Understanding the impact of releasing and re-using open government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Report by the European Public Sector Information Platform: “While there has been a proliferation of open data portals and data re-using tools and applications of tremendous speed in the last decade, research and understanding about the impact of opening up public sector information and open government data (OGD hereinafter) has been lacking behind.
Until now, there have been some research efforts to structure the concept of the impact of OGD suggesting various theories of change, their measuring methodologies or in some cases, concrete calculations as to what financial benefits opening government data brings on a table. For instance, the European Commission conducted a study on pricing of public sector information, which attempted evaluating direct and indirect economic impact of opening public data and identified key indicators to monitor the effects of open data portals. Also, Open Data Research Network issued a background report in April 2012 suggesting a general framework of key indicators to measure the impact of open data initiatives both on a provision and re-use stages.
Building on the research efforts up to date, this report will reflect upon the main types of impacts OGD may have and will also present key measuring frameworks to observe the change OGD initiatives may bring about.”

Open Government in a Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

An essay by Jonathan Reichental (Chief Information Officer of the City of Palo Alto) and Sheila Tucker (Assistant to the City Manager) that summarizes work done at the City that resulted in the Thomas H. Muehlenback Award for Excellent in Local Government: “Government is in a period of extraordinary change. Demographics are shifting. Fiscal constraints continue to challenge service delivery. Communities are becoming more disconnected with one another and their governments, and participation in civic affairs is rapidly declining. Adding to the complexities, technology is rapidly changing the way cities provide services, and conduct outreach and civic engagement. Citizens increasingly expect to engage with their government in much the same way they pay bills online or find directions using their smartphone where communication is interactive and instantaneous. The role of government of course is more complicated than simply improving transactions.
To help navigate these challenges, the City of Palo Alto has focused its effort on new ways of thinking and acting by leveraging our demographic base, wealth of intellectual talent and entrepreneurial spirit to engage our community in innovative problem solving. The City’s historic advantages in innovative leadership create a compelling context to push the possibilities of technology to solve civic challenges.
This case study examines how Palo Alto is positioning itself to maximize the use of technology to build a leading Digital City and make local government more inclusive, transparent and engage a broader base of its community in civic affairs….”

White House: "We Want Your Input on Building a More Open Government"

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai at the White House Blog:”…We are proud of this progress, but recognize that there is always more we can do to build a more efficient, effective, and accountable government.  In that spirit, the Obama Administration has committed to develop a second National Action Plan on Open Government: “NAP 2.0.”
In order to develop a Plan with the most creative and ambitious solutions, we need all-hands-on-deck. That’s why we are asking for your input on what should be in the NAP 2.0:

  1. How can we better encourage and enable the public to participate in government and increase public integrity? For example, in the first National Action Plan, we required Federal enforcement agencies to make publicly available compliance information easily accessible, downloadable and searchable online – helping the public to hold the government and regulated entities accountable.
  • What other kinds of government information should be made more available to help inform decisions in your communities or in your lives?
  • How would you like to be able to interact with Federal agencies making decisions which impact where you live?
  • How can the Federal government better ensure broad feedback and public participation when considering a new policy?
  1. The American people must be able to trust that their Government is doing everything in its power to stop wasteful practices and earn a high return on every tax dollar that is spent.  How can the government better manage public resources? 
  • What suggestions do you have to help the government achieve savings while also improving the way that government operates?
  • What suggestions do you have to improve transparency in government spending?
  1. The American people deserve a Government that is responsive to their needs, makes information readily accessible, and leverages Federal resources to help foster innovation both in the public and private sector.   How can the government more effectively work in collaboration with the public to improve services?
  • What are your suggestions for ways the government can better serve you when you are seeking information or help in trying to receive benefits?
  • In the past few years, the government has promoted the use of “grand challenges,” ambitious yet achievable goals to solve problems of national priority, and incentive prizes, where the government identifies challenging problems and provides prizes and awards to the best solutions submitted by the public.  Are there areas of public services that you think could be especially benefited by a grand challenge or incentive prize?
  • What information or data could the government make more accessible to help you start or improve your business?

Please think about these questions and send your thoughts to opengov@ostp.gov by September 23. We will post a summary of your submissions online in the future.”

