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/chapters/part-0.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: Preface
4 | part: 0
5 | chapter: 0
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Brett Goldstein
9 | job: Former Chief Data Officer
10 | employer: City of Chicago
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/brett.png
12 | twitter: bjgol
13 | about: "Former Chief Data and Information Officer for the City of Chicago. Currently a fellow in Urban Science at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy."
14 |
15 | permalink: /preface/
16 | ---
17 |
18 | The rise of open data in the public sector has sparked innovation, driven efficiency, and fueled economic development. And in the vein of high-profile federal initiatives like Data.gov and the White House’s Open Government Initiative, more and more governments at the local level are making their foray into the field with Chief Data Officers, open data policies, and open data catalogs.
19 |
20 | While still emerging, we are seeing evidence of the transformative potential of open data in shaping the future of our cities. It’s at the city level that government most directly impacts the lives of residents—providing clean parks, fighting crime, or issuing permits to open a new business. This is where there is the biggest opportunity to use open data to reimagine the relationship between citizens and government.
21 |
22 | And as momentum grows and norms are set, we reach a critical turning point in the trajectory of the movement. As a community, we need to be reflective, mindful, and adaptive. We must take stock of what’s worked so far and what we still need to learn in order to ensure we are driving towards meaningful, sustainable outcomes.
23 |
24 | *Beyond Transparency* is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve accomplished with open data. It seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving. Through these stories, we examine what is needed to build an ecosystem in which open data can become the raw materials to drive more effective decision-making and efficient service delivery, spur economic activity, and empower citizens to take an active role in improving their own communities.
25 |
26 | ### How This Book Came to Be
27 |
28 | The idea for this book originated while I was in my role as Chief Information Officer for the City of Chicago. I was often flooded with requests of how to replicate the Chicago “success story” with open data. Some essays had been written to talk about implementations using specific vendor platforms. This was valuable, but I felt it required a broader approach. The more I thought about it, the more I came to believe that the moment was right for a “guidebook” of sorts that documented the successes and lessons learned of open civic data so far.
29 |
30 | I had become acquainted with Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, through the City of Chicago’s engagement as a Code for America Fellowship city in 2012. We had built a trusting relationship through our discussions related to Code for America’s work in Chicago, and continued to get to know each other at the ongoing stream of open government and civic innovation conferences, meetings, and events that we both frequented. As I pondered how to push forward this idea of marking a milestone in civic open data, Jen was an obvious ally.
31 |
32 | I reached out to Jen with a big idea: let’s write a book on open data. For two busy professionals, this seemed like a herculean task, but a plan came together that leveraged the resources of Code For America along with the insights of key players in the data space. Jen was enthusiastic and pulled together a team from Code for America to support the project. Within a few weeks, we had an initial list of contributors signed on. Within a few months we had chapter drafts in hand and a working outline of the book. A good idea coupled with agile execution—in many ways, the way this book was created embodies principles of the open data movement in and of itself.
33 |
34 | ### What Does This Book Seek to Do?
35 |
36 | *Beyond Transparency* is a resource for (and by) practitioners inside and outside government—from the municipal chief information officer to the community organizer to the civic-minded entrepreneur. We aim for this book to accomplish a few specific things.
37 |
38 | For a local government looking to start an open data program, we hope the lessons outlined here will help them do exactly that.
39 |
40 | We want to spark a discussion of where open data will go next—and how we, as practitioners, can be smarter, more effective, and more broadly impactful.
41 |
42 | We want to help community members (technologists and otherwise) outside of government better engage with the process of governance and improve our public institutions.
43 |
44 | And we want lend a voice to many aspects of the open data community. In this book, you’ll see perspectives from many different participants that comprise an open data ecosystem: public servants, community organizers, NGOs, technologists, designers, researchers, journalists, and citizens. With *Beyond Transparency*, we’ve brought together a diverse cross-section of the field’s top innovators and leaders to share their stories of what has been achieved with open data so far, what they’ve learned along the way, and how we can apply those lessons to realize a more promising future for America’s cities. As they look back on what’s been accomplished so far—and what is yet to come—emergent themes resonate throughout their stories.
45 |
46 | As the title of this book suggests, the community is realizing the need to look beyond the rationale of transparency and instead align open data efforts with policy objectives, applying it to solve problems that really matter and make better decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. We also hear again and again the need for citizen-centered design that borrows principles from the User Experience field to move from data that is open to data that is truly usable and accessible by the public. Many practitioners cite the need for open data standards—across various types of civic data—to increase interoperability and make impact scalable. These are just some of the ideas and lessons that emerge from the stories gathered here.
47 |
48 | As we look forward, this is an exciting point in time. We have proven the value of open data. We have shown it can be done in short order, in cities of all sizes, from Chicago to Asheville, North Carolina. And now it is up to all of us to carry on the work that has been started.
49 |
50 | ### Acknowledgments
51 |
52 | Thank you to my wife Sarah—as I continue to pile on projects, her tolerance is remarkable. Thank you to Lauren Dyson and the rest of Code for America team who helped bring this vision to fruition. Thanks to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose support laid the foundation that allowed open data in Chicago to become what it is today. And above all, thank you to the community of practitioners whose work is featured in this book. Your ingenuity, hard work, and commitment to innovation illuminate a path forward to a stronger public sphere powered by open data.
53 |
54 |
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | author:
4 | part: 1
5 | chapter: 0
6 | permalink: "/part-1/"
7 | ispart: true
8 | title: Opening Government Data
9 | ---
10 |
11 | ## Editor’s Note
12 |
13 | In the first section, we consider the challenges and outcomes of opening government data through a series of practical case studies.
14 |
15 | In Chapter 1, civic software developer Joel Mahoney tells the story of how opening government data changed the conversation around Boston’s school assignment policies, which have been a topic of debate since the 1960s. Open data, he argues, not only contributes to a more informed public discourse, but can play a key role in upholding core democratic values, like aligning policy with societal goals.
16 |
17 | Next, in Chapter 2, we turn to the City of Chicago, which pioneered one of the most comprehensive municipal open data programs in the country. Brett Goldstein, who was Chicago’s first Chief Data Officer, tells the story of building Chicago’s open data efforts from the ground up. Providing a first-hand account of the internal workings of city hall, he shares what they learned about building sustainable technical infrastructure for open data.
18 |
19 | In Chapter 3, we examine another angle of Chicago’s open data initiative. Daniel X. O’Neil, Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, has worked closely with the City of Chicago’s open data team and local open data activists to advance the city’s progress in this space. He breaks down the key components of data, policy, developers, capital, and products that have allowed a sustainable open data ecosystem to develop in Chicago.
20 |
21 | Emer Coleman—founder of the London Datastore, one of the flagship open data efforts in a major city—tells us about open data in a non-US context in Chapter 4. She gives a personal perspective on the establishment of the Datastore, the policy context that preceded it, and the challenges of data release in the public sector.
22 |
23 | Finally, we examine how open data can have big impact in smaller cities—not just highly resourced urban areas. In Chapter 5, Jonathan Feldman, Chief Information Officer of Asheville, North Carolina (population 85,000), writes about open data as a long-term investment and explores some of the challenges and opportunities specific to smaller local governments. Through a case study of how Asheville’s emerging open data efforts can save city resources, he urges other small cities to consider the pragmatics of open data.
24 |
25 |
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/chapters/part-1-chapter-01.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Open Data and Open Discourse at Boston Public Schools"
4 | part: 1
5 | chapter: 1
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Joel Mahoney
9 | job: Co-Founder
10 | employer: OpenCounter
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/joel.jpg
12 | twitter: joelmahoney
13 | about: "Joel Mahoney is a civic software architect and entrepreneur. He was a 2011 Fellow at Code for America and is the co-founder of OpenCounter."
14 |
15 | permalink: /part-1/open-data-and-open-discource-at-boston-public-schools/
16 | ---
17 |
18 | > I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.
19 |
20 | > —Abraham Lincoln
21 |
22 | ### Inside the Maze
23 |
24 | In March of 2011, the City of Boston had a problem: the *Boston Globe* had just published a special multimedia series titled “Getting In: Inside Boston’s School Assignment Maze” that offered a critical view of Boston’s school assignment policies (*Boston Globe*, 2011). The report profiled thirteen families entering the Boston public school system, and traced their hopes and frustrations as they navigated the complicated school selection process. The following quotes from interviews with the families are indicative:
25 |
26 | > I don’t have a lot of faith in the process being logical, so I just hope that in that mess we somehow get something that works out.
27 |
28 | > —Malia Grant
29 |
30 | > Just the word ‘lottery’ when it comes to schools—what, you just roll the dice and take a shot with your kid and hope for the best? That’s pretty much where we’re at.
31 |
32 | > —Steve Rousell
33 |
34 | > Ultimately, it’s possible that we will leave the city if things don’t work out the way we want them to.
35 |
36 | > —Andy Berg
37 |
38 | The report used interactive maps, school performance data, and personal stories to paint a compelling picture of the complexity of the school assignment process. It also showed that the stakes—in terms of citizen satisfaction and trust in government—were high.
39 |
40 | These complaints weren’t news to the School Department. The school assignment policies dated back to the Racial Imbalance Act of 1965, which required forced integration in Boston public schools, and provoked riots and protests throughout the city (Hoover Institution, 1998). The opposition was so persistent that it made the cover of Time Magazine in 1971. It led to a District Court ruling in 1974, which found Boston Public Schools to be unconstitutionally segregated, and imposed forced busing on the city to remedy the situation. It wasn’t until busing was abandoned in 1988 that the issue was finally resolved; by that time the school district had shrunk from 100,000 to 57,000 students, only twenty-eight percent of whom were white (Hoover Institution, 1998).
41 |
42 | What appeared to be a logistical issue—distributing a large number of students to a limited number of schools—touched on challenging social questions of race, equality, and opportunity. Should diversity be pursued at the expense of neighborhood cohesion? Should desegregation be enforced at a local level when wealthier parents could leave the city? Should cities be responsible for determining the proper balance? As indicated by the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, these questions had a long and contentious history. The simple act of sending a child to school involves some of society’s most divisive issues.
43 |
44 | By highlighting the school assignment problem in their 2011 report, the *Boston Globe* brought a longstanding issue back into the public spotlight. The report sparked high-level conversations in City Hall and made it difficult for the School Department to ignore the problem. The criticism demanded a response.
