t like
Set out to create commercial or social value with data

Dont…

Just release data and expect people to understand or create with it. Publication is not the same as communication
Wait for data requests, put the data out first informally
Avoid challenges to current income streams
Go straight for the finished article, use rapid prototyping
Be put off by the tensions between confidentiality, data protection and publishing
Wait for the big budget or formal process but start big things with small amounts now
Be technology led, be business led instead
Expect the community to entirely self-manage
Restrict open data to the IT literate – create interdisciplinary partnerships
Get caught in the false dichotomy that is commercial vs. social

In summary we believe we need to assume openness as the default (for organisations that is, not individuals) and secrecy as the exception – the exact opposite to how most commercial organisations currently operate. …”

Making All Voices Count

Curated on September 26, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Launch of Making All Voices Count: “Making All Voices Count is a global initiative that supports innovation, scaling-up, and research to deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness….Solvable problems need not remain unsolved. Democratic systems in the 21st century continue to be inhibited by 19th century timescales, with only occasional opportunities for citizens to express their views formally, such as during elections. In this century, many citizens have access to numerous tools that enable them to express their views – and measure government performance – in real time.
For example, online reporting platforms enable citizens to monitor the election process by reporting intimidation, vote buying, bias and misinformation; access to mobile technology allows citizens to update water suppliers on gaps in service delivery; crisis information can be crowdsourced via eyewitness reports of violence, as reported by email and sms.
The rise of mobile communication, the installation of broadband and the fast-growing availability of open data, offer tremendous opportunities for data journalism and new media channels. They can inspire governments to develop new ways to fight corruption and respond to citizens efficiently, effectively and fairly. In short, developments in technology and innovation mean that government and citizens can interact like never before.
Making All Voices Count is about seizing this moment to strengthen our commitments to promote transparency, fight corruption, empower citizens, and harness the power of new technologies to make government more effective and accountable.
The programme specifically aims to address the following barriers that weaken the link between governments and citizens:

Citizens lack incentives: Citizens may not have the necessary incentives to express their feedback on government performance – due to a sense of powerlessness, distrust in the government, fear of retribution, or lack of reliable information
Governments lack incentives: At the same time, governments need incentives to respond to citizen input whenever possible and to leverage citizen participation. The government’s response to citizens should be reinforced by proactive, public communication. This initiative will help create incentives for government to respond. Where government responds effectively, citizens’ confidence in government performance and approval ratings are likely to increase
Governments lack the ability to translate citizen feedback into action: This could be due to anything from political constraints to a lack of skills and systems. Governments need better tools to effectively analyze and translate citizen input into information that will lead to solutions and shape resource allocation. Once captured, citizens’ feedback (on their experiences with government performance) must be communicated so as to engage both the government and the broader public in finding a solution.
Citizens lack meaningful opportunities: Citizens need greater access to better tools and know-how to easily engage with government in a way that results in government action and citizen empowerment”

Open Data 500 gives voice to companies using government data

Curated on September 25, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Fedscoop: “Federal agencies have been working toward a Nov. 1 deadline to unlock their data, as mandated by an executive order issued in May. But what has yet to be examined is how useful those data sets have been to companies and the economic value they have created.
Enter the Open Data 500 – a project that gives companies the opportunity to provide feedback to government about which data sets are most useful and which type of data demand exists.
The initiative is part of a broader effort by the New York University’s Governance Lab’s research of how government can work more effectively with its constituents, said Joel Gurin, GovLab’s senior adviser and director of Open Data 500.
“We hope this will be a research project that illuminates the way government open data sets are being used by the private sector and help people gauge the economic impact and also help to make open data more effective, more useful,” he said.

Companies participating in Open Data 500 submit their responses via a survey to give insight into which data has been easiest to use and which type of data they would like to see made available. The survey also ranks agencies’ data sets on how useful they are.
What the project won’t do is score companies based on their use of federal data, but instead gives them a chance to interact with government and express which data they want.”

Open Data’s Road to Better Transit

Curated on September 22, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Goldsmith in GovTech: “Data is everywhere. It now costs less to capture, store and process data than ever before, thanks to better technology and economies of scale. And more than ever, the public expects government to use data to improve its services. Increasingly, government’s problem is not capturing the data, but having sufficient resources to clean and analyze the information in order to address issues, improve performance and make informed decisions.
In particular, public transit not only produces an immense volume of data, but it also stands to benefit from good analysis in the form of streamlined operations and a better rider experience. More than 200 transit agencies worldwide — from Buffalo to Budapest — are well on their way. They are publishing their schedules, fares and station locations to Google’s TransitDataFeed in a common format and for free. Such information is called open data, which is any data that’s publicly shared.
Open data allows anyone to download and use the information for his or her purposes, particularly software developers who can use it to create mobile and Web-based applications. Google, for example, incorporates the information into its Maps application to help riders plan trips and learn about service updates across bus, rail and bike systems. Other third parties have built successful apps on top of open transit data.
Innovations like these allow transit agencies to leverage external expertise and resources, and have also reduced customer service costs and increased ridership levels. In fact, some members of the American Public Transportation Association believe that open data initiatives have catalyzed more innovation throughout the industry than any other factor in the last three decades….
In Philadelphia, the City Planning Commission is using text message surveying to capture the opinions of transit riders across the demographic spectrum to determine the usefulness of a proposed rapid transit line into downtown. Philadelphia uses the transit information to inform its comprehensive city plan, but this digital citizen survey mechanism, created by a company called Textizen, is a platform that can be used by any government that wants to solicit feedback or begin a dialog with its citizens.
In 2012, Dubuque, Iowa, collaborated with IBM to run a Smarter Travel pilot study. The pilot used a mobile app and RFIDs to collect anonymous travel data from volunteer transit riders. The city has already used the data to open a new late-night bus line for third-shift workers and college students, and by next year will incorporate data into more route planning decisions.”