The Other Side of Open is Not Closed

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dazza Greenwood at Civics.com: “Impliedly, the opposite of “open” is “closed” but the other side of open data, open API’s and open access is usually still about enabling access but only when allowed or required. Open government also needs to include adequate methods to access and work with data and other resources that are not fully open. In fact, many (most?) high value, mission critical and societally important data access is restricted in some way. If a data-set is not fully public record then a good practice is to think of it as “protected” and to ensure access according to proper controls.
As a metaphorical illustration, you could look at an open data system like a village square or agora that is architected and intended to be broadly accessible. On the other side of the spectrum, you could see a protected data system more like a castle or garrison, that is architected to be secure from intruders but features guarded gates and controlled access points in order to function.
In fact, this same conceptual approach applies well beyond data and includes everything you could consider an resource on the Internet.  In other words, any asset, service, process or other item that can exist at a URL (or URI) is a resource and can be positioned somewhere on a spectrum from openly accessible to access protected. It is easy to forget that the “R” in URL stands for “Resource” and the whole wonderful web connects to resources of every nature and description. Data – structured, raw or otherwise – is just the tip of the iceberg.
Resources on the web could be apps and other software, or large-scale enterprise network services, or just a single text file with few lines of html. The concept of a enabling access permission to “protected resources” on the web is the cornerstone of OAuth2 and is now being extended by the OpenID Connect standard, the User Managed Access protocol and other specifications to enable a powerful array of REST-based authorization possibilities…”

A Modern Approach to Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at the Sunlight Foundation blog: “Last year, a group of us who work daily with open government data — Josh Tauberer of GovTrack.us, Derek Willis at The New York Times, and myself — decided to stop each building the same basic tools over and over, and start building a foundation we could share.
noun_project_15212
We set up a small home at github.com/unitedstates, and kicked it off with a couple of projects to gather data on the people and work of Congress. Using a mix of automation and curation, they gather basic information from all over the government — THOMAS.gov, the House and Senate, the Congressional Bioguide, GPO’s FDSys, and others — that everyone needs to report, analyze, or build nearly anything to do with Congress.
Once we centralized this work and started maintaining it publicly, we began getting contributions nearly immediately. People educated us on identifiers, fixed typos, and gathered new data. Chris Wilson built an impressive interactive visualization of the Senate’s budget amendments by extending our collector to find and link the text of amendments.
This is an unusual, and occasionally chaotic, model for an open data project. github.com/unitedstates is a neutral space; GitHub’s permissions system allows many of us to share the keys, so no one person or institution controls it. What this means is that while we all benefit from each other’s work, no one is dependent or “downstream” from anyone else. It’s a shared commons in the public domain.
There are a few principles that have helped make the unitedstates project something that’s worth our time:…”

How the Internet Can Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Ben Rooney in the Wall Street Journal: “Given the response to previous attempts at opening up democracy, maybe his distrust in participatory democracy isn’t unreasonable. On coming to power in 2010 the coalition government launched a website to ask the public to nominate what laws it wanted repealed. But there was no promise that its choices would be enacted. Perhaps as a consequence there was a campaign to demand the overturning of the second law of thermodynamics. The website has since closed….

There is a precedent for this, according to Beth Noveck, who led President Obama’s Open Government Initiative. Speaking to an audience in Edinburgh recently, she pointed to the invention of the jury system by Henry II, a king of England in the 12th century.
This was a “powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries…we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance.”

What should we do about the naming deficit/surplus?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in mySociety Blog: “As I wrote in my last post, I am very concerned about the lack of comprehensible, consistent language to talk about the hugely diverse ways in which people are using the internet to bring about social and political change….My approach to finding an appropriate name was to look at the way that other internet industry sectors are named, so that I could choose a name that sits nicely next to very familiar sectoral labels….

Segmenting the Civic Power sector

Choosing a single sectoral name – Civic Power – is not really the point of this exercise. The real benefit would come from being able to segment the many projects within this sector so that they are more easy to compare and contrast.

Here is my suggested four part segmentation of the Civic Power sector…:

  1. Decision influencing organisations try to directly shape or change particular decisions made by powerful individuals or organisations.
  2. Regime changing organisations try to replace decision makers, not persuade them.
  3. Citizen Empowering organisations try to give people the resources and the confidence required to exert power for whatever purpose those people see fit, both now and in the future.
  4. Digital Government organisations try to improve the ways in which governments acquire and use computers and networks. Strictly speaking this is just a sub-category of ‘decision influencing organisation’, on a par with an environmental group or a union, but more geeky.”

