Open Data Is Open for Business

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey Stinson at Stateline: ” Last month, web designer Sean Wittmeyer and colleague Wojciech Magda walked away with a $25,000 prize from the state of Colorado for designing an online tool to help businesses decide where to locate in the state.
The tool, called “Beagle Score,” is a widget that can be embedded in online commercial real estate listings. It can rate a location by taxes and incentives, zoning, even the location of possible competitors – all derived from about 30 data sets posted publicly by the state of Colorado and its municipalities.
The creation of Beagle Score is an example of how states, cities, counties and the federal government are encouraging entrepreneurs to take raw government data posted on “open data” websites and turn the information into products the public will buy.
“The (Colorado contest) opened up a reason to use the data,” said Wittmeyer, 25, of Fort Collins. “It shows how ‘open data’ can solve a lot of challenges. … And absolutely, we can make it commercially viable. We can expand it to other states, and fairly quickly.”
Open-data advocates, such as President Barack Obama’s former information chief Vivek Kundra, estimate a multibillion-dollar industry can be spawned by taking raw government data files on sectors such as weather, population, energy, housing, commerce or transportation and turn them into products for the public to consume or other industries to pay for.
They can be as simple as mobile phone apps identifying every stop sign you will encounter on a trip to a different town, or as intricate as taking weather and crops data and turning it into insurance policies farmers can buy.

States, Cities Sponsor ‘Hackathons’

At least 39 states and 46 cities and counties have created open-data sites since the federal government, Utah, California and the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., began opening data in 2009, according to the federal site, Data.gov.
Jeanne Holm, the federal government’s Data.gov “evangelist,” said new sites are popping up and new data are being posted almost daily. The city of Los Angeles, for example, opened a portal last week.
In March, Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that in the year since it was launched, his state’s site has grown to some 400 data sets with 50 million records from 45 agencies. Available are everything from horse injuries and deaths at state race tracks to maps of regulated child care centers. The most popular data: top fishing spots in the state.
State and local governments are sponsoring “hackathons,” “data paloozas,” and challenges like Colorado’s, inviting businesspeople, software developers, entrepreneurs or anyone with a laptop and a penchant for manipulating data to take part. Lexington, Kentucky, had a civic hackathon last weekend. The U.S. Transportation Department and members of the Geospatial Transportation Mapping Association had a three-day data palooza that ended Wednesday in Arlington, Virginia.
The goals of the events vary. Some, like Arlington’s transportation event, solicit ideas for how government can present its data more effectively. Others seek ideas for mining it.
Aldona Valicenti, Lexington’s chief information officer, said many cities want advice on how to use the data to make government more responsive to citizens, and to communicate with them on issues ranging from garbage pickups and snow removal to upcoming civic events.
Colorado and Wyoming had a joint hackathon last month sponsored by Google to help solve government problems. Colorado sought apps that might be useful to state emergency personnel in tracking people and moving supplies during floods, blizzards or other natural disasters. Wyoming sought help in making its tax-and-spend data more understandable and usable by its citizens.
Unless there’s some prize money, hackers may not make a buck from events like these, and participate out of fun, curiosity or a sense of public service. But those who create an app that is useful beyond the boundaries of a particular city or state, or one that is commercially valuable to business, can make serious money – just as Beagle Score plans to do. Colorado will hold onto the intellectual property rights to Beagle Score for a year. But Wittmeyer and his partner will be able to profit from extending it to other states.

States Trail in Open Data

Open data is an outgrowth of the e-government movement of the 1990s, in which government computerized more of the data it collected and began making it available on floppy disks.
States often have trailed the federal government or many cities in adjusting to the computer age and in sharing information, said Emily Shaw, national policy manager for the Sunlight Foundation, which promotes transparency in government. The first big push to share came with public accountability, or “checkbook” sites, that show where government gets its revenue and how it spends it.
The goal was to make government more transparent and accountable by offering taxpayers information on how their money was spent.
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts site, established in 2007, offers detailed revenue, spending, tax and contracts data. Republican Comptroller Susan Combs’ office said having a one-stop electronic site also has saved taxpayers about $12.3 million in labor, printing, postage and other costs.
Not all states’ checkbook sites are as openly transparent and detailed as Texas, Shaw said. Nor are their open-data sites. “There’s so much variation between the states,” she said.
Many state legislatures are working to set policies for releasing data. Since the start of 2010, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, nine states have enacted open-data laws, and more legislation is pending. But California, for instance, has been posting open data for five years without legislation setting policies.
Just as states have lagged in getting data out to the public, less of it has been turned into commercial use, said Joel Gurin, senior adviser at the Governance Lab at New York University and author of the book “Open Data Now.”
Gurin leads Open Data 500, which identifies firms that that have made products from open government data and turned them into regional or national enterprises. In April, it listed 500. It soon may expand. “We’re finding more and more companies every day,” he said. “…

