Paper presented at the the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Technologies: “Open Government Data (OGD) stands for a relatively young trend to make data that is collected and maintained by state authorities available for the public. Although various Austrian OGD initiatives have been started in the last few years, less is known about the validity and the usefulness of the data offered. Based on the data-set on Vienna’s stock of trees, we address two questions in this paper. First of all, we examine the quality of the data by validating it according to knowledge from a related discipline. It shows that the data-set we used correlates with findings from meteorology. Then, we explore the usefulness and exploitability of OGD by describing a concrete scenario in which this data-set can be supportive for citizens in their everyday life and by discussing further application areas in which OGD can be beneficial for different stakeholders and even commercially used.”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee: The many meanings of Open
Sir Tim Berners-Lee; ” I was recently asked to talk about the idea of “open”, and I realized the term is used in at least eight different ways. The distinct interpretations are all important in different but interlocking ways. Getting them confused leads to a lot of misunderstanding, so it’s good to review them all.
When we tease apart their meanings, we can understand more clearly which aspects of each are the most important. The first, one of the most important forms of openness for the Web, is its universality.
Universality – When I designed the Web protocols, I had already seen many networked information systems fail because they made some assumptions about the users – that they were using a particular type of computer for instance – or constrained the way they worked, such as forcing them to organize their data in a particular way, or to use a particular data format. The Web had to avoid these issues. The goal was that anyone should be able to publish anything on the Web and so it had to be universal in that it was independent of all these technical constraints, as well as language, character sets, and culture….
Open Standards
The actual design of the Web involved the creation of open standards – and getting people to agree to use them globally. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), of which I am the Director, helps create interoperable standards for Web technology, including HTML5, mobile Web, graphics, the Semantic Web of linked data, and Web accessibility. Any company can join and anyone can review and help create the specifications for the Web….
Open Web Platform (OWP)
W3C’s Open Web Platform is the name for a particular set of open standards which enable an exciting stage of Web computing. Standards such as HTML5, SVG, CSS, video, JavaScript, and others are advancing together so that programmes that once worked only on desktop, tablets or phones can now work from within the browser itself. It has all the power of HTML5, like easily-inserted video and, in the future, easily-inserted conferences. It also features the APIs for accessing hardware and other capabilities on the device, such as a smartphone’s accelerometer, camera, and local storage. While native apps are limited, Web Apps can work on any platform….
Open Government through Open Data
In 2009, I resolved to encourage more use of data on the Web. Too many websites could generate nice reports as documents, but had no way to access the data behind it to check and build on the results. In February that year I stood up in front of a TED audience and asked them for their data; I even got them to chant: “raw data now”. In April that year, I met with Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister of the UK and with him began the UK Government’s ground-breaking work on Open Data. That same year President Barack Obama announced his commitment to the US Open Government Initiative. In 2010 I went back to TED and showed the audience some of what had been achieved, including Open Street Map’s role in relief efforts in Haiti….
Open Platform
While it’s not really a feature of the Web, a concern for a lot of people is whether they can choose which apps run on their own phone or computer. An Open Platform means having the right to install and write software on your computer or device. One motivation to close off a computing platform comes from a manufacturer wanting to allow you to experience their content on your machine without being able to store it or pass it on. Some systems are very closed, in that the user can only watch a movie or play a game, with no chance to copy anything or back it up. Some systems are very open, allowing users to take copies of files and run any application they like. Many systems fall in between, letting users pay for additional material or an experience…
Open Source
“Open Source” is another way “open” is used on the web, one which has been and is very important to the Web’s growth. It’s important to me that I can get at the source code of any software I’m using. If I can get at the source code, can I modify it? Can I distribute the modified code and run it on my machine? As Free Software Foundation lead Richard Stallman puts it, “free as in freedom rather than free as in beer”.
Open Access
Open Access is a Web-based movement specifically about free (as in beer) access to the body of academic learning. Governments, and therefore taxpayers, pay for research via grants but often the results of the research are kept in closed-access academic journals. The results are only available to those at big universities. The poor and those in remote rural areas cannot participate…
Open Internet and Net Neutrality
When we talk about keeping the internet free and open, we are often worried about blocking and spying. One of the ways in which we protect the Web is by ensuring Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is about non-discrimination. Its principle is that if I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This is important because it allows an open, fair market. It’s essential to an open, fair democracy. The alternative is a Web in which governments or large companies, or frequently a close association of the two, try to control the internet, with packets of information delivered in a way that discriminates for commercial or political reasons. Regimes of every sort spy on their citizens, deriving hugely accurate and detailed profiles of them and their intimate lives. Today, the battle is building. The rights of individual people on the Web are being attacked, and at the moment only a few people really understand and realize what is going on.”