See also: Open Government – What’s in a Name?

Eduardo Paes on Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mayor, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the Huffington Post: “The Internet revolution has transformed the way knowledge is disseminated and how people unite over causes. Social networks are playing a key role in this movement, just as books and the press have done over the last six centuries. During the recent demonstrations in Brazil, approximately 62 percent of the people were informed of the event via Facebook, a much higher rate than TV, which was first source of information to 14 percent of attendees, according to Ibope Institute. Three out of four agitators used social networks to round up support. As generations succeed and the digital gap narrows, these statistics could possibly rise.
This revolution is also accentuating the imperfections of the representative democracy, the only plausible alternative, as Churchill famously said. We live in an era of “Liquid Modernity” as defined by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, which describes the ephemeral nature of contemporary social interactions. Bauman says that these days society, in a similar manner to liquid, adopts various unstable forms under small amounts of pressure. They are incapable of stabilizing in a consistent form, which results in consequences to social relationships and politics. Meanwhile, political parties, bureaucracy and institutions seem to remain firmly in the 17th Century.
Democracy has to reinvent itself in accordance with this new “liquid society” where collaboration happens between many millions of people directly. Leadership is not vertical, as in the past, but horizontal. Nowadays some say following is more important than leading. Cyber culture understands open code as a principle, something the music industry has reluctantly had to learn. There is no time and space limitation for public accountability on the Internet. Creative commonality is standard and does not resemble the authoritarian style of the dead communist experience. It seems that it is no longer society’s obligation to understand legislation, it is a duty for governments to be understood by their people.”

Index: Participation and Civic Engagement

Curated on Posted on by admin

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on participation and civic engagement and was originally published in 2013.

  • Percent turnout of voting age population in 2012 U.S. Presidential election: 57.5
  • Percent turnout in 2008, 2004, 2000 elections: 62.3, 60.4, 54.2
  • Change in voting rate in U.S. from 1980 to most recent election: –29
  • Change in voting rate in Slovak Republic from 1980 to most recent election: –42, the lowest rate among democratic countries surveyed
  • Change in voting rate in Russian Federation from 1980 to most recent election: +14, the highest rate among democratic countries surveyed
  • Percent turnout in Australia as of 2011: 95, the highest rate among democratic countries surveyed
  • Percentage point difference in voting rates between high and low educated people in Australia as of 2011: 1
  • Percentage point difference in voting rates between high and low educated people in the U.S. as of 2011:  33
  • Number of Black and Hispanic U.S. voters in comparison to 2008 election: 1.7 million and 1.4 million increase
  • Number of non-Hispanic White U.S. voters in comparison to 2008 election: 2 million decrease, the only example of a race group showing a decrease in net voting from one presidential election to the next
  • Percent of Americans that contact their elected officials between elections: 10
  • Margin of victory in May 2013 Los Angeles mayoral election: 54-46
  • Percent turnout among Los Angeles citizens in May 2013 Los Angeles mayoral election: 19
  • Percent of U.S. adults that used social networking sites in 2012: 60
  • How many of which participated in a political or civic activity online: 2/3
  • Percent of U.S. social media users in 2012 that used social tools to encourage other people to take action on an issue that is important to them: 31
  • Percent of U.S. adults that belonged to a group on a social networking site involved in advancing a political or social issue in 2012: 12
  • Increase in the number of adults who took part in these behaviors in 2008: four-fold
  • Number of U.S. adults that signed up to receive alerts about local issues via email or text messaging in 2010: 1 in 5
  • Percent of U.S. adults that used digital tools digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues in 2010: 20
  • Number of Americans that talked face-to-face with neighbors about community issues in 2010: almost half
  • How many online adults that have used social tools as blogs, social networking sites, and online video as well as email and text alerts to keep informed about government activities: 1/3
  • Percent of U.S. adult internet users that have gone online for raw data about government spending and activities in 2010: 40
  • Of which how many look online to see how federal stimulus money is being spent: 1 in 5
  • Read or download the text of legislation: 22%
  • How many Americans volunteered through or for an organization at least once between September 2011 and September 2012: 64.5 million
  • Median hours spent on volunteer activities during this time: 50
  • Change in volunteer rate compared to the year before: 0.3 decline

Sources