Open Government Data: Helping Parents to find the Best School for their Kids

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Radu Cucos at the Open Government Partnership blog: “…This challenge – finding the right school – is probably one of the most important decisions in many parents’ lives.  Parents are looking for answers to questions such as which schools are located in safe neighborhoods, which ones have the highest teacher – students’ ratio, which schools have the best funding, which schools have the best premises or which ones have the highest grades average.
It is rarely an easy decision, but is made doubly difficult in the case of migrants.  People residing in the same location for a long time know, more or less, which are the best education institutions in their city, town or village. For migrants, the situation is absolutely the opposite. They have to spend extra time and resources in identifying relevant information about schools.
Open Government Data is an effective solution which can ease the problem of a lack of accessible information about existing schools in a particular country or location. By adopting the Open Government Data policy in the educational field, governments release data about grades, funding, student and teacher numbers, data generated throughout time by schools, colleges, universities and other educational settings.
Developers then use this data for creating applications which portray information in easy accessible formats. Three of the best apps which I have come across are highlighted below:

  • Discover Your School, developed under the Province of British Columbia of Canada Open Data Initiative, is a platform for parents who are interested in finding a school for their kids, learning about the school districts or comparing schools in the same area. The application provides comprehensive information, such as the number of students enrolled in schools each year, class sizes, teaching language, disaster readiness, results of skills assessment, and student and parent satisfaction. Information and data can be viewed in interactive formats, including maps. On top of that, Discover Your School engages parents in policy making and initiatives such as Erase Bullying or British Columbia Education Plan.
  • The School Portal, developed under the Moldova Open Data Initiative, uses data made public by the Ministry of Education of Moldova to offer comprehensive information about 1529 educational institutions in the Republic of Moldova. Users of the portal can access information about schools yearly budgets, budget implementation, expenditures, school rating, students’ grades, schools’ infrastructure and communications. The School Portal has a tool which allows visitors to compare schools based on different criteria – infrastructure, students’ performance or annual budgets. The additional value of the portal is the fact that it serves as a platform for private sector entities which sell school supplies to advertise their products. The School Portal also allows parents to virtually interact with the Ministry of Education of Moldova or with a psychologist in case they need additional information or have concerns regarding the education of their children.
  • RomaScuola, developed under the umbrella of the Italian Open Data Initiative, allows visitors to obtain valuable information about all schools in the Rome region. Distinguishing it from the two listed above is the ability to compare schools depending on such facets as frequency of teacher absence, internet connectivity, use of IT equipment for teaching, frequency of students’ transfer to other schools and quality of education in accordance with the percentage of issued diplomas.

Open data on schools has great value not only for parents but also for the educational system in general. Each country has its own school market, if education is considered as a product in this market. Perfect information about products is one of the main characteristics of competitive markets. From this perspective, giving parents the opportunity to have access to information about schools characteristics will contribute to the increase in the competitiveness of the schools market. Educational institutions will have incentives to improve their performance in order to attract more students…”