45 |
46 | ### Coding for America
47 |
48 | In January 2011, Code for America began work in Boston as part of an eleven-month engagement with the City. I was part of a five-person Fellowship team tasked with building innovative applications around public education, partnering with The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and Boston Public Schools (BPS). Our goal was to make educational services “simple, beautiful, and easy to use,” to quote my teammate Scott Silverman.
49 |
50 | Our main project was a “trust framework” that would allow developers to build innovative services on top of student information—a kind of “app store for students.” By the time the *Globe* article was published in March, however, the viability of the project was in doubt: BPS lawyers were taking a conservative stance toward the possibility of opening data, so we shifted our focus to other projects that would be less reliant on open data.
51 |
52 | After the Globe report was published, however, we sensed an opportunity to make progress with the city around the sensitive topic of open data. In an early meeting with the School Department, the Superintendent suggested that we build an application to help parents through the school discovery process. We realized that the project would be an excellent opportunity to clarify the eligibility rules in context, especially considering the existing tools—a twenty-eight-page parent handbook, and a home-grown BPS website called “What Are My Schools?”—left much to be desired. In July of 2011, we began work on a project that allows parents to enter a home address and grade level and see a personalized list of eligible schools. We called it “DiscoverBPS.”
53 |
54 | Our research showed that parents had two primary concerns: school quality and school location. To address those concerns, we included detailed information on commute distances and times (by foot and by bus), as well as MCAS scores, teacher-to-student ratios, school hours, after-school programs, and other performance metrics. We built “walkshed maps” to help parents make sense of the complicated walk-zone policy (which gave a higher precedence to students who lived within a certain radius of a school), and we added historical acceptance rate data for each grade level in each school. This latter statistic proved to be the most controversial: the School Department worried that the odds of admission would add to the sense of “gambling with your child’s future.” We countered that it was impossible for parents to make informed decisions without relevant information, and that transparent data would make the lottery process more comprehensible. Even after we received permission to publish the data, the School Department thought that the phrase “odds of admission” would be inflammatory, and asked us to refer to the statistic as “applicants per open seat” (which meant that we had to present the number as a ratio instead of a percentage). Apparently, “open data” had shades of grey.
55 |
56 | DiscoverBPS launched in November of 2011 and has received upwards of 15,000 unique visitors since then, with a substantial increase in traffic during school registration months. For context, about that same number of people register for school in Boston each year. It won praise from parents and school officials, who felt that the intuitive UI and data-driven content made the complicated school selection process more intelligible. The most significant feedback, however, came a year and a half later, when Superintendent Carol Johnson told me that DiscoverBPS had “changed the way [the School Department] relates to parents.” In thinking about the goals of Code for America—improving citizen engagement by making government services more open, efficient and participatory—I can’t imagine a much higher form of praise.
57 |
58 | ### Algorithmic Regulation
59 |
60 | It is important to note the backdrop for the Superintendent’s remark: I met her at a town hall meeting in February of 2013 where BPS officials were presenting proposals to overhaul Boston’s school assignment policies. These plans had been a topic of discussion for years, but had finally become a reality after Mayor Menino committed to resolving the problem in his “State of the City” speech in January of 2012:
61 |
62 | > The Boston Public Schools have come a long way in the last twenty years. When I became mayor, many parents considered sending their children to only a handful of schools. Today, more than 100 of our schools have waiting lists because they are so popular with parents. Our graduation rate has never been higher, and our dropout rate hasn’t been lower in two decades.
63 |
64 | > But something stands in the way of taking our system to the next level: a student assignment process that ships our kids to schools across our city. Pick any street. A dozen children probably attend a dozen different schools. Parents might not know each other; children might not play together. They can’t carpool, or study for the same tests. We won’t have the schools our kids deserve until we build school communities that serve them well.
65 |
66 | > I’m committing tonight that one year from now Boston will have adopted a radically different student assignment plan—one that puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes. I am directing Superintendent Johnson to appoint a citywide group of dedicated individuals. They will help design the plan to get us there and engage the community on this transition.
67 |
68 | > I know I have talked about changing the student assignment plan before. We have made many improvements over the years. 2012 will be the year to finish the job. (City of Boston, 2012)
69 |
70 | This directive laid out the School Department’s agenda for the next year, including the town hall meetings like the one I attended in February where BPS officials presented the new assignment proposals and solicited feedback from parents. Most of these proposals aimed to solve the busing problem by dividing the school district into smaller assignment zones (see http://bostonschoolchoice.org/explore-the-proposals/original-bps-proposals/). Boston had traditionally consisted of three zones: North, West, and East. The new proposals ranged from nine to twenty-three zones. Like any redistricting effort, there was no easy way to redraw the lines: the number of schools would still be the same, and some parents or groups would always feel short-changed. The meetings were contentious, and parents vented frustrations about the current and proposed assignment systems. And although the Superintendent’s comments were complimentary, when I was sitting in the town hall session, where a long line of parents were venting frustrations about the school selection process it was hard to believe that a website like DiscoverBPS could really have an impact on such deep and intractable problems.
71 |
72 | Interestingly, the winning proposal was not on the School Department’s original list. It was submitted by Peng Shi, a doctoral student at MIT studying the use of algorithms to address social problems, who had started attending the town hall meetings out of curiosity. Like us, he came to the conclusion that the problem centered on school quality and location, which he believed were poorly addressed by fixed geographical zones. His solution used an algorithm to ensure that each student had access to a guaranteed number of high-quality choices (as defined by the School Department using test scores and other metrics), no matter where in the city the student lived. According to a *New York Times* article on the topic by Katharine Seelye (2013), “He started saying things like, ‘What I’m hearing is, parents want close to home but they really care about quality… I’m working on something to try to meet those two goals.’ He didn’t have a political agenda.”
73 |
74 | Peng proposed his algorithm to the School Department and they included it in their proceedings. Parents were receptive to the idea, and the School Committee eventually voted it into policy in March of 2013 (the algorithm will be put into effect at the end of 2013). The decision was an historic development in a fifty-year debate.
75 |
76 | As Seelye’s article noted:
77 |
78 | > That it took a dispassionate outsider with coding skills but no political agenda to formulate the model is a measure of the complexities facing urban school districts today. Many such districts, like Boston’s, are plagued by inequities, with too few good schools and children mostly of color trapped in low-performing schools. Overcoming that legacy here has been so emotionally charged that previous attempts to redraw the zones have failed (though in 2005 the district did change the algorithm it uses to assign students). (Seelye, 2013)
79 |
80 | This description would have applied equally well to our work in Boston as Code for America Fellows.
81 |
82 | ### Data and Discourse
83 |
84 | The Boston school assignment story shows the power of open data to shift the public discourse around social issues. The Boston Globe made its case against the School Department using data made publicly available by the School Department (along with parent interviews, etc.); the School Department responded by opening up new data in DiscoverBPS, and by engaging in an open dialogue with parents around proposed solutions. This process involved town hall meetings and a website called www.bostonschoolchoice.org, which includes an entire section devoted to “Raw Data.” As Chris Osgood, co-chair of the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics noted, this data allowed third parties like Peng Shi to make informed contributions to the process. The open data served as a kind of API endpoint into the school selection debate.
85 |
86 | The Superintendent’s comment that DiscoverBPS “changed the way [the School Department] relates to parents” reflects the critical role that user-friendly interfaces to open data (such as DiscoverBPS) play in facilitating that discourse.
87 |
88 | By changing the way the school department relates to parents, DiscoverBPS also changed attitudes within the school department about the role—and value—of technology. Based on the success of version 1.0 of DiscoverBPS, the City recently retained me to develop version 2.0 of the software, which will include new data and new tools for parents. I am now continuing conversations at BPS that began in 2011, and have noticed a greater tolerance toward the use of open data, as well as toward the tools and technologies that make open data possible (the BPS IT department is currently building a RESTful API to expose a canonical repository of school and student information). Lastly, the School Department’s choice of an assignment policy that can only be administered by a computer strikes me as a hugely symbolic step toward embracing technological solutions—consider what it means that the School Department can no longer pin assignment zone maps on the wall, since the algorithm generates a unique list of eligible schools for each address.
89 |
90 | ### Conclusion
91 |
92 | Our work in Boston shows how open data can catalyze change around even the most contentious social issues. At first, we tried to affect change directly by opening up all student information in an app store, but encountered resistance around privacy issues, and had to take a roundabout approach. By instead applying open data to real and existing problems, we were able to demonstrate the immediate value of the data, and make meaningful contributions to a longstanding public debate.
93 |
94 | Two and a half years later, the School Department is investing in the continued development of DiscoverBPS, and is demonstrating a deeper understanding of the role that open data can play in governance.
95 |
96 | Democracy relies on our ability to frame policy—and regulation—around our broad societal goals. Open data plays an important role in this process by encouraging constructive public discourse, and by proving a transparent measure of progress towards those goals. Indeed, as Abraham Lincoln noted, with “real facts” even the most challenging social issues can be met.
97 |
98 | ### About the Author
99 |
100 | Joel Mahoney is an entrepreneur and former Code for America Fellow. He is the creator of DiscoverBPS.org, which helps Boston parents to find the best public schools for their kids, and the co-founder of OpenCounter.us, which helps entrepreneurs to navigate business permitting. His work on DataDonor.org explores the use of personal data as a new medium of charitable contribution.
101 |
102 | ### References
103 |
104 | * [Boston Globe Staff (2011). Getting In: Inside Boston’s School Assignment Maze [Multimedia series]. The Boston Globe. Retrieved from http://www.boston.com/news/education/specials/school_chance/index/](http://www.boston.com/news/education/specials/school_chance/index/)
105 | * [City of Boston. (2012). The Honorable Mayor Thomas M. Menino: State of the City Address, January 17, 2012. Retrieved from http://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/State_of_the_City_2012_tcm3-30137.pdf](http://www.cityofboston.gov/Images_Documents/State_of_the_City_2012_tcm3-30137.pdf)
106 | * [Hoover Institution, Stanford University (1998). Busing’s Boston Massacre. Policy Review, 98. Retrieved from http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7768](http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/7768)
107 | * [Seelye, Katherine Q. (2013, March 12). No Division Required in This School Problem. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/education/no-division-required-in-this-school-problem.html?_r=0](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/education/no-division-required-in-this-school-problem.html?_r=0)
108 |
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: Building a Smarter Chicago
4 | chapter: 3
5 | part: 1
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Dan X O'Neil
9 | job: Executive Director
10 | employer: Smart Chicago Collaborative
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/daniel.png
12 | twitter: danxoneil
13 | about: "Making lives better in Chicago through technology. Former co-founder of EveryBlock."