NEW Publication: “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts”
Over the last few years, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada has initiated a variety of practices and policies aimed at providing more legitimate and effective governance. Leveraging advances in technology, the BC Government has focused on changing how it engages with its citizens with the goal of optimizing the way it seeks input and develops and implements policy. The efforts are part of a broader trend among a wide variety of democratic governments to re-imagine public service and governance.
At the beginning of 2013, BC’s Ministry of Citizens’ Services and Open Government, now the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services, partnered with the GovLab to produce “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts.” The GovLab’s May 2013 report, made public today, makes clear that BC’s current practices to create a more open government, leverage citizen engagement to inform policy decisions, create new innovations, and provide improved public monitoring—though in many cases relatively new—are consistently among the strongest examples at either the provincial or national level.
According to Stefaan Verhulst, Chief of Research at the GovLab: “Our benchmarking study found that British Columbia’s various initiatives and experiments to create a more open and participatory governance culture has made it a leader in how to re-imagine governance. Leadership, along with the elimination of imperatives that may limit further experimentation, will be critical moving forward. And perhaps even more important, as with all initiatives to re-imaging governance worldwide, much more evaluation of what works, and why, will be needed to keep strengthening the value proposition behind the new practices and polices and provide proof-of-concept.”
See also our TheGovLab Blog.
AskThem
“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!”
Global Open Data Initiative moving forward
“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:
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.”
Open-Government Laws Fuel Hedge-Fund Profits
Wall Street Journal: “Hedge Funds Are Using FOIA Requests to Obtain Nonpublic Information From Federal Agencies…When SAC Capital Advisors LP was weighing an investment in Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., the hedge-fund firm contacted a source it knew would provide nonpublic information without blinking: the federal government.
An investment manager for an SAC affiliate asked the Food and Drug Administration last December for any “adverse event reports” for Vertex’s recently approved cystic-fibrosis drug. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the agency had to hand over the material, which revealed no major problems. The bill: $72.50, cheaper than the price of two Vertex shares.
SAC and its affiliate, Sigma Capital Management LLC, snapped up 13,500 Vertex shares in the first quarter and options to buy 25,000 more, securities filings indicate. The stock rose that quarter, then surged 62% on a single day in April when Vertex announced positive results from safety tests on a separate cystic-fibrosis drug designed to be used in combination with the first.
Finance professionals have been pulling every lever they can these days to extract information from the government. Many have discovered that the biggest lever of all is the one available to everyone—the Freedom of Information Act—conceived by advocates of open government to shine light on how officials make decisions. FOIA is part of an array of techniques sophisticated investors are using to try to obtain potentially market-moving information about products, legislation, regulation and government economic statistics.
“It’s an information arms race,” says Les Funtleyder, a longtime portfolio manager and now partner at private-equity firm Poliwogg Holdings Inc. “It’s important to try every avenue. If anyone else is doing it, you need to, too.”
A review by The Wall Street Journal of more than 100,000 of the roughly three million FOIA requests filed over the past five years, including all of those sent to the FDA, shows that investors use the process to troll for all kinds of information. They ask the Environmental Protection Agency about pollution regulations, the Department of Energy about grants for energy-efficient vehicles, and the Securities and Exchange Commission about whether publicly held companies are under investigation. Such requests are perfectly legal.”
See also “Making FOIA More Free and Open” (Joel Gurin)
GovLab Seeks Open Data Success Stories
Wyatt Kash in InformationWeek: “A team of open government advocates, led by former White House aide Beth Novek, has launched a campaign to identify 500 examples of how freely available government data is being put to profitable use in the private sector.Open Data 500 is part of a broader effort by New York University’s Governance Lab (GovLab) to conduct the “first real, comprehensive study of the use of open government data in the private sector,” said Joel Gurin, founder of OpenDataNow.com and senior adviser at GovLab.
Novek, who served in the White House as the first U.S. deputy CTO and led the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011, founded GovLab while also teaching at the MIT Media Lab and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In an interview with InformationWeek Government, Gurin explained that the goal of GovLab, and the Open Data 500 project, is to show how technology and new uses of data can make government more effective, and create more of a partnership between government and the public. “We’re also trying to draw on more public expertise to solve government problems,” he said….
Gurin said Open Data 500 will primarily look at U.S.-based, revenue-producing companies or organizations where government data is a key resource for their business. While the GovLab will focus initially on the use of federal data, it will also look at cases where entrepreneurs are making use of state or local data, but in scalable fashion.
“This goes one step further than the datapaloozas” championed by U.S. CTO Todd Park to showcase tools developed by the private sector using government data. “We’re trying to show how we can make data sets even more impactful and useful.”