How to treat government like an open source project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Balter in OpenSource.com: “Open government is great. At least, it was a few election cycles ago. FOIA requests, open data, seeing how your government works—it’s arguably brought light to a lot of not-so-great practices, and in many cases, has spurred citizen-centric innovation not otherwise imagined before the information’s release.
It used to be that sharing information was really, really hard. Open government wasn’t even a possibility a few hundred years ago. Throughout the history of communication tools—be it the printing press, fax machine, or floppy disks—new tools have generally done three things: lowered the cost to transmit information, increased who that information could be made available to, and increase how quickly that information could be distributed. But, printing presses and fax machines have two limitations: they are one way and asynchronous. They let you more easily request, and eventually see how the sausage was made but don’t let you actually take part in the sausage-making. You may be able to see what’s wrong, but you don’t have the chance to make it better. By the time you find out, it’s already too late.
As technology allows us to communicate with greater frequency and greater fidelity, we have the chance to make our government not only transparent, but truly collaborative.
…
So, how do we encourage policy makers and bureaucrats to move from open government to collaborative government, to learn open source’s lessons about openness and collaboration at scale?
For one, we geeks can help to create a culture of transparency and openness within government by driving up the demand side of the equation. Be vocal, demand data, expect to see process, and once released, help build lightweight apps. Show potential change agents in government that their efforts will be rewarded.
Second, it’s a matter of tooling. We’ve got great tools out there—things like Git that can track who made what change when and open standards like CSV or JSON that don’t require proprietary software—but by-and-large they’re a foreign concept in government, at least among those empowered to make change. Command line interfaces with black background and green text can be intimidating to government bureaucrats used to desktop publishing tools. Make it easier for government to do the right thing and choose open standards over proprietary tooling.”
Last, be a good open source ambassador. Help your home city or state get involved with open source. Encourage them to take their first step (be it consuming open source, publishing, or collaborating with the public), teach them what it means to do things in the open, And when they do push code outside the firewall, above all, be supportive. We’re in this together.
As technology makes it easier to work together, geeks can help make our government not just open, but in fact collaborative. Government is the world’s largest and longest running open source project (bugs, trolls, and all). It’s time we start treating it like one.

Harnessing the Power of Data, Technology, and Innovation for a Clean Energy Economy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the White House, the Energy Department, and the General Services Administration are teaming up to host an Energy Datapalooza, highlighting important new steps in the public and private sectors to leverage data and innovation in ways that promote a clean energy economy in America.
Advances in technology are making it easier for consumers and businesses across the nation to better understand how they are using and saving energy. Empowering citizens with information about their energy usage can help them make smart choices that cut energy waste, cut down energy bills, and preserve our environment.
The federal government has an important role to play in unleashing energy-related data and catalyzing innovation to support these savings. That is why the Obama Administration has taken unprecedented steps to make open government data more available to citizens, companies, and innovators — including by launching both an Energy Data Initiative and a Climate Data Initiative.
In addition, in 2011, the Administration launched the Green Button Initiative to provide families and businesses with easy and secure access to their own energy-usage information. And today, the Obama Administration is announcing a number of new steps to continue this momentum, including: a successful federal pilot applying the Green Button to help building managers achieve greater efficiencies; and new or expanded data resources and tools in the areas of geothermal, solar, hydropower, bio energy, and buildings.
Private-sector entrepreneurs and innovators are important partners in this effort. They are continually finding new ways to use groundbreaking software and technologies to analyze data about energy usage, building efficiency, renewable energy sources, and more, and providing those data to consumers in ways that help them achieve energy savings and help advance America’s clean energy goals.
At today’s Energy Datapalooza, companies, utilities, and innovators who are leading the charge in this important domain are announcing new commitments to make energy data available to their customers, provide consumers and first-responders with information about power outages, publish data about open building energy performance, and more. These innovators — and dozens more students, researchers, and technologists — will demonstrate exciting tools, apps, and services at a live Innovation Showcase, highlighting just some of the cutting-edge advances already underway in the energy-data space….
FACT SHEET: Harnessing the Power of Data for a Clean, Secure, and Reliable Energy Future ”
 

Open government: getting beyond impenetrable online data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jed Miller in The Guardian: “Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously closed a long letter by apologising that he hadn’t had time to make it shorter. Unfortunately, his pithy point about “download time” is regularly attributed to Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, probably because the public loves writers more than it loves statisticians. Scientists may make things provable, but writers make them memorable.
The World Bank confronted a similar reality of data journalism earlier this month when it revealed that, of the 1,600 bank reports posted online on from 2008 to 2012, 32% had never been downloaded at all and another 40% were downloaded under 100 times each.
Taken together, these cobwebbed documents represent millions of dollars in World Bank funds and hundreds of thousands of person-hours, spent by professionals who themselves represent millions of dollars in university degrees. It’s difficult to see the return on investment in producing expert research and organising it into searchable web libraries when almost three quarters of the output goes largely unseen.
The World Bank works at a scale unheard of by most organisations, but expert groups everywhere face the same challenges. Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
Even those who brave the progress bar find too often that urgent, incisive findings about poverty, health, discrimination, conflict or social change are presented in prose written by and for high-level experts, rendering it impenetrable to almost everyone else. Information isn’t just trapped in pdfs; it’s trapped in PhDs.
Governments and NGOs are beginning to realise that digital strategy means more than posting a document online, but what will it take for these groups to change not just their tools, but their thinking? It won’t be enough to partner with WhatsApp or hire GrumpyCat.
I asked strategists from the development, communications and social media fields to offer simple, “Tweetable” suggestions for how the policy community can become better communicators.