14 |
15 | permalink: "/part-1/building-a-smarter-chicago/"
16 | featured: true
17 | ---
18 |
19 | ### Introduction
20 |
21 | As the open data and open government movement continues, there is a lot of talk about building local ecosystems for the work. The general idea is that there has to be a mildly magic combination of data, policy, developers, capital, and products to enable the kind of growth that is necessary to take the movement to the next level—where there is a mature market for open government products that serve real community needs and lead to sustainable revenue.
22 |
23 | The thing about building an ecosystem is that when it is done deliberately, it can be a slog. Building a developer community from scratch, convincing local government to publish data, getting venture capitalists to take a look at open government projects—all of this is tough work that takes time.
24 |
25 | By looking at the Chicago example, however, we can see that there’s often more built than it first seems. The components can be found, in varying degrees, in any unit of government. The trick is to find, cobble, and congeal these pieces together.
26 |
27 | What follows is an illustrative, incomplete, and idiosyncratic look at the ecosystem in Chicago. It is meant to provide a thumbnail take on how the ecosystem developed here, while sparking fires elsewhere.
28 |
29 | ### Data: An Era of Incidental Transparency
30 |
31 | The story starts with Citizen ICAM (Information Collection for Automated Mapping), the granddaddy of all crime mapping applications, created by the Chicago Police Department in May 1995. I wrote about this system back in 2006 because I wanted to understand the archaeology of this distinctly unique (and relatively difficult to use) interface (O’Neil, 2006). You can learn a lot about software by its backstory. Here’s the first sentence of a July 1996 National Institute of Justice report on Citizen ICAM:
32 |
33 | > To better understand the nature and extent of criminal and social problems in the community and improve allocation of resources, a growing number of crime control and prevention organizations are turning to computerized mapping. (Rich, 1996)
34 |
35 | The impetus behind the project (“Citizen” is the first word in its name) was the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) program. Here’s another snip from the 1996 report:
36 |
37 | > ICAM was developed as part of CPD’s far-reaching and ambitious community policing strategy. Unlike many other community-policing programs that are limited to a single unit in the department, the Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) is department-wide. The strategic plan for reinventing CPD describes CAPS as a “wholesale transformation of the department, from a largely centralized, incident-driven, crime suppression agency to a more decentralized, customer-driven organization dedicated to solving problems, preventing crime, and improving the quality of life in each of Chicago’s neighborhoods.
38 |
39 | > In fact, CAPS is really a city program with strong support from the Mayor’s office and close involvement of city agencies, which have been directed to give top priority to “CAPS service requests” that affect crime and neighborhood safety. (Rich, 1996)
40 |
41 | This twenty-year-old project is a model for where we need to be now—and where the movement seems to be heading. It starts with deep input from residents to form a “customer-driven organization.”
42 |
43 | In the technology world, we call these people “users.”
44 |
45 | Adrian Holovaty’s ChicagoCrime.org—widely considered a major impetus in the open data movement—simply would not have existed without Citizen ICAM (Holovaty, 2008). At the same time, ChicagoCrime.org was certainly not well-formed public data. For instance, all data was retrieved by scraping with obscure URL calls that ignored the user interface, which limited searches to a quarter-mile radius.
46 |
47 | Another example is transit data “published” by the Chicago Transit Authority in the context of their proprietary Bus Tracker system. I covered this extensively in a January 2009 blog post (O’Neil, 2009). The upshot is that Harper Reed scraped all data driving the app, cached it, and served it to developers. This led to a blossoming of transit-focused apps.
48 |
49 | The culmination of this work is the publication of the CTA’s own API, a document wherein Harper and I are explicitly called out for helping them develop it:
50 |
51 | > Special thanks go to Harper Reed and Dan O’Neil for their support and encouragement, and to the independent development community, for showing such great interest in developing applications with CTA data, leading to the creation of this official API. Thank you. (Chicago Transit Authority, 2011)
52 |
53 | This is the kind of inside/outside game that is also essential to the ecosystem. You have to work with government institutions to make their data fluency and data policy better.
54 |
55 | A last example of early data in Chicago (and perhaps the first explicitly conscious publication of data in the city) is the wealth of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data published by the City of Chicago. This was another early reason why ChicagoCrime (and, by extension, EveryBlock) could exist. Their policy was formalized in July 2007, but the data had been available long before that (City of Chicago, 2007).
56 |
57 | The first section of their documentation, “Data Sharing Principles,” has the idea that public information should be public: “Wherever possible, direct requestors to publicly available internet sources of map information.”
58 |
59 | This is the moment when the governmental provision of data goes from incidental to essential. Before that magic moment, it’s important for developers and citizens to look harder for data published in plain sight.
60 |
61 | ### Policy: Enlightened Self-Interest Meets the Movement
62 |
63 | As a co-founder of EveryBlock, I spent four years (2007 to 2011) working with sixteen municipalities on publishing data. I saw some fundamental patterns of open data policy development that held true here in Chicago.
64 |
65 | First off, I can’t emphasize the power of examples enough. In December 2007, I was part of a meeting of open data advocates in Sebastopol, California. The mission was “to develop a more robust understanding of why open government data is essential to democracy.”
66 |
67 | The output was the “8 Principles of Open Government Data” (Open Government Working Group, 2007). This simple document was a powerful, unimpeachable tool that I used every time I worked with government. It made a significant difference because it gave government-based open data advocates something to point to when they were in their internal meetings. This support of isolated pockets of policymakers was one important pattern I saw here in Chicago as well. Building relationships with public, sharable resources, like the “8 Principles,” allowed for shared trust and shared work. This pattern of template sharing is something that works.
68 |
69 | There were nascent open data plans and products in the Daley administration, including Chicago Works For You, a project I worked on as a consultant for the City in 2005. Micah Sifry discussed this project in a 2009 article titled “A See-Through Society”:
70 |
71 | > People are eager for access to information, and public officials who try to stand in the way will discover that the internet responds to information suppression by routing around the problem. Consider the story of a site you’ve never seen, ChicagoWorksForYou.com. In June 2005, a team of Web developers working for the City of Chicago began developing a site that would take the fifty-five different kinds of service requests that flow into the city’s 311 database—items like pothole repairs, tree-trimming, garbage-can placement, building permits, and restaurant inspections—and enable users to search by address and “map what’s happening in your neighborhood.” The idea was to showcase city services at the local level. (Sifry, 2009)
72 |
73 | Early failures often lead the way to the next policy win—that’s another pattern.
74 |
75 | Hot topics that receive public attention are fecund areas for open data policy. In Chicago, Tax Increment Financing is a big topic, mainly because it has been an opaque financial instrument, handling huge amounts of money with very little public information about how the system works.
76 |
77 | It’s no accident that a number of Aldermen sponsored the TIF Sunshine Ordinance in 2009 (Brooks & O’Neil, 2009). Pressure and heat get results.
78 |
79 | The last pattern has perhaps led to the most good: when the chief executive of a unit of government wants to make a big push. Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York won an unusual third term at the same time he pushed for BigApps; San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was planning a run for governor at the same time he worked to open DataSF; and our own Mayor Rahm Emanuel embraced open data when he made a move from the White House to Chicago City Hall.
80 |
81 | This is the pattern of powerful, enlightened elected officials in the executive branch deciding that open data is good policy. They back this up by empowering people, like former Chicago CIO Brett Goldstein and CTO John Tolva, to develop and implement that policy.
82 |
83 | It’s the unique and aggressive policy of publishing data that has brought the movement further here in Chicago.
84 |
85 | ### Developers: Civic Activism
86 |
87 | Every city has its own history and its own approach to the world, and I think that is expressed in its technological history as well. Chicago has been a center of civic activism and individual public creativity for decades.
88 |
89 | It can be traced as far back as Jane Addams, who created the Hull House in 1889. It was the first “settlement house,” cooperative residences for middle-class “settlers” in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods that aimed to reduce inequality in urban areas (Wade, 2004). She was also a tireless scholar who studied the geographical distribution of typhoid fever and found that it was the working poor who suffered most from the illness.
90 |
91 | Chicago is the place where the drive for common standards, like the eight-hour workday, was fought (Jentz, n.d.). It was a center for the battle against mortgage redlining (the practice of denying or raising prices for mortgages that has played a role in the decay of cities). Activists used data to understand the predicament and prove their case.
92 |
93 | The General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is a recent national example of success in putting civic data to use for the public good. Everyone loves CTA bus tracker apps, but few people know that the installation of the GPS satellite technology making that possible is the result of a lawsuit brought by a group associated with the Americans Disabled for Accessible Public Transit (Chicago Transit Authority, n.d.). Their case, Access Living et al. v. Chicago Transit Authority, required “installation of audio-visual equipment on buses to announce bus stop information to riders who have visual impairments or are deaf or hard of hearing” (Equip for Equality, n.d.). When you hear the loudspeaker system announce the next street where the bus is stopping, you have de facto data activists to thank.
94 |
95 | This is the place where saxophonists rise from the stage, blare out a ten-minute solo, and calmly fade back into the band. It’s the place where slam poetry was conceived—individual poets audaciously grabbing the mic for three minutes and getting judged by the crowd. It’s also where improv comedy—with its focus on ensemble and fast thinking—was invented.
96 |
97 | These are threads for us in the civic innovation movement here in Chicago. I believe they’re embedded in the work. They form examples for us to follow—the quiet humility of the worker in the crowd, the developer among the people.
98 |
99 | You can find recitations of particular apps using specific datasets anywhere. Just remember that every city has unique cultural and technological histories. This is the essence of an ecosystem, and it’s why they are local.
100 |
101 | It’s one thing to recognize history and another to build a local movement from it. Here are some of the entities that have helped form and accelerate the work:
102 |
103 | * Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates was an early-incarnation open data group that led the way (Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates, 2007).
104 | * Independent Government Observers Task Force was a 2008 non-conference, where many of the leaders of the movement worked together (Independent Government Observers Task Force, 2008).
105 | * Open Government Chicago(-land) is a meetup group started by Joe Germuska (Open Government Chicago(-land), 2013).
106 | * Open Gov Hack Nights are weekly meetings that have been critical to accelerating the pace of development (Open Gov Hack Night, n.d.).
107 | * Digital.CityofChicago.org is a publication at the center of city policy and examples (“Release All the Data,” 2013).
108 |
109 | ### Capital: Philanthropy Leads, Capital Must Follow
110 |
111 | Without money, there is no sustainability.
