New Paper by Djoko Sigit Sayogo and Theresa Pardo: “Open data policies are expected to promote innovations that stimulate social, political and economic change. In pursuit of innovation potential, open datahas expanded to wider environment involving government, business and citizens. The US government recently launched such collaboration through a smart data policy supporting energy efficiency called Green Button. This paper explores the implementation of Green Button and identifies motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy. Analyzing qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with experts involved in Green Button initiation and implementation, this paper presents some key findings. The success of Green Button can be attributed to the interaction between internal and external factors. The external factors consist of both market and non-market drivers: economic factors, technology related factors, regulatory contexts and policy incentives, and some factors that stimulate imitative behavior among the adopters. The external factors create the necessary institutional environment for the Green Button implementation. On the other hand, the acceptance and adoption of Green Button itself is influenced by the fit of Green Button capability to the strategic mission of energy and utility companies in providing energy efficiency programs. We also identify the different roles of government during the different stages of Green Button implementation.”
[Recipient of Best Management/Policy Paper Award, dgo2013]
Next.Data.gov
Nick Sinai at the White House Blog: “Today, we’re excited to share a sneak preview of a new design for Data.gov, called Next.Data.gov. The upgrade builds on the President’s May 2013 Open Data Executive Order that aims to fuse open-data practices into the Federal Government’s DNA. Next.Data.gov is far from complete (think of it as a very early beta), but we couldn’t wait to share our design approach and the technical details behind it – knowing that we need your help to make it even better. Here are some key features of the new design:
Leading with Data: The Data.gov team at General Services Administration (GSA), a handful of Presidential Innovation Fellows, and OSTP staff designed Next.Data.Gov to put data first. The team studied the usage patterns on Data.gov and found that visitors were hungry for examples of how data are used. The team also noticed many sources, such as tweets and articles outside of Data.gov featuring Federal datasets in action. So Next.Data.gov includes a rich stream that enables each data community to communicate how its datasets are impacting companies and the public.
In this dynamic stream, you’ll find blog posts, tweets, quotes, and other features that more fully showcase the wide range of information assets that exist within the vaults of government.
Powerful Search: The backend of Next.Data.gov is CKAN and is powered by Solr—a powerful search engine that will make it even easier to find relevant datasets online. Suggested search terms have been added to help users find (and type) things faster. Next.Data.gov will start to index datasets from agencies that publish their catalogs publicly, in line with the President’s Open Data Executive Order. The early preview launching today features datasets from the Department of Health and Human Services—one of the first Federal agencies to publish a machine-readable version of its data catalog.
Rotating Data Visualizations: Building on the theme of leading with data, even the masthead-design for Next.Data.gov is an open-data-powered visualization—for now, it’s a cool U.S. Geological Survey earthquake plot showing the magnitude of earthquake measurements collected over the past week, around the globe.
This particular visualization was built using D3.js. The visualization will be updated periodically to spotlight different ways open data is used and illustrated….
We encourage you to collaborate in the design process by creating pull requests or providing feedback via Quora or Twitter.”
Open Data Tools: Turning Data into ‘Actionable Intelligence’
Shannon Bohle in SciLogs: “My previous two articles were on open access and open data. They conveyed major changes that are underway around the globe in the methods by which scientific and medical research findings and data sets are circulated among researchers and disseminated to the public. I showed how E-science and ‘big data’ fit into the philosophy of science though a paradigm shift as a trilogy of approaches: deductive, empirical, and computational, which was pointed out, provides a logical extenuation of Robert Boyle’s tradition of scientific inquiry involving “skepticism, transparency, and reproducibility for independent verification” to the computational age…
This third article on open access and open data evaluates new and suggested tools when it comes to making the most of the open access and open data OSTP mandates. According to an article published in The Harvard Business Review’s “HBR Blog Network,” this is because, as its title suggests, “open data has little value if people can’t use it.” Indeed, “the goal is for this data to become actionable intelligence: a launchpad for investigation, analysis, triangulation, and improved decision making at all levels.” Librarians and archivists have key roles to play in not only storing data, but packaging it for proper accessibility and use, including adding descriptive metadata and linking to existing tools or designing new ones for their users. Later, in a comment following the article, the author, Craig Hammer, remarks on the importance of archivists and international standards, “Certified archivists have always been important, but their skillset is crucially in demand now, as more and more data are becoming available. Accessibility—in the knowledge management sense—must be on par with digestibility / ‘data literacy’ as priorities for continuing open data ecosystem development. The good news is that several governments and multilaterals (in consultation with data scientists and – yep! – certified archivists) are having continuing ‘shared metadata’ conversations, toward the possible development of harmonized data standards…If these folks get this right, there’s a real shot of (eventual proliferation of) interoperability (i.e. a data platform from Country A can ‘talk to’ a data platform from Country B), which is the only way any of this will make sense at the macro level.”