For nonprofits and governments that still publish 100-page pdfs on their websites and do not optimise the content to share in other channels such as social: it is a huge waste of time and ineffective. Stop it now.

– Beth Kanter, author and speaker. Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

Treat text as #opendata so infomediaries can mash it up and make it more accessible (see, for example federalregister.gov) and don’t just post and blast: distribute information in a targeted way to those most likely to be interested.

– Beth Noveck, director at the Governance Lab and former director at White House Open Government Initiative

Don’t be boring. Sounds easy, actually quite hard, super-important.

– Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy

Surprise me. Uncover the key finding that inspired you, rather than trying to tell it all at once and show me how the world could change because of it.

– Jay Golden, co-founder of Wakingstar Storyworks

For the Bank or anyone who is generating policy information they actually want people to use, they must actually write it for the user, not for themselves. As Steve Jobs said, ‘Simple can be harder than complex’.

– Kristen Grimm, founder and president at Spitfire Strategies

The way to reach the widest audience is to think beyond content format and focus on content strategy.

– Laura Silber, director of public affairs at Open Society Foundations

Open the door to policy work with short, accessible pieces – a blog post, a video take, infographics – that deliver the ‘so what’ succinctly.

– Robert McMahon, editor at Council on Foreign Relations

Policy information is more usable if it’s linked to corresponding actions one can take, or if it helps stir debate.  Also, whichever way you slice it, there will always be a narrow market for raw policy reports … that’s why explainer sites, listicles and talking heads exist.

– Ory Okolloh, director of investments at Omidyar Network and former public policy and government relations manager at Google Africa
Ms Okolloh, who helped found the citizen reporting platform Ushahidi, also offered a simple reminder about policy reports: “‘Never gets downloaded’ doesn’t mean ‘never gets read’.” Just as we shouldn’t mistake posting for dissemination, we shouldn’t confuse popularity with influence….”

Citizen participation and technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ICTlogy: “The recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology is changing relationships between citizens, organizations and public institutions, and expanding political participation. But while technology has the potential to amplify citizens’ voices, it must be accompanied by clear political goals and other factors to increase their clout.
Those are among the conclusions of a new NDI study, “Citizen Participation and Technology,” that examines the role digital technologies – such as social media, interactive websites and SMS systems – play in increasing citizen participation and fostering accountability in government. The study was driven by the recognition that better insights are needed into the relationship between new technologies, citizen participation programs and the outcomes they aim to achieve.
Using case studies from countries such as Burma, Mexico and Uganda, the study explores whether the use of technology in citizen participation programs amplifies citizen voices and increases government responsiveness and accountability, and whether the use of digital technology increases the political clout of citizens.
The research shows that while more people are using technology—such as social media for mobile organizing, and interactive websites and text messaging systems that enable direct communication between constituents and elected officials or crowdsourcing election day experiences— the type and quality of their political participation, and therefore its impact on democratization, varies. It also suggests that, in order to leverage technology’s potential, there is a need to focus on non-technological areas such as political organizing, leadership skills and political analysis.
For example, the “2% and More Women in Politics” coalition led by Mexico’s National Institute for Women (INMUJERES) used a social media campaign and an online petition to call successfully for reforms that would allocate two percent of political party funding for women’s leadership training. Technology helped the activists reach a wider audience, but women from the different political parties who made up the coalition might not have come together without NDI’s role as a neutral convener.
The study, which was conducted with support from the National Endowment for Democracy, provides an overview of NDI’s approach to citizen participation, and examines how the integration of technologies affects its programs in order to inform the work of NDI, other democracy assistance practitioners, donors, and civic groups.

Observations:

Key findings:

  1. Technology can be used to readily create spaces and opportunities for citizens to express their voices, but making these voices politically stronger and the spaces more meaningful is a harder challenge that is political and not technological in nature.
  2. Technology that was used to purposefully connect citizens’ groups and amplify their voices had more political impact.
  3. There is a scarcity of data on specific demographic groups’ use of, and barriers to technology for political participation. Programs seeking to close the digital divide as an instrument of narrowing the political divide should be informed by more research into barriers to access to both politics and technology.
  4. There is a blurring of the meaning between the technologies of open government data and the politics of open government that clouds program strategies and implementation.
  5. Attempts to simply crowdsource public inputs will not result in users self-organizing into politically influential groups, since citizens lack the opportunities to develop leadership, unity, and commitment around a shared vision necessary for meaningful collective action.
  6. Political will and the technical capacity to engage citizens in policy making, or providing accurate data on government performance are lacking in many emerging democracies. Technology may have changed institutions’ ability to respond to citizen demands but its mere presence has not fundamentally changed actual government responsiveness.”