112 |
113 | As an ecosystem matures, it finds ways to adapt and grow. In technology and data, growing means capital. In Chicago, a main source of capital currently comes from philanthropic sources, though there are some stirrings in the market.
114 |
115 | The first open government data apps contest—Apps for Metro Chicago—was primarily funded by the MacArthur Foundation (O’Brien, 2011). The contest was an important moment in the ecosystem—it was the first time that government and developers were brought together in the context of a project with cash prizes.
116 |
117 | The Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology, is funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. Additional funding came through the federal government’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program, a program designed to expand access and adoption of broadband opportunities in communities across America (National Telecommunications and Information Administration, n.d.).
118 |
119 | EveryBlock was funded by a $1 million grant from the Knight Foundation, and then was acquired by MSNBC. This was a test of using philanthropic money and open source as a basis for a business. There have not been many examples since then. This is a problem that needs to be fixed—we need more experimentation, more value.
120 |
121 | A digital startup hub in Chicago, known as 1871, has a number of civic startups in their space, including Smart Chicago, Tracklytics, Purple Binder, and Data Made. As these organizations deliver more value, the entire civic innovation sector will attract more capital.
122 |
123 | ### Products: The Next Frontier
124 |
125 | In order for the ecosystem to be self-sustaining, we have to create popular, scalable, and revenue-generating products with civic data.
126 |
127 | Developers in Chicago are making a renewed focus on users. An example is the Civic User Testing Group run by Smart Chicago (Smart Chicago Collaborative, n.d.). We’ve spent years trying to get regular residents to participate in the product development process, and now we have more than five hundred people signed up in our first six months.
128 |
129 | We have to do this—go beyond anecdote, beyond the cool app that lacks real traction, into creating business models and datasets that add value. We need to make products and services that people can’t live without.
130 |
131 | This will require a mix of proprietary solutions, open source code, and shared standards. Companies need to follow viable product strategies—moving from one-off apps to sustainable systems. Interoperable data is a critical component to making this happen.
132 |
133 | The good thing about this is that there are models to follow in other successful companies right here in Chicago. SitterCity is a vast consumer success story. OpenTable, Groupon, and GrubHub are all Chicago companies that found ways to reduce transaction friction in various markets.
134 |
135 | They did this, in the main, with a strict attention to customers. In the civic innovation sector of the technology industry, we call those people “residents.” When you are serving people and make popular products, you are necessarily serving a civic need.
136 |
137 | We’re beginning to focus on this work here in Chicago by adding value to civic data with unstructured public content, by creating systems around predictive analytics, and making baseline services, like Open311, that can serve future product needs.
138 |
139 | ### What’s Your Ecosystem?
140 |
141 | This is a short take on a complicated subject that, in the end, has to be completely local. Hopefully, it gives some specific examples of how we’ve built an open data ecosystem in Chicago and points to how far we have to go.
142 |
143 | Chicago has contributed, in our small way, but we have to be measured by how we contribute to the entirety of the internet, rather than this civic innovation subset. We’re ready to keep going, and we’re excited to share our models with the rest of the country and the world.
144 |
145 | ### About the Author
146 |
147 | Daniel X. O’Neil is the Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to making lives better in Chicago through technology. Prior to Smart Chicago, O’Neil was a co-founder of and People Person for EveryBlock, a neighborhood news and discussion site that served 16 cities until February 2013. He’s a co-founder of the OpenGovChicago meetup group.
148 |
149 | ### References
150 |
151 | * [Brooks, M. & O’Neil, D. X. (2009, August 5). Chicago’s First Attempt at TIF Sunshine Falls Short. Progress Illinois. Retrieved from http://www.progressillinois.com/2009/8/5/columns/tif-sunshine-review](http://www.progressillinois.com/2009/8/5/columns/tif-sunshine-review)
152 | * [Chicago Transit Authority. (2011, June 16). Bus Tracker API Documentation. Retrieved from http://www.transitchicago.com/asset.aspx?AssetId=2917](http://www.transitchicago.com/asset.aspx?AssetId=2917)
153 | * [Chicago Transit Authority. (n.d.) Open Data from CTA. Retrieved from http://www.transitchicago.com/data/](http://www.transitchicago.com/data/)
154 | * [City of Chicago, Department of Business and Information Services. (2007, July). GIS Data Sharing Policies and Procedures. Retrieved from http://www.cityofchicago.org/dam/city/depts/doit/general/GIS/GIS_Data/Data_Sharing/GIS_DataSharingPolicy.pdf](http://www.cityofchicago.org/dam/city/depts/doit/general/GIS/GIS_Data/Data_Sharing/GIS_DataSharingPolicy.pdf)
155 | * [City of Chicago. (2013, April 1). Release All the Data. Chicago Digital. Retrieved from http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/release-all-the-data/](http://digital.cityofchicago.org/index.php/release-all-the-data/)
156 | * [Equip for Equality. (n.d.). What is the Access Living et al. v. Chicago Transit Authority Class Action Settlement Agreement? Retrieved from http://www.equipforequality.org/programs/transportationrights/ctasettlement.php](http://www.equipforequality.org/programs/transportationrights/ctasettlement.php)
157 | * [Holovaty, A. (2008, January 31). In memory of chicagocrime.org. Retrieved from http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/](http://www.holovaty.com/writing/chicagocrime.org-tribute/)
158 | * [Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates. (2007). The Business Case for Real-time Sharing of Government Data. Retrieved from http://downloads2.esri.com/campus/uploads/library/pdfs/132035.pdf](http://downloads2.esri.com/campus/uploads/library/pdfs/132035.pdf)
159 | * [Independent Government Observers Task Force. (2008). Independent Government Observers Task Force: A Non-Conference. Retrieved from http://igotf.org/](http://igotf.org/)
160 | * [Jentz, J. B. (n.d.). Eight-Hour Movement. The Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved from http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/417.html](http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/417.html)
161 | * [National Telecommunications and Information Administration. (n.d.). BroadbandUSA. Retrieved from http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/](http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/)
162 | * [O’Brien, J. (2011, June 24). Apps for Metro Chicago Illinois Competition Launched. Chicago Tonight. Retrieved from http://blogs.wttw.com/moreonthestory/2011/06/24/apps-for-metro-chicago-illinois-competition-launched/](http://blogs.wttw.com/moreonthestory/2011/06/24/apps-for-metro-chicago-illinois-competition-launched/)
163 | * [O’Neil, D. X. (2009, January). Harper Reed: “The power is not the mashup. It’s the data.” Retrieved from http://www.derivativeworks.com/2009/01/h.html](http://www.derivativeworks.com/2009/01/h.html)
164 | * [O’Neil, D. X. (2006, February 18). History of Citizen ICAM. Retrieved from http://www.derivativeworks.com/2006/02/history_of_citi.html](http://www.derivativeworks.com/2006/02/history_of_citi.html)
165 | * [Open Gov Hack Night. (n.d.). Open Gov Hack Night Registration, Chicago. Retrieved from http://opengovhacknight.org/](http://opengovhacknight.org/)
166 | * [Open Government Chicago(-land). (2013). Open Government Chicago(-land). Retrieved from http://www.meetup.com/OpenGovChicago/](http://www.meetup.com/OpenGovChicago/)
167 | * [Open Government Working Group. (2007, December 8). 8 Principles of Open Government Data. Retrieved from https://public.resource.org/8_principles.html](https://public.resource.org/8_principles.html)
168 | * [Rich, T. F., National Institute of Justice. (1996). The Chicago Police Department’s Information Collection for Automated Mapping (ICAM) Program. Retrieved from https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/icamprog.pdf](https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/icamprog.pdf)
169 | * [Sifry, M. L. (2009, January 15). A See-Through Society. Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2009. Retrieved from http://www.danielxoneil.com/2009/01/15/columbia-journalism-review-a-see-through-society/](http://www.danielxoneil.com/2009/01/15/columbia-journalism-review-a-see-through-society/)
170 | * [Smart Chicago Collaborative. (n.d.). Civic User Testing Group. Retrieved from http://cutgroup.smartchicagoapps.org/](http://cutgroup.smartchicagoapps.org/)
171 | * [Wade, Louise Carrol (2004). “Settlement Houses.” Encyclopedia of Chicago. Chicago Historical Society. Retrieved from http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1135.html](http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1135.html)
172 |
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2 | layout: chapter
3 | author: someone
4 | part: 2
5 | chapter: 0
6 | permalink: /part-2/
7 | ispart: true
8 | title: Building on Open Data
9 | ---
10 |
11 | ## Editor’s Note
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 | Once government data has been released, what can it be used for and by whom? What are some of the emergent, and perhaps unexpected, applications? In this section, we hear from different users of open data—including entrepreneurs, journalists, community organizers, government employees, and established companies—and discuss examples of what these stakeholders have done with and learned from open government data.
16 |
17 | We begin with Chapter 6 by Brightscope co-founders Ryan and Mike Alfred. Their story starts not with open data, but one step before that. In order to build their business, they worked with federal agencies to release and digitize scores of government records. Along the way, they not only created a successful company but also catalyzed an open data-friendly culture within their partner agencies. They share lessons learned for other entrepreneurs seeking to build businesses around government data and discuss the importance of data standards moving forward to reduce barrier of entry to new startups in this space.
18 |
19 | In Chapter 7, we hear from another civic startup, SmartProcure, which has developed a model for transforming FOIA into a government improvement platform. Founder Jeffrey Rubenstein discusses how by aggregating, standardizing, and digitizing government purchasing data across jurisdictions, open data can actually become a tool to increase collaboration between government agencies and help them make more informed decisions.
20 |
21 | In Chapter 8, we hear from Chicago-based reporter Elliott Ramos about a journalist’s relationship with open public data. He describes how the surge of government data made available under Chicago’s new open data initiative changed the way he reported on local stories and allowed for new kinds of storytelling to emerge.
22 |
23 | Steve Spiker is the Director of Research for the Urban Strategies Council, an organization that has been supporting innovation in Oakland for almost twenty-six years and often uses government-held data for projects. In Chapter 9, he writes about how the city of Oakland’s initial foray in open data has impacted the work of local community organizers and researchers—while also cautioning against overly optimistic views of an “open government” based on the release of limited data.
24 |
25 | Finally, in Chapter 10, Bibiana McHugh of Portland, Oregon’s TriMet agency writes about her experience developing a data standard for transit information with Google that is now used by hundreds of governments worldwide to make it as easy to get public transit directions as driving directions. She discusses the importance of public-private partnerships in bringing open government data to the platforms and services where people are already going for information.