Power of open data reveals global corporate networks
Open Data Institute: “The ODI today welcomed the move by OpenCorporates to release open data visualisations which show the global corporate networks of millions of businesses and the power of open data.
See the Maps
OpenCorporates, a company based at the ODI, has produced visuals using several sources, which it has published as open data for the first time:
- Filings made by large domestic and foreign companies to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Banking data held by the National Information Center of the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.
- Information about individual shareholders published by the official New Zealand corporate registry
Launched today, the visualisations are available through the main OpenCorporates website.”
Open Government is an Open Conversation
Lisa Ellman and Hollie Russon Gilman at the White House Blog: “President Obama launched the first U.S. Open Government National Action Plan in September 2011, as part of the Nation’s commitment to the principles of the global Open Government Partnership. The Plan laid out twenty-six concrete steps the United States would take to promote public participation in government, increase transparency in government, and manage public resources more effectively.
A year and a half later, we have fulfilled twenty-four of the Plan’s prescribed commitments—including launching the online We the People petition platform, which has been used by more than 9.6 million people, and unleashing thousands of government data resources as part of the Administration’s Open Data Initiatives.
We are proud of this progress, but recognize that there is always more work to be done to build a more efficient, effective, and transparent government. In that spirit, as part of our ongoing commitment to the international Open Government Partnership, the Obama Administration has committed to develop a second National Action Plan on Open Government.
To accomplish this task effectively, we’ll need all-hands-on-deck. That’s why we plan to solicit and incorporate your input as we develop the National Action Plan “2.0.”…
Over the next few months, we will continue to gather your thoughts. We will leverage online platforms such as Quora, Google+, and Twitter to communicate with the public and collect feedback. We will meet with members of open government civil society organizations and other experts, to ensure all voices are brought to the table. We will solicit input from Federal agencies on lessons learned from their unique experiences, and gather information about successful initiatives that could potentially be scaled across government. And finally, we will canvass the international community for their diverse insights and innovative ideas.”
City Data: Big, Open and Linked
Working Paper by Mark S. Fox (University of Toronto): “Cities are moving towards policymaking based on data. They are publishing data using Open Data standards, linking data from disparate sources, allowing the crowd to update their data with Smart Phone Apps that use Open APIs, and applying “Big Data” Techniques to discover relationships that lead to greater efficiencies.
One Big City Data example is from New York City (Schönberger & Cukier, 2013). Building owners were illegally converting their buildings into rooming houses that contained 10 times the number people they were designed for. These buildings posed a number of problems, including fire hazards, drugs, crime, disease and pest infestations. There are over 900,000 properties in New York City and only 200 inspectors who received over 25,000 illegal conversion complaints per year. The challenge was to distinguish nuisance complaints from those worth investigating where current methods were resulting in only 13% of the inspections resulting in vacate orders.
New York’s Analytics team created a dataset that combined data from 19 agencies including buildings, preservation, police, fire, tax, and building permits. By combining data analysis with expertise gleaned from inspectors (e.g., buildings that recently received a building permit were less likely to be a problem as they were being well maintained), the team was able to develop a rating system for complaints. Based on their analysis of this data, they were able to rate complaints such that in 70% of their visits, inspectors issued vacate orders; a fivefold increase in efficiency…
This paper provides an introduction to the concepts that underlie Big City Data. It explains the concepts of Open, Unified, Linked and Grounded data that lie at the heart of the Semantic Web. It then builds on this by discussing Data Analytics, which includes Statistics, Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning. Finally we discuss Big Data as the extension of Data Analytics to the Cloud where massive amounts of computing power and storage are available for processing large data sets. We use city data to illustrate each.”
Open Data Directory – Use Cases and Requirements
Word Wide Web Foundation: “Today, we’re pleased to be publishing a report entitled “Open Data Directory: Use Cases and Requirements”. The full report can be downloaded here.
As we noted in April when we released a draft for comment, quality rich information and content references are a need when you are dealing with innovative environments such as Open Data, where sharing and reusing are necessary routines in order to advance, and to give Open Data initiatives the visibility and recognition they need.
Although only a few years ago it was nearly impossible to find information and examples of Open Government Data initiatives and their components, there are currently a growing and varied number of Open Data resources all over the Web.
Given the increasing number of Open Data-related activities all around the world, and the social, economic or cultural diversity within the different countries, no single person or organization could grasp the whole scope of such a huge amount of information.
Any Government or organization interested in Open Data would greatly benefit from the existing and growing knowledge base and resources, so this scenario represents an invaluable opportunity to construct a neutral and trustable central directory that can help us to structure references, share best practices, and, generally speaking, mobilize the global Open Data community around it….”