Democracy and open data: are the two linked?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
transparency
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:

While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.

Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:

  1. Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
  2. Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
  3. The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”

Open Data at Core of New Governance Paradigm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

GovExec: “Rarely are federal agencies compared favorably with Facebook, Instagram, or other modern models of innovation, but there is every reason to believe they can harness innovation to improve mission effectiveness. After all, Aneesh Chopra, former U.S. Chief Technology Officer, reminded the Excellence in Government 2014 audience that government has a long history of innovation. From nuclear fusion to the Internet, the federal government has been at the forefront of technological development.
According to Chopra, the key to fueling innovation and economic prosperity today is open data. But to make the most of open data, government needs to adapt its culture. Chopra outlined three essential elements of doing so:

  1. Involve external experts – integrating outside ideas is second to none as a source of innovation.
  2. Leverage the experience of those on the front lines – federal employees who directly execute their agency’s mission often have the best sense of what does and does not work, and what can be done to improve effectiveness.
  3. Look to the public as a value multiplier – just as Facebook provides a platform for tens of thousands of developers to provide greater value, federal agencies can provide the raw material for many more to generate better citizen services.

In addition to these three broad elements, Chopra offered four specific levers government can use to help enact this paradigm shift:

  1. Democratize government data – opening government data to the public facilitates innovation. For example, data provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration helps generate a 5 billion dollar industry by maintaining almost no intellectual property constraints on its weather data.
  2. Collaborate on technical standards – government can act as a convener of industry members to standardize technological development, and thereby increase the value of data shared.
  3. Issue challenges and prizes – incentivizing the public to get involved and participate in efforts to create value from government data enhances the government’s ability to serve the public.
  4. Launch government startups – programs like the Presidential Innovation Fellows initiative helps challenge rigid bureaucratic structures and permeate a culture of innovation.

Federal leaders will need a strong political platform to sustain this shift. Fortunately, this blueprint is also bipartisan, says Chopra. Political leaders on both sides of the aisle are already getting behind the movement to bring innovation to the core of government..

The merits of participatory budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Hollie Russon Gilman at Aljazeera America: “For many Americans, government just isn’t working. In 2013, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the top identified U.S. problem. A recent survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans rate the health of our democracy as weak — and unlikely to get better anytime soon. But in small corners throughout the United States, democratic innovations are creating new opportunities for citizens to be a part of governance. Collectively known as open government or civic innovation, these projects are engaging policymakers, citizens and civil society and proving the skeptics wrong.
One particularly promising innovation in participatory budgeting, or PB — a process to directly empower citizens to make spending decisions on a defined public budget. PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation. Since then, PB has expanded to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including several in the U.S. Starting in 2009 in Chicago’s 49th Ward with a budget of just $1 million, PB in the United States has expanded to a $27 million-a-year experiment. Municipal leaders from Vallejo, California, to New York City have turned over a portion of their discretionary funds to neighborhood residents. Boston recently launched the first youth-driven PB. Nearly half of New York’s City Council members are slated to participate this fall, after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a cornerstone of his campaign. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a new manager of participatory budgeting who will help coordinate Council districts that want to participate. The White House recently included federally supported participatory budgeting as part of its international Open Government Partnership commitments.

Wants and needs

In PB, citizens are empowered to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals and vote upon where to spend public funds. The decisions are binding. And that’s important: Making democracy work is not just about making better citizens or changing policies. It is also about creating structures that create the conditions that make the effective exercise of democratic citizenship possible, and PB is uniquely structured to do that.