26 |
27 |
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2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Pioneering Open Data Standards: The GTFS Story"
4 | chapter: 10
5 | part: 2
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Bibiana McHugh
9 | job: IT Manager
10 | employer: Trimet
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/bibiana.png
12 | twitter: trimet
13 | about: "IT Manager of Geographic Information Systems for Portland's Trimet public transit agency. Open data evangelist."
14 |
15 | featured: true
16 |
17 | permalink: "/part-2/pioneering-open-data-standards-the-gtfs-story/"
18 | ---
19 |
20 | In 2005, I was working at TriMet, the public transit agency in Portland, Oregon, as an IT manager for Geographic Information Services. Earlier that year, while traveling, I found it very frustrating to try and find transit directions in the unfamiliar cities I was visiting. This was especially true when transportation agencies that provided differing services or areas were not consolidated. It was much easier at that time to get driving directions from popular online mapping services, and I realized this was probably encouraging car usage over public transit.
21 |
22 | In my role at TriMet, I worked with transit data every day, so I knew such data was available and the potential was there. We offered our own online transit trip planning tool, as many agencies do. The trouble was, the average citizen often didn’t know where to go to find this information, especially if he or she was unfamiliar with the local transit system. The general public was used to going to certain online destinations for driving directions—Google Maps, MapQuest, and Yahoo were all widely used at the time—but the data they needed to plan a trip using public transit wasn’t available where they were looking.
23 |
24 | ### Bringing Data to the Citizens
25 |
26 | As a public servant who had worked to improve public transit for nearly a decade, I saw this as a missed opportunity to promote public transit to an audience that might not be aware of the option. When I returned to Portland, I made it my mission to make it just as easy to get transit directions as it is to get driving directions from anywhere in the world. I reached out to several companies to inquire about the idea of integrating Portland’s public transit data into their existing navigation products in order to allow users to plan transit trips.
27 |
28 | After some persistent follow-up with no response, I contacted Jeremy Faludi after reading his article “A Call for Open-Source Public Transit Mapping” (Faludi, 2005). He introduced me to Chris Harrelson, a software engineer at Google who had the same idea in mind. He and a group of like-minded volunteers had been working on building out a prototype of Google Transit during their twenty percent flexible project time. They had the idea and the basic infrastructure. What they needed to continue was a government partner who could provide service data (routes, timetables, etc.).
29 |
30 | In July of 2005, we got together with the team at Google to discuss the project. At first, some of the TriMet staff were hesitant to hand over the data—it’s very complex spatial-temporal data that is difficult to handle correctly. But when we saw that Chris’ team knew what they were doing, we were very impressed. Tim McHugh, TriMet’s Chief Technology Officer, generated the initial data export that same night—the beta version of what would eventually become the first widely used transit data standard.
31 |
32 | TriMet already had an existing centralized enterprise database that housed all of the relevant data already pieced together in good form. Having this foundation in place was significant—only because of this was it possible to write an initial script in less than an hour that would export the data required for transit trip planning. We published this schedule data in the form of CSV files based on our existing internal database schema and shared it with Google, as well as publicly on our website, so that any third-party developer could access and use it.
33 |
34 | The other component was that our agency leadership gave us support to move ahead with the experiment. Carolyn Young, our executive director, gave us permission to open the data almost as soon as we had the idea. We were lucky that our agency has a long history of supporting open source and open data. TriMet’s TransitTracker™ (next arrival times) feed was already open, so outside developers were already using TriMet open data prior to 2005. We had had an open source-friendly procurement policy in place for a decade. These factors meant that the TriMet culture was primed to be supportive of this type of initiative, which allowed us to move quickly.
35 |
36 | On December 7, 2005—less than five months after our initial conference call—the first version of Google Transit was launched with TriMet data that covered the Portland Metro area (Garg, 2005). The launch received an overwhelmingly positive response. As Google Transit went live for the first time, word first spread across Europe. According to the Google Transit Team, they watched in amazement as the number of hits to the site increased exponentially. By morning, as the US awoke, the counts were reaching staggering numbers, even by Google standards.
37 |
38 | The day of the launch, I did numerous interviews with local TV stations, newspapers, and even several radio stations. It seemed we were onto something important—something that people cared about. We knew we needed to get other agencies on board so that this could expand beyond Portland.
39 |
40 | ### Scaling Up
41 |
42 | We had held a workshop just before the launch of the Google Transit beta, in an attempt to get other agencies and developers on board with the effort to open and standardize this data. Multiple transit agencies participated—including representatives from Seattle, Chicago, and New York, among others—but many were apprehensive. A common concern was that providing data in the standard open format wouldn’t benefit the agency; it would only benefit Google.
43 |
44 | However, this resistance turned around as soon as everyone saw the positive public response to the launch announcement. Agencies saw that they could benefit from being involved—not just by getting good publicity for their agency, but also by offering a service that was clearly in demand by the public. Department heads started calling us, asking, “How can we be next?”
45 |
46 | To scale up to more cities, it was essential that transit agencies standardize and publish their schedule data so that it could be integrated into third-party apps the same way across jurisdictions. We worked with Google and with several of the interested agencies to develop this standard format, then called the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), based closely off of the first series of data that TriMet had published.
47 |
48 | We chose to keep the files in CSV format. We wanted it to be as simple as possible so that agencies could easily edit the data, using any editor. This approach received substantial criticism—it was even called “technically old-fashioned and brittle” (KiZoom, 2006)—but it was important to us to keep the barrier to participation low so that even smaller, less-resourced agencies could join in. As Google Transit team member Joe Hughes put it in his original welcome message on the GTFS discussion list:
49 |
50 | > We chose CSV as the basis for the specification because it’s easy to view and edit using spreadsheet programs and text editors, which is helpful for smaller agencies. It’s also straightforward to generate from most programming languages and databases, which is good for publishers of larger feeds. (Hughes, 2007)
51 |
52 | In September 2006, Google Transit launched in five more cities that began publishing their service data in the nascent standard format: Tampa; Honolulu; Eugene, Oregon; Pittsburgh; and Seattle. Shortly thereafter, we published the first version of the GTFS spec under a Creative Commons License (“What is GTFS?” 2012).
53 |
54 | Within a year, Google Transit launched with fourteen more transit agencies in the United States and expanded internationally to Japan. As of July 2013, Google Transit has launched in hundreds of cities worldwide (“Google Maps: Transit: Cities Covered,” n.d.). Detailed transit instructions, in addition to driving directions on Google Maps, is available in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.
55 |
56 | In early 2007, TriMet and other transit agencies began to publish their transit data openly, in a more formal and publicized way, with official sites for developer resources. TriMet and San Francisco’s BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, were the first agencies, and others soon followed as the benefits became increasingly apparent (“Developer Resources,” 2013; “For Developers,” 2013).
57 |
58 | TriMet’s core business is not software development. By making our data open, we were able to leverage external resources to bring benefits to the public. Making transit data publicly available and collaborating with a community of software developers has resulted in hundreds of useful and popular transit applications for TriMet customers and many others. Many have all been developed by third parties offering a wide range of creative and useful tools available on multiple platforms for a variety of users. When I asked Tim McHugh about why he supported opening our data to third-party developers, he explained:
59 |
60 | > Due to the large proliferation of transit applications on mobile platforms, the market is able to react quickly to changes and to fill gaps in service. This is something that one government IT department could not develop or support with the same level of spontaneity and flexibility. (McHugh, personal communication, 2013)
61 |
62 | One of the first initiatives President Obama introduced was an open government initiative (“About Open Government,” n.d.). This resulted in Data.gov, a resource for software developers and a resource for applications in support of open data and open source software. This movement has spread to many cities, states, and countries, bringing many benefits to the public. Having already released open data in transit put us in a good position to respond quickly to the mandate and take advantage of this new momentum from the top.
63 |
64 | In addition to online groups, forums, and mailing lists, other sites, like the GTFS Data Exchange (www.gtfs-data-exchange.com), began to emerge to establish communities around the standard and facilitate wide adoption in the industry. Companies that offer support for the production and maintenance for GTFS began to fill an important void in the industry. GTFS began to generate business and business incentives.
65 |
66 | ### Why Standards Matter for Cities
67 |
68 | I believe there are several important ingredients that made the GTFS initiative successful:
69 |
70 | * A collaborative team that started small and designed for a very specific use.
71 | * Releasing the transit data specification in an open standard; the simplicity of the specification and format.
72 | * A tangible business incentive for the transit agencies and for private partners to participate.
73 | * The contributions and involvement from the worldwide community of users.
74 |
75 | The biggest advantage of being part of the GTFS standard for agencies is that their information appears in a global set of search products that are easy to use and visited by millions and millions of people every day. People who do not know a city well, are visiting, or are simply unaware of the agency’s services, can benefit and find alternatives to driving. Regular public transit riders benefit from being able to find transit information in a familiar user interface and in the context of other useful information. It’s about providing better information and service delivery for citizens, which is ultimately aligned with any agency’s mission.
76 |
77 | This all comes at a low cost for the city. At TriMet, our process is automated, so there is very little overhead. TriMet has four major service changes a year, in addition to minor changes and adjustments in between. We may update and publish our GTFS data as frequently as twice a month. TriMet has not incurred any direct costs for this specific project, except resource time, which is a very small investment in comparison to the returns.
78 |
79 | Now that agencies have made GTFS freely available as open data, hundreds of applications have spawned worldwide. We found that by making our data easily and openly accessible, developers are getting very creative and expanding its use. This is not only beneficial because it expands the number of product offerings available, but it can also have emergent economic benefits for developers and the communities they live in. In addition, because the standard allows for interoperability between cities, applications built to serve one city can be readily deployed to serve other cities for a much lower cost and effort than if the data wasn’t standardized.
80 |
81 | Early on in the adoption of GTFS, it was suggested that transit agencies charge fees for their GTFS data. However, it became apparent that the return on investment (ROI) was far greater than potential sales on the data. In addition, Public Records requests reminded agencies that making sought-after data openly available was a far better solution than addressing many requests individually. Some developers resorted to screen-scraping the data off transit sites, which was not a stable method that ensured access to current and accurate customer information. It became apparent that open data in a standard format was the solution that was in the best interest of the public.
82 |
83 | ### Lessons Learned for Scalable Standards
84 |
85 | Civic data standards are not just limited to the realm of public transit. Data is a central component of every facet of public service, and there is an opportunity for standards in many of them. Emergent efforts include those like Open311, a standard format for civic issue reporting; LIVES, a format for restaurant inspection data; and House Facts, a standard for residential building inspection data. Lessons from our work developing GTFS can help inform how to build a truly scalable and open data standard for cities.