Gurin said the GovLab team hopes to complete the study by the end of this year. The team has already identified 150 companies as candidates. To submit your company for consideration, visit thegovlab.org/submit-your-company; to submit another company, visit thegovlab.org/open500“
Novek, who served in the White House as the first U.S. deputy CTO and led the White House Open Government Initiative from 2009-2011, founded GovLab while also teaching at the MIT Media Lab and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
In an interview with InformationWeek Government, Gurin explained that the goal of GovLab, and the Open Data 500 project, is to show how technology and new uses of data can make government more effective, and create more of a partnership between government and the public. “We’re also trying to draw on more public expertise to solve government problems,” he said….
Gurin said Open Data 500 will primarily look at U.S.-based, revenue-producing companies or organizations where government data is a key resource for their business. While the GovLab will focus initially on the use of federal data, it will also look at cases where entrepreneurs are making use of state or local data, but in scalable fashion.
“This goes one step further than the datapaloozas” championed by U.S. CTO Todd Park to showcase tools developed by the private sector using government data. “We’re trying to show how we can make data sets even more impactful and useful.”
Gurin said the GovLab team hopes to complete the study by the end of this year. The team has already identified 150 companies as candidates. To submit your company for consideration, visit thegovlab.org/submit-your-company; to submit another company, visit thegovlab.org/open500“
Foundations of Digital Government
New book by Daniel Veit and Jan Huntgeburth: “Digital government consists in the purposeful use of information and communication technologies (ICT), in particular the internet, to transform the relationship between government and society in a positive manner. This book focuses on the current status, prospects and foundations of digital government. Integrating examples and cases from administrative practice, it covers all important aspects of digital government management. Learning outcomes include
- Understanding the implications of the internet for government and society
- Gaining deeper insights into the concept and opportunities of digital democracy
- Understanding the challenges of moving public services online
Table of Contents: Preface.- 1 Introduction to Digital Government.- 2 Impact of Digital Government.- 3 The Digital Divide.- 4 Legal Aspects of Digital Service Delivery.- 5 Online One-Stop Government.- 6 Open Government.- 7 E-Procurement.- 8 E-Voting.- 9 E-Participation.- 10 Lesson Learned and Outlook.”
Riding the Waves or Caught in the Tide? Navigating the Evolving Information Environment
IFLA Trend Report: “In the global information environment, time moves quickly and there’s an abundance of commentators trying to keep up. With each new technological development, a new report emerges assessing its impact on different sectors of society. The IFLA Trend Report takes a broader approach and identifies five high level trends shaping the information society, spanning access to education, privacy, civic engagement and transformation. Its findings reflect a year’s consultation with a range of experts and stakeholders from different disciplines to map broader societal changes occurring, or likely to occur in the information environment.
The IFLA Trend Report is more than a single document – it is a selection of resources to help you understand where libraries fit into a changing society.
From Five Key Trends Which Will Change Our Information Environment:
Trend 1:
New Technologies Will Both Expand and Limit Who Has Access to Information…
Trend 2:
Online Education Will Democratise and Disrupt Global Learning…
Trend 3:
The Boundaries of Privacy and Data Protection Will Be Redefined…
Trend 4:
Hyper-Connected Societies Will Listen to and Empower New Voices and Groups…In hyper-connected societies more opportunities for collective action are being realised – enabling the rise of new voices and promoting the growth of single-issue movements at the expense of traditional political parties. Open government initiatives and access to public sector data are leading to more transparency and citizen-focused public services.
Trend 5:
The Global Information Economy Will Be Transformed by New Technologies…”
From public innovation to social innovation in the public sector
A review of the literature by Victor Bekkers, Lars Tummers & William Voorberg: “Innovation is a recurring issue in public administration. In doing so it can be considered as a ‘magic concept’ that is been used to frame the necessary transformation of the public sector in order to improve not only its effectiveness and efficiency but also its legitimacy. Innovation is a concept that inspires people and policy makers because it offers the promise of radical change. As such the desire to innovate the public sector has a long history which is sometimes linked to reform programs in order to meet budget cutbacks, to meet the introduction of new management and governance ideologies (like New Public Management or Open Government) or to meet the introduction of new information and communication technologies (like e- government)…
Our starting point for studying social innovations in the public sector is that social innovations take place in a specific environment in which different actors can be distinguished. These actors collaborate with each other in terms of sharing relevant resources in order to develop and implement new ideas, new ways of working or new ways of organizing. This implies that characteristics of the environment can be seen as a relevant drivers and barriers. These characteristics can either function as a trigger for innovation while at the same time they can also function as relevant constraints. Based on an analysis of the literature, we have found that the following aspects of the environment could function as important drivers and barriers of innovation:
- The social and political complexity of the environment in which public organizations operate which leads to specific demands that function as an external ‘trigger’ for innovation
- The characteristics and degree of the legal culture in a country or policy sector
- The type of governance and state tradition in the country or policy sector
- The allocation of resources, resource dependency and the quality of relationships within the networks among the involved stakeholders”