How Open Data Can Fight Climate Change
New blog post by Joel Gurin, Founder and Editor, OpenDataNow.com: When people point to the value of Open Data from government, they often cite the importance of weather data from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That data has given us the Weather Channel, more accurate forecasts, and a number of weather-based companies. But the most impressive – and one of the best advertisements for government Open Data – may well be The Climate Corporation, headquartered in San Francisco.
Founded in 2006 under the name WeatherBill, The Climate Corporation was started to sell a better kind of weather insurance. But it’s grown into a company that could help farmers around the world plan around climate change, increase their crop yields, and become part of a new green revolution.
The company’s work is especially relevant in light of President Obama’s speech yesterday on new plans to fight climate change. We know that whatever we do to reduce carbon emissions now, we’ll still need to deal with changes that are already irreversible. The Climate Corporation’s work can be part of that solution…
The company has developed a new service, Climate.com, that is free to policyholders and available to others for a fee….
Their work may become part of a global Green Revolution 2.0. The U.S. Government’s satellite data doesn’t stop at the border: It covers the entire planet. The Climate Corporation is now looking for ways to apply its work internationally, probably starting with Australia, which has relevant data of its own.
Start with insurance sales, end up by changing the world. The power of Open Data has never been clearer.”
Canada's Action Plan on Open Government
Introduction: “Canada’s commitment to open government is part of the federal government’s efforts to foster greater openness and accountability, to provide Canadians with more opportunities to learn about and participate in government, to drive innovation and economic opportunities for all Canadians and, at the same time, create a more cost effective, efficient and responsive government.
The Government of Canada first launched its Open Government strategy in March 2011, and then further enhanced its commitment by announcing its intention to join the Open Government Partnership in September 2011.
Over the past two years, we have consulted Canadians on both the development of a Digital Economy Strategy and on Open Government. Our Digital Economy consultation sought feedback from all Canadians on how to improve innovation and creativity, and achieve the shared goal of making Canada a global leader in the digital economy. More recently, in the fall of 2011, we launched a consultation to explore Canadians’ perspectives on Open Government in order to inform the development of Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government.
The results of these consultations stressed the importance of providing open access to public sector information and data and, in particular, the need to improve the availability of data to researchers and the private sector with fewer restrictions on reuse of these information assets. Canadians also want the opportunity to engage in an ongoing dialogue with government on policies and priorities. Cumulatively, the valuable information and insight received from Canadians have helped us shape the direction for open government in Canada. As we move forward, we will continue to consult with Canadians and Canada’s active open government community on how best to implement this plan.
Our Action Plan on Open Government sets out our commitments to Canadians and for the Open Government Partnership, which we will achieve over a three-year period through the effective and prudent use of resources. It is structured along the three streams of our Open Government Strategy: Open Information, Open Data, and Open Dialogue.”
G8 Open Data Charter: "Open Data by Default" will "fuel innovation"
G8 Open Data Charter, June 2013: “Principle 1: Open Data by Default
13. We recognise that free access to, and subsequent re-use of, open data are of significant value to society and the economy.
14. We agree to orient our governments towards open data by default.
15. We recognise that the term government data is meant in the widest sense possible. This could apply to data owned by national, federal, local, or international government bodies, or by the wider public sector.
16. We recognise that there is national and international legislation, in particular pertaining to intellectual property, personally-identifiable and sensitive information, which must be observed.
17. We will: establish an expectation that all government data be published openly by default , as outlined in this Charter, while recognising that there are legitimate reasons why some data cannot be released….
Principle 4: Releasing Data for Improved Governance
25. We recognise that the release of open data strengthens our democratic institutions and encourages better policy-making to meets the needs of our citizens. This is true not only in our own countries but across the world.
26. We also recognise that interest in open data is growing in other multilateral organisations and initiatives.
27. We will: share technical expertise and experience with each other and with other countries across the world so that everyone can reap the benefits of open data; and be transparent about our own data collection, standards, and publishing processes , by documenting all of these related processes online.
Principle 5: Releasing Data for Innovation
28. Recognising the importance of diversity in stimulating creativity and innovation, we agree that the more people and or ganisations that use our data, the greater the social and economic benefits that will be generated. This is true for both commercial and non-commercial uses .
29. We will: work to increase open data literacy and encourage people, such as developers of applications and civil society organisations that work in the field of open data promotion, to unlock the value of open data ; empower a future generation of data innovators by providing data in machine-readable formats.”
See also:
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, Chairman and Co-Founder, Open Data Institute on G8 Open Data Charter: why it matters
Nick Sinai and Marina Martin from the White House on Open Data Going Global