86 |
87 | A key to the success of GTFS was that we built around a real use case. We saw a real problem and a way to solve it with data. Because the standard clearly linked to a real-life problem, we were able to articulate a real ROI for adoption. It’s important to take the time to think through all the different stakeholders and how they can benefit from participation. Don’t underestimate the value of publicity as a tool when pushing to get those first adopters on board. Public agencies are usually accustomed to getting negative media coverage when something goes wrong and no coverage when something goes right. The chance to get positive press for the good work they are doing is often a powerful incentive. It was game changing when TriMet gained national attention at the launch of Google Transit.
88 |
89 | Working with a well-known national partner to integrate the data can provide a tremendous amount of the momentum needed to succeed. Working with Google enabled us to show scalable value quickly, as well as gain attention from the association with their brand. We could immediately show national, and even worldwide, relevance through integration with Google’s existing widely used products.
90 |
91 | However, it’s important not to conflate the identity of an open standard with the brand of a corporate partner. While we engaged other open source developers to build apps on the standard and created partnerships with industry vendors who supplied transit data services to provide standards-compliant export functionality for their customers, we received pushback: agencies didn’t want to be perceived as giving their data to Google exclusively, and developers were reluctant to develop off of a standard that had Google in the name. We eventually changed the name from Google Transit Feed Specification to General Transit Feed Specification—and the effect was transformative. It greatly reduced resistance from software vendors; proponents of existing transit data standards; companies that assembled and resold public data; and transit agencies who were worried about losing control of their data.
92 |
93 | In addition to a national partner, the involvement of other developers and partners (including civic hackers, other cities, and larger vendors) is crucial for scalability and neutrality of the standard. Be agile and evolve to support other entities and applications.
94 |
95 | It’s amazing that GTFS has since been adopted relatively quickly on a worldwide platform, but it’s even more amazing to think it has been adopted worldwide voluntarily. Apparent and persuasive ROIs, its unpretentious and evolving nature, and its supporting community are all key growth factors.
96 |
97 | ### Standards for Better Public Service
98 |
99 | Why did we do all this? I believe it comes back to the core meaning of the term “public service.” It is about providing the best experience possible to our citizens. At TriMet, we believe it should be just as easy for our customers to plan transit trips as it is to get driving instructions. Opening up this data to allow for wider use and integration with existing services is putting a new face on public transportation and reaching a much wider audience than we as a single local agency could ever hope to. Contrary to speculation that third-party transit applications are drawing attention away from transit agencies and their brand, TriMet is finding that many applications are reaching a broader audience. They direct potential customers to more comprehensive information on an agency’s site that may otherwise be unknown.
100 |
101 | We still offer our own TriMet trip planner, as we feel it is our responsibility to provide that service to our customers, but Google Transit, Bing Maps, and all the other apps that developers have built using this data, offer our customers another way to plan their trips with different options and features. GTFS lets us meets citizens where they already are and builds interoperability across municipalities as it expands to more cities.
102 |
103 | The next logical step after GTFS was developing a specification for real-time transit data in addition to schedule data. TriMet, MBTA, BART, and MTS worked with Google on a new specification for real-time transit data, not just scheduled: the General Transit Feed Specification-realtime or GTFS-RT (“What is GTFS-realtime?” 2012). This information is very beneficial to our customers, and wide adoption is growing. We look forward to seeing the impact of civic data standards as they expand to other areas of transit and public service.
104 |
105 | As Chris Harrelson has said:
106 |
107 | > It’s perhaps easy to jump to the conclusion that Google is the hero in this story, in the typical role of the innovator who overcomes the inefficiencies of the past, but this is really not true in this case. This is a success story about a new model of cooperation in order to solve a problem that cannot be addressed directly with either market forces or a classic government solution. Everyone had an equally important role to play, and without TriMet and other government advocates, this story would not be possible. (Harrelson, personal communication, 2013)
108 |
109 | GTFS began with a single public agency and single private company working together to solve a common problem creatively. The extensive community of agencies and GTFS users continue to collaborate on evolving the standard to meet the requirements of many more applications. The end result is that it is now just as easy to get transit directions as it is to get driving directions from nearly anywhere in the world.
110 |
111 | ### About the Author
112 |
113 | Bibiana McHugh has worked in TriMet’s Information Technology Department since 1997 and currently leads a team of innovative web developers and analysts as the IT Manager of Geographic Information Systems and Location-Based Services. She leads several open data and open source software initiatives including opentripplanner.org, maps.trimet.org, rtp.trimet.org, developer.trimet.org, and trimet.org/apps. After initiating collaboration with Google for the first release of Google Transit, she helped pioneer the now worldwide standard General Transit Feed Spec (GTFS). She received a degree in Geography from the University of Kansas.
114 |
115 | ### References
116 |
117 | * Bay Area Rapid Transit. (2013). For Developers. Retrieved from http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/index.aspx
118 | * Faludi, J. (2005, June 5). A Call for Open-Source Public Transit Mapping. Retrieved from http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/002937.html
119 | * Garg, A. (2005, December 7). Public transit via Google. Retrieved from http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/12/public-transit-via-google.html
120 | * Google Developers. (2012, January 12). What is GTFS? Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/
121 | * Google Developers. (2012, July 26). What is GTFS-realtime? Retrieved from https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs-realtime/
122 | * Google Maps. (2013). Transit: Cities Covered. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/landing/transit/cities/index.html
123 | * Hughes, J. (2007, May 18). General Transit Feed Spec Changes (Msg. 1). Message posted to (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/gtfs-changes/C5dgsKGkpDA/kyxN1DCS-dQJ
124 | * KiZoom. (2006). The Google Transit Feed Specification — Capabilities & Limitations: A Short Analysis.
125 | * The White House. (n.d.). About Open Government. Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/about
126 | * TriMet. (2013). App Center: Transit Tools for the Web and Mobile Devices. Retrieved from http://trimet.org/apps/
127 | * TriMet. (2013). Developer Resources. Retrieved from http://developer.trimet.org/
128 |
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | author: Editor
4 | part: 3
5 | chapter: 0
6 | ispart: true
7 | title: Understanding Open Data
8 | permalink: /part-3/
9 | ---
10 |
11 |
12 | ## Editor’s Note
13 |
14 | This section explores some of the larger scale implications of opening government data. Industry experts outline emergent impacts on our public sphere, democratic processes, and economy—while also articulating the enabling factors that are needed to bring about potential transformative benefits.
15 |
16 | In Chapter 11, Eric Gordon and Jessica Baldwin-Philippi argue that the open data movement suggests more than just access to government data—it is the reframing of data from a government resource to a publicly owned asset to which every citizen has right. As a result of this reframing, many new tools have been developed that encourage citizens to place their personal data into service of collaboration and active citizenship. This chapter describes how this culture of open data has facilitated good civic habits, which point to active learning and sustainable civic engagement.
17 |
18 | Building on that theme, in Chapter 12, User Experience expert Cyd Harrell explores design principles as applied to open data, and argues that a citizen-centric approach is key to fully realize the benefits of open data in civic life and engagement.
19 |
20 | Next, we hear from Michael Chui, Diana Farrell, and Steve Van Kuiken from the McKinsey Global Institute, who examine how open data can generate economic value in Chapter 13. They offer a framework of enablers that open data leadership should take into account in order to unlock this potential value.
21 |
22 | And in Chapter 14, Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein of the New America Foundation discuss the unique opportunities open data and innovation at the local scale to improve the lives of citizens and make government more responsive and adaptive to residents. They caution against excluding smaller, less-resourced cities from the open data movement, and outline several steps to ensure that advances in civic innovation are inclusive of all kinds of local governments.
23 |
24 |
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/chapters/part-3-chapter-11.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Making a Habit Out of Engagement: How the Culture of Open Data Is Reframing Civic Life"
4 | chapter: 11
5 | part: 3
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Eric Gordon
9 | job: Director, Engagement Game Lab
10 | employer: Emerson College
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/ericg.png
12 | twitter: ericbot
13 | about: "Fellow at the Berkman Center; Associate Professor at Emerson College; Director of Engagement Game Lab."
14 | -
15 | name: Jessica Baldwin-Philippi
16 | job: Researcher, Engagement Game Lab
17 | employer: Emerson College
18 | photo_url: /images/authors/jessica.png
19 | twitter: engagelab
20 | about: "Visiting faculty in civic media at Emerson College and a researcher in the Engagement Game Lab."
21 |
22 | permalink: "/part-3/making-a-habit-out-of-engagement-how-the-culture-of-open-data-is-reframing-civic-life/"
23 | ---
24 |
25 | We live in data rich times. Digital tools, from Facebook to Fitbit, have made more and more thoughts and actions collectable. Thoughts and actions that were once understood as ephemeral and public can now be fixed and privatized. Indeed, many of the artifacts of public life have become sequestered into proprietary and isolated databases, from individual mobility patterns to reflections on current affairs. While this data does not have any obvious function, recent revelations about the National Security Agency monitoring Americans’ metadata points to just how revealing this data can be. Still, the story has created surprisingly little concern because of a general lack of understanding about how metadata can be used. The majority of Americans are comfortable with the federal government accessing their metadata for the purpose of national security (Pew Research/Washington Post, 2013); likewise, they expect that corporations will preserve their privacy by enabling them to control who has access to their personally identifiable data. Both personally identifiable data and metadata are generally seen as passively generated, harmlessly owned and protected by corporations, and “rented” when needed.
26 |
27 | Enter the open data movement—a loosely defined effort of technology and policy hackers seeking to reposition data and its uses into the public domain. From health records to geodata, people are creating standards and repositories that facilitate access to, interoperability across, and transformation of datasets, outside of corporate interests. While open data is proving disruptive to a myriad of domains, from music to news, it is particularly powerful in the areas of government and civic life. What we call civic data are any data that inform public life, from the location of fire hydrants and blighted properties to citizen reports of potholes. These are not private data; they are signals transmitted within the public realm that remain publicly accessible.
28 |
29 | Over the last several years, governments have pushed to standardize and release large datasets. Technologists have created thousands of tools to aggregate, filter, and facilitate production of this data. Within this sphere of activity, users transition from being renters to co-owners and creators. When they access or contribute data to an open system, they expect not only a service, but also that the aggregate of the data they produce contributes to something larger. Indeed, open civic data is a public asset that can be reused and recombined toward a collective good. The net result is more than just access to standard datasets. The “culture” of open civic data is the reframing of data from a government resource to a publicly owned asset to which every citizen has a right.
