Book Review by K. Sabeel Rahman in the Boston Review: White Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making Nicholas Carnes University of Chicago Press, $50 (cloth). The Promise of Participation: Experiments in Participatory Governance in Honduras and Guatemala Daniel Altschuler and Javier Corrales Palgrave Macmillan, $100 (cloth). Making Democracy Fun: How Game Design Can Empower Citizens and Transform Politics Josh Lerner The MIT Press, $27.95 (cloth). “In the years since the financial crisis, the realities of rapid economic recovery for some and stagnant wages for most has made increasingly clear that we live in a... (More >)
5 great apps backed with open data
Jeanne Holm at OpenSource.com: “Data.gov has taken open source to heart. Beyond just providing open data and open source code, the entire process involves open civic engagement. All team ideas, public interactions, and new ideas (from any interaction) are cross-posted and entered in Github. These are tracked openly and completed to milestones for full transparency. We also recently redesigned the website at Data.gov through usability testing and open engagement on Github. Today, I want to share with you just five of the hundreds of applications that have been developed by the public using open government data. These are examples... (More >)
Value Based Prioritisation of Open Government Data Investments
This ePSI platform: “This ePSI platform topic report explores how Governments are increasingly prioritising their investments in Open Government Data on the basis of the value that can be unlocked by opening up government datasets. The report elaborates on a working definition for high value datasets from different dimensions, both from the perspective of the data publisher and data re-user. This working definition has been used to identify and prioritise datasets to be listed on the European Union Open Data Portal, allowing EU institutions to better determine which new datasets should be published with priority, or to identify which... (More >)
Stacking Up the Benefits of Openness
Jeanne Holm at Digital Gov: “Open government, open source, openness. These words are often used in talking about open data, but we sometimes forget that the root of all of this is an open community. Individuals working together to release government data and put it to use to help their neighbors and reach new personal goals. This sense of community in the open data field shows up in many places. I see it when people volunteer at the National Day of Civic Hacking, crowdsource data integrity with MapGive, or mentor with Girls Who Code. And each day I see... (More >)
EU: GLOW (Global Legislative Openness Week)
GLOW is a celebration of open, participatory legislative processes around the world as well as an opportunity for diverse stakeholders to collaborate with one another and make progress toward adopting and implementing open-government commitments. The week is being led by the Legislative Openness Working Group of the Open Government Partnership, which is co-anchored by the National Democratic Institute and the Congress of Chile. The campaign kicks off with the International Day of Democracy on September 15, and throughout the 10 days you are invited to share your ideas and experiences, kickstart new transparency tools and engage members of your... (More >)
18F launches alpha foia.gov in a bid to reboot Freedom of Information Act requests for the 21st century
Alexander Howard at E Pluribus Unum: “18F, the federal government’s new IT development shop, has launched a new look at the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the form of a open source application hosted on Github. Today’s announcement is the most substantive evidence yet that the Obama administration will indeed modernize the Freedom of Information Act, as the United States committed to doing in its second National Action Plan on Open Government. Given how poor some of the “FOIA portals” and underlying software that supports them exists is at all level of government, this is tremendous news for... (More >)
Secrecy in the Sunshine Era – The Promise and Failures of U.S. Open Government Laws
New book by Jason Ross Arnold: “A series of laws passed in the 1970s promised the nation unprecedented transparency in government, a veritable “sunshine era.” Though citizens enjoyed a new arsenal of secrecy-busting tools, officials developed a handy set of workarounds, from overclassification to concealment, shredding, and burning. It is this dark side of the sunshine era that Jason Ross Arnold explores in the first comprehensive, comparative history of presidential resistance to the new legal regime, from Reagan-Bush to the first term of Obama-Biden. After examining what makes a necessary and unnecessary secret, Arnold considers the causes of excessive... (More >)
The city as living labortory: A playground for the innovative development of smart city applications
Paper by Veeckman, Carina and van der Graaf, Shenja: “Nowadays the smart-city concept is shifting from a top-down, mere technological approach towards bottom-up processes that are based on the participation of creative citizens, research organisations and companies. Here, the city acts as an urban innovation ecosystem in which smart applications, open government data and new modes of participation are fostering innovation in the city. However, detailed analyses on how to manage smart city initiatives as well as descriptions of underlying challenges and barriers seem still scarce. Therefore, this paper investigates four, collaborative smart city initiatives in Europe to learn... (More >)
Quantifying the Interoperability of Open Government Datasets
Paper by Pieter Colpaert, Mathias Van Compernolle, Laurens De Vocht, Anastasia Dimou, Miel Vander Sande, Peter Mechant, Ruben Verborgh, and Erik Mannens, to be published in Computer: “Open Governments use the Web as a global dataspace for datasets. It is in the interest of these governments to be interoperable with other governments worldwide, yet there is currently no way to identify relevant datasets to be interoperable with and there is no way to measure the interoperability itself. In this article we discuss the possibility of comparing identifiers used within various datasets as a way to measure semantic interoperability. We... (More >)
The Quiet Revolution: Open Data Is Transforming Citizen-Government Interaction
Maury Blackman at Wired: “The public’s trust in government is at an all-time low. This is not breaking news. But what if I told you that just this past May, President Obama signed into law a bill that passed Congress with unanimous support. A bill that could fundamentally transform the way citizens interact with their government. This legislation could also create an entirely new, trillion-dollar industry right here in the U.S. It could even save lives. On May 9th, the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act) became law. There were very few headlines, no Rose Garden... (More >)