Chicago has been a particularly insightful petri dish to study PB in the U.S., mainly because the city is an unlikely candidate for democratic innovations. For decades its Democratic machine retained a strong and continuous hold over city government. The Daley family held the mayoralty for a combined 12 terms. While discretionary funds (known as “menu money”) are allocated equally — but not equitably, given different needs — to all 50 wards, the process of spending this money is at the discretion of locally elected aldermen. From 1972 to 2009, 30 Chicago aldermen were indicted and convicted of federal crimes ranging from income tax evasion to extortion, embezzlement and conspiracy. Clearly, Chicago has not always been a model of good governance.
Against this backdrop, PB has continued to expand in Chicago. This year three districts participated. The Fifth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, decided not to continue the process again this year. Instead, this year the ward had four groups of residents each allocate $250,000. The alderwoman noted that this enabled the transparency and engagement aspect of PB with fewer process resources — they had only 100 people come out to vote.
Different versions of PB are aimed to lower the current barriers to civic engagement. I have seen PB bring out people who have never before engaged in politics. Many longtime civic participants often cite PB as the single most meaningful civic engagement of their lives — far above, say, jury duty. Suddenly, citizens are empowered with real decision-making authority and leave with new relationships with their peers, community and elected officials.
However, PB is not a stand-alone endeavor. It must be part of a larger effort to improve governance. This must include greater transparency in public decision making and empowering citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. The process provides an enormous education that can be translated into civic activity beyond PB. Ideally after engaging in PB, a citizen will be better equipped to volunteer in the community, vote or push for policy reform. What other infrastructure, both online and off, is needed to support citizens who want to further engage in more collaborative governance?  …”

Believe the hype: Big data can have a big social impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Annika Small at the Guardian: “Given all the hype around so called big data at the moment, it would be easy to dismiss it as nothing more than the latest technology buzzword. This would be a mistake, given that the application and interpretation of huge – often publicly available – data sets is already supporting new models of creativity, innovation and engagement.
To date, stories of big data’s progress and successes have tended to come from government and the private sector, but we’ve heard little about its relevance to social organisations. Yet big data can fuel big social change.
It’s already playing a vital role in the charitable sector. Some social organisations are using existing open government data to better target their services, to improve advocacy and fundraising, and to support knowledge sharing and collaboration between different charities and agencies. Crowdsourcing of open data also offers a new way for not-for-profits to gather intelligence, and there is a wide range of freely available online tools to help them analyse the information.
However, realising the potential of big and open data presents a number of technical and organisational challenges for social organisations. Many don’t have the required skills, awareness and investment to turn big data to their advantage. They also tend to lack the access to examples that might help demystify the technicalities and focus on achievable results.
Overcoming these challenges can be surprisingly simple: Keyfund, for example, gained insight into what made for a successful application to their scheme through using a free, online tool to create word clouds out of all the text in their application forms. Many social organisations could use this same technique to better understand the large volume of unstructured text that they accumulate – in doing so, they would be “doing big data” (albeit in a small way). At the other end of the scale, Global Giving has developed its own sophisticated set of analytical tools to better understand the 57,000+ “stories” gathered from its network.
Innovation often happens when different disciplines collide and it’s becoming apparent that most value – certainly most social value – is likely to be created at the intersection of government, private and social sector data. That could be the combination of data from different sectors, or better “data collaboration” within sectors.
The Housing Association Charitable Trust (HACT) has produced two original tools that demonstrate this. Its Community Insight tool combines data from different sectors, allowing housing providers easily to match information about their stock to a large store of well-maintained open government figures. Meanwhile, its Housing Big Data programme is building a huge dataset by combining stats from 16 different housing providers across the UK. While Community Insight allows each organisation to gain better individual understanding of their communities (measuring well-being and deprivation levels, tracking changes over time, identifying hotspots of acute need), Housing Big Data is making progress towards a much richer network of understanding, providing a foundation for the sector to collaboratively identify challenges and quantify the impact of their interventions.
Alongside this specific initiative from HACT, it’s also exciting to see programmes such as 360giving, which forge connections between a range of private and social enterprises, and lays foundations for UK social investors to be a significant source of information over the next decade. Certainly, The Big Lottery Fund’s publication of open data late last year is a milestone which also highlights how far we have to travel as a sector before we are truly “data-rich”.
At Nominet Trust, we have produced the Social Tech Guide to demonstrate the scale and diversity of social value being generated internationally – much of which is achieved through harnessing the power of big data. From Knewton creating personally tailored learning programmes, to Cellslider using the power of the crowd to advance cancer research, there is no shortage of inspiration. The UN’s Global Pulse programme is another great example, with its focus on how we can combine private and public sources to pin down the size and shape of a social challenge, and calibrate our collective response.
These examples of data-driven social change demonstrate the huge opportunities for social enterprises to harness technology to generate insights, to drive more effective action and to fuel social change. If we are to realise this potential, we need to continue to stretch ourselves as social enterprises and social investors.”