30 |
31 | While civic hackers and government employees continue to chip away at the technical and political problems of data accessibility and interoperability, there is a culture of use that is burgeoning in the civic realm that needs to be attended to. New tools enable citizens to access, share, and contribute to civic data repositories. Each time someone uses a tool to help them choose a public school, catch a bus, or report a pothole, they are interacting with and contributing to civic data. When they actively choose to share their own data or access public datasets, they are contributing to a culture of civic data that shapes and refines expectations of how information can and should be used in public life. These simple, yet powerful actions are habits. Civic habits—or any habitual practice of engaging in civic institutions or community life—are the foundation of the culture of open civic data. These actions become the raw material of civic life.
32 |
33 | Why should the open civic data community be thinking about civic habits? Habits are what ultimately will sustain the culture of open civic data. Without habits, there is no demand for data and no foundation on which to build emergent civic actions. In this essay, we look at one kind of civic technology: Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) systems, or 311 reporting tools. CRM systems cultivate civic habits by making civic actions accessible and repeatable. By looking at three distinct generations of CRM systems, we demonstrate how habits, once established, can be reflected upon so as to generate more and different civic actions.
34 |
35 | ### Making Civic Habits
36 |
37 | A habit is a settled or regular tendency, especially one that’s hard to give up. We tend to think of habits as bad: smoking, gambling, etc. “The fact is,” as psychologist William James wrote in 1892, “our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits” (James, 1925).
38 |
39 | When we talk of civic habits, we are talking about all the practices that form civic life, from bad habits like throwing trash on the street to good habits like picking up another person’s trash; from posting a nasty comment about a neighbor on Facebook to tweeting about traffic. Civic habits are everyday repetitive practices that have a bearing on public life. As James put it, we are “mere bundles of habits, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves” (James, 1925). The social context of a city, therefore, is a mere bundle of habits with tools and systems in place that reinforce or disrupt existing habits. Consider how an antiquated data management system in government can perpetuate bad civic habits as city workers produce incomplete or substandard data. Consider how poor placement of recycling bins can produce bad civic habits as people grow tired of carrying a plastic bottle around and just throw it in the nearest trashcan. Now consider how access to open data can produce good civic habits by providing opportunities for people to visualize and augment the world around them so as to make better, more informed decisions.
40 |
41 | Habits are even more valuable than the sum of their parts. They are the building blocks that are necessary if a citizen is to move beyond individual or serial actions to be more aware and able to reflect about his or her role in civic life. The philosopher John Dewey argued that all learning is premised on habitual actions (Dewey, 2011). According to Dewey, it is only when something becomes habitual that one has the opportunity to reflect on it—like learning an instrument or a language. Learning happens when one becomes aware of the systems in which actions are taken. For example, when a child is learning to play the piano, she begins immediately to make music by pressing keys in no apparent order. She does not actually learn to play the piano until she understands that strings of notes compose melodies and groupings of notes compose chords. If she never has the opportunity to place her habits within larger systems, if there is no internal or external structure to her learning, there is a danger of getting stuck in a non-reflective habit loop that merely continues the same action without the possibility of growth. When people have the opportunity to place their habits into systems, habits become productive of other habits and emerging systems.
42 |
43 | Civic habits are all the actions citizens take that interface with public institutions or communities, from voting to reporting to littering to checking in on an elderly neighbor. Civic habits are produced through formal systems and processes. They are also generated informally by ad hoc groups and networks. What are often missing from this “mass of habits” are opportunities for reflection. It should come as no surprise that government often fails at producing processes and systems that both cultivate habits and provide opportunities to reflect. It is too often the case that government makes productive habit formation difficult because barriers to participation are simply too high. But as the culture of open civic data intersects with government processes, there are examples of government fulfilling its role as a systems designer for civic habits.
44 |
45 | One such example is the rapidly growing field of Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) systems. All big cities in the United States have some mechanism for citizens to report problems, from potholes to downed limbs or graffiti. These systems have undergone a series of iterations, from traditional hotlines (CRM 1.0) to mobile applications and interactive web pages (CRM 2.0) to mobile and web tools that frame interaction within a reflective context (CRM 3.0) (see Figure 1). As we will explain, these systems are progressively influenced by the culture of open data. The move from 1.0 to 3.0 reflects an emerging context where citizens can contextualize habits within clearly demarcated systems so as to introduce new actions, new habits, and a new understanding of civic life.
46 |
47 | ### Civic Habits and CRM
48 |
49 | While CRM systems were originally developed as part of the New Public Management approach that emphasized a customer-centered or citizen-centered government, they are also deeply connected to the open data movement as both suppliers of civic data and as tools by which to display and publicize civic data. Over the last several years, governments and non-profits have developed a variety of tools. While they all collect, organize, and publicize civic habits to some degree, these tools’ ability to foster good civic habits differ dramatically. Early CRM enabled habits, but did little to encourage them. While the next major developments in CRM facilitated the development and recognition of habits, it was not designed for reflection as a necessary or even important component of habitual action. Currently, as CRM tools are being improved and added to, there are isolated examples of designing for better, reflective civic habits that deserve attention and continuation.
50 |
51 | Although it has certainly impacted governments’ approach to data, the open data movement’s first major impacts on CRM systems did little to move the public toward a culture of open data. Before mobile applications ruled the reporting scene, phone-based hotlines (and later web portals) provided insight into civic habits. Active in over 130 cities, traditional phone-based reporting systems are still in widespread use and largely considered to be success stories in terms of efficiency. CRM 1.0 tools enable citizens to provide information that is relevant to a series of reporting categories. Citizens enter information into a set of forms or relay this information to an operator. While these tools allow citizens to file reports efficiently and effectively, they lack interactivity. They are good at enabling transactions: citizens need something fixed, they report it, and the government responds. Even when reports concern public issues—a broken sidewalk or graffiti on a wall—the hotline system frames the habit as a private action: citizens get their particular, specific needs met; they are not prompted to view their needs as one of many or as an issue shared with others within a community.
52 |
53 | Whether phone-based or online, the open data movement has directly impacted these tools. The Open311 movement, for example, has encouraged cities to follow many protocols to ensure that their data is made public and also able to seamlessly integrate with other cities’ data and future applications. As a result, a significant portion of the data collected in these systems is made available to the public. Still, they are disconnected from the actions themselves. While they contribute to a valuable store of data, they do not feedback to the user to cultivate reflection on habits and understand how those habits fit into the landscape of the community and the city.
54 |
55 | Mobile reporting apps and web tools do more than merely replicate the experience offered by older technologies. As CRM systems go mobile and take better advantage of the web, non-governmental groups have developed tools that can be used across cities. An example of a system created by a non-government group is SeeClickFix. Governments themselves have developed tools, such as NYC311, Chicago Works, and Citizens Connect (Boston). Building upon the existing open data movement, now over 25,000 cities are using SeeClickFix and thirty-two cities are developing apps that support Open311’s set of open data standards. These systems display data to more citizens, but more importantly, they allow citizens to see their own data in relation to larger community datasets. Within these apps, data is immediately available and ready at hand, and it serves as the foundation for subsequent actions.
56 |
57 | In Boston’s Citizens Connect, we can see how CRM 2.0 does more to civic actions than categorize and publicize them; it makes them immediately visible to citizens and connects them to the creation of public knowledge. Rather than simply being confronted by a form to fill out, users can look at other reports—deciding to view them according to most recent or by a specific geographical location. SeeClickFix allows users to see the profiles of “neighbors” using the system in a specific area. These maps are the traces of collective civic habits, and through them, users can visualize their own habits, as well as those of the community as a whole. This visualization of civic habits marks the first step toward reflection.
58 |
59 | These tools are widely considered to be successful. Existing apps are scaling themselves to function seamlessly across multiple cities, as is the case with Massachusetts’ Commonwealth Connect, an iteration of Boston’s Citizens Connect, and the amount of participation via these apps is significant—SeeClickFix hit its 500,000th report in May of 2013. Geolocation and easy camera access in these apps make reporting easier, reports clearer, and as a result, government responsiveness and efficiency of service better. These tools are well positioned to turn individual actions into habitual practice and to expand the influence of such practices to populations not currently predisposed to them.
60 |
61 | Enabling reflection, however, has proven to be quite difficult. While these tools can present an individual’s civic habits within a larger public context, they do not always succeed at generating motivation for users to pay attention to that context. A survey of 217 of Boston’s Citizens Connect users (a response rate of about forty-one percent, sampled from all currently active users) has shown that users are unlikely to engage with the map-based visualization of recent reports or even bother to look at other citizens’ reports. Thirty-eight percent of users report that they have never used the mobile app to look at other users’ reports, and forty-one percent report they use this feature “a minority of the time.” With only slightly over nine percent of users reporting they “always” make use of this feature, it is clear that although possibilities for reflection are designed into the tool, the typical use context does not yet motivate these actions.
62 |
63 | There are exceptional cases of citizens working together to solve problems before the city can get to them—fixing a damaged mural or overturning a neighbor’s garbage can to free a possibly-dead possum—but these are not the norm. CRM tools have not fully taken advantage of the emerging culture of open civic data to cultivate reflection on civic habits. They still tend to default to the mere facilitation of habitual practice, but as more and more cities commit to using these tools or seek to develop their own, non-reflective habits should not be enough. These tools have the potential to cultivate reflection, where taking individual action leads to actionable public understanding.
64 |
65 | CRM tools should be iterated, redesigned, and expanded to create environments that not only allow for reflection upon one’s role in civic life, but also actually necessitate it. Some good examples include SeeClickFix’s asking and answering feature and Civic Hero, a gamified version of reporting. While these examples are promising, they may not go far enough—how one interacts with CRM should be fundamentally reconfigured for reflection. In other words, when a user picks up Citizens Connect to report a pothole, that impulse should be immediately framed within a larger social context.
66 |
67 | Built as an API that connects to multiple existing tools—Boston’s Citizens Connect and Commonwealth Connect, SeeClickFix, and Foursquare—StreetCred is one such example. It is designed to improve civic habits and encourage reflection upon these habits at multiple points in the interaction. In StreetCred, players are prompted to take specific actions using already-existing tools, such as Citizens Connect, and are rewarded with badges, which contribute to larger campaigns and real-life rewards. Actions, badges, and campaigns all contribute to a social reputation system that lets players see their participation within the context of community data.
68 |
69 | The significance of this intervention is three-fold. First, StreetCred contextualizes one-off moments of participation within greater civic goals and highlights big picture needs of a community or city. Fundamentally, the idea of campaigns is meant to order discrete transactions into legible accomplishments with clear objectives. This practice attempts to interrupt and supplement existing habits with moments of reflection by encouraging actions that citizens have not taken, but are related to either citizens’ own interests, or major issues within the community. Second, through location-based interactions, StreetCred makes players aware of how their actions contribute to overall participation at a local, community, and city level. Campaigns are often related to local geographic areas, and users’ actions and standing are always displayed within the map-based interfaces that highlight an individual’s actions within their local community. As opposed to systems where the act of reporting can be a private interaction with a city, StreetCred allows users to take civic action alongside and in comparison to other citizens. By constructing APIs that connect data from a variety of aggregators, be they privately or publicly owned, StreetCred highlights the fact that open data is not limited to government-run programs.
70 |
71 | ### Conclusion
72 |
73 | Civic life is a mass of habits. By enabling moments of civic participation to be collected in ways that are accessible, interoperable, and visible, the open data movement has provided citizens with a way to easily understand these habits and opened up a bounty of new opportunities to simply and flexibly cultivate them. As more and more data is collected and collectable, it is government’s responsibility to create and/or support the systems in which habits are formed and reflected upon.
74 |
75 | As CRM systems and civic apps undergo further development and iteration, we must move beyond simply designing to make civic actions easy and sustainable. Instead, design choices that encourage reflective civic habits and collaborative and communal participation ought to be the norm. Not only can tools be designed to improve and deepen the civic experience, but their iterations can also set the stage for the development of a more robust culture of open data that extends beyond the civic realm.
76 |
77 | ### About the Authors
78 |
79 | Eric Gordon studies civic media, location-based media, and serious games. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an associate professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College where he is the founding director of the Engagement Game Lab (http://engagementgamelab.org), which focuses on the design and research of digital games that foster civic engagement. He is the co-author of Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell Publishing, 2011) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010).
80 |
81 | Jessica Baldwin-Philippi is a visiting assistant professor of civic media at Emerson College and a researcher in the Engagement Game Lab. Her work focuses on how engagement with new technologies can restructure forms of political participation and ideas about citizenship, and has covered a variety of political contexts, from political campaigns’ use of social media, to games designed to increase participation, to tools that can mediate relationships between citizens and governmental institutions.
82 |
83 | ### References
84 |
85 | * Dewey, J. (2011). Democracy and Education. New York: Simon and Brown.
86 | * James, W. (1925). Talks to Teachers on Psychology; And to Students On Some of Life’s Ideals. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
87 | * Pew Research Center/Washington Post (2013). “Public Says Investigate Terrorism, Even If It Intrudes on Privacy: Majority Views NSA Phone Tracking as Acceptable Anti-Terror Tactic.” Retrieved from http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/06-10-13%20PRC%20WP%20Surveillance%20Release.pdf
88 |
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Generating Economic Value through Open Data"
4 | chapter: 13
5 | part: 3
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Michael Chui
9 | job: Principal
10 | employer: McKinsey Global Institute
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/chui.png
12 | twitter: mchui
13 | about: "Leading research on the impact of information technologies and innovation on business, the economy, and society. Former CIO of Bloomington, Indiana."
14 | -
15 | name: Diana Farrell
16 | job: Director
17 | employer: McKinsey & Company
18 | photo_url: /images/authors/diana.png
19 | twitter: Farrell_Diana
20 | about: "Co-founder of McKinsey Center for Government, helping government leaders achieve greater & lasting performance."
21 | -
22 | name: Steve Van Kuiken
23 | job: Director
24 | employer: McKinsey & Company
25 | photo_url: /images/authors/stevev.png
26 | twitter: McKinsey
27 | about: "Bringing technology solutions to help healthcare companies transform operational performance and increase market responsiveness"
28 |
29 | permalink: /part-3/generating-economic-value-through-open-data/
30 | ---
31 |
32 | The private and public sectors have begun to embrace “big data” and analytics to improve productivity and enable innovation. We have documented the tremendous economic potential that can be unlocked by using the increasing volumes and diversity of real-time data (e.g., social media, road traffic flows) to make better decisions in a wide variety of sectors, from healthcare to manufacturing to retail to public administration (Manyika et al., 2011).
33 |
34 | Open data—governments and other institutions making their data freely available—plays an important role in maximizing the benefits of big data. Open data enables third parties to create innovative products and services using datasets such as transportation data, or data about medical treatments and their outcomes, that are generated in the course of providing public services or conducting research. This is a trend that is both global—in less than two years, the number of national governments that have become members of the Open Government Partnership has increased from a founding eight to more than fifty—and local; state/provincial, and municipal governments, including New York, Chicago, and Boston, have begun to “liberate” their data through open data initiatives.
35 |
36 | Some of the key motivations for open data initiatives are to promote transparency of decision-making, create accountability for elected and appointed officials, and spur greater citizen engagement. In addition, however, it is increasingly clear that open data can also enable the creation of economic value beyond the walls of the governments and institutions that share their data. This data can not only be used to help increase the productivity of existing companies and institutions, it also can spur the creation of entrepreneurial businesses and improve the welfare of individual consumers and citizens.
37 |
38 | McKinsey & Company is engaged in ongoing research to identify the potential economic impact of open data, the findings from which will be published in the fall of 2013. In this piece, we would like to share some of our preliminary hypotheses from this work, including examples from our research into open data in healthcare (See “The ‘Big Data’ revolution in healthcare,” McKinsey Center for US Healthcare Reform and Business Technology).
39 |
40 | ### Definitions
41 |
42 | It’s helpful to first clarify what we mean by open data. We use four criteria to define open data:
43 |
44 | * Accessible to all. This is the key criterion—the data becomes accessible outside of the organization that generated or collected it.
45 | * Machine-readable. Data must be useable, which means it must be made available in formats that are easily used in third-party applications.
46 | * Free. Zero or low costs for data access aid openness.
47 | * Unrestricted rights to use. Data that is unencumbered by contractual or other restrictions leads to the maximum potential of innovation.
48 |
49 | However, we also recognize that these are the ideals of “openness” and there is still significant value in making data more widely available, even if its use is not completely unrestricted. For example, the US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has released some health-care claims data, but only for use by qualified medical researchers, and with strict rules about how the data can be used. Nevertheless, providing this data outside of CMS multiplies the amount of value it can create. Similarly, there is great variation in the degree to which data can be considered machine-readable. Data in proprietary formats is machine-readable, but is less useful than data in open-standard formats, which do not require licenses to use and are not subject to change with format updates decided by a single vendor. And while a strict definition of open data requires zero cost for data access, some institutions have chosen to charge a fee for accessing data, still providing considerable value.
50 |
51 | Very closely related to this definition of open data is the concept of “my data,” which involves supplying data about individuals or organizations that has been collected about them. In the United States, the “Blue Button” encourages healthcare providers to give patients access to their health information (see www.bluebuttondata.org). Similarly, the “Green Button” program encourages energy providers to give consumers access to energy usage information such as data collected by smart meters (see www.greenbuttondata.org). In “my data” applications, information is not made accessible to all, but only to the person or organization whose activities generated the data. These users can opt in to make their data available to other service providers (e.g., a service that analyzes energy consumption and suggests ways in which to improve energy efficiency).
52 |
53 | ### Why Now?
54 |
55 | It’s also worth considering why the open data movement is gathering momentum. First, the amount and variety of valuable data that is being generated and collected by institutions has exploded: transaction data produced by government, sensor data collected from the physical world, and regulatory data collected from third parties such as transportation carriers or financial institutions. Secondly, the ability to process large, real-time, diverse streams of data has been improving at an exponential rate, thanks to advances in computing power. Today, a smartphone has sufficient processing power to beat a grandmaster at chess.
56 |
57 | Equally important, there are institutional forces accelerating the adoption of open data initiatives. Both within and especially outside of government, decision makers are demanding more precise and timely insights, supported by data and experimentation (e.g., running controlled experiments on the web or in the real world to determine how people will actually behave). At the same time, governments are under pressure to become more transparent, while simultaneously doing more with less due to fiscal constraints. The financial pressure also compels governments to look for economic growth and innovation, which could be catalyzed by new businesses based on open data.
58 |
59 | Finally, there is a social benefit: open data can democratize information, as more individuals gain access to their own data through my data initiatives, and people with programming skills gain access to more datasets. Individuals can develop applications that use open data, reflecting their interests, rather than relying on data services provided by large organizations.
60 |
61 | ### How Open Data Creates Economic Value
62 |
63 | Our emerging hypothesis is that the effective use of open data can unlock significant amounts of economic value. For example, in US healthcare, we found that more than $300 billion a year in value potentially could be created through the use of more open data, e.g., through the analysis of open data to determine which therapies are both medically effective and cost-efficient. We also recognize that access to data alone does not unlock value. In healthcare, many systemic reforms need to be in place before data-enabled innovations such as large-scale analyses of comparative effectiveness and genetically tailored therapies can achieve their maximum potential. Yet, if reforms are in place, truly transformative changes in the healthcare system can result. We believe similar changes can occur in many other domains.
64 |
65 | So what are some of the archetypes for value creation that we discovered? Building on our big data research, we see five common ways in which the use of open data can unlock value.
66 |
67 | #### Transparency
68 |
69 | In many cases, we find that decisions are made without access to relevant data. Simply providing data to the right decision maker at the right moment can be a huge win. For example, most patients and primary care physicians have limited knowledge about how well different hospitals do in various types of surgery or how much different providers charge for a particular procedure. When such data exists—and is provided in a usable format—the resulting transparency can lead to better decisions. In our study of US healthcare, we estimate that ensuring that patients go to the right care setting (e.g., the one with the best record of outcomes and the best costs) could unlock $50 to $70 billion in annual value.
70 |
71 | #### Exposing Variability and Enabling Experimentation
72 |
73 | Closely related to transparency is the concept of exposing variability in processes and outcomes, then using experimentation to identify the drivers of that variability. For example, open data can be used to expose the variability in improving student achievement across various schools or school districts. When this information is made transparent, it creates incentives to improve educational outcomes. In addition to simply exposing differences in performance, open data can be used to design and analyze the outcomes of purposeful experimentation to determine which organizational or teaching techniques raise student achievement.
74 |
75 | #### Segmenting Populations to Tailor Actions
76 |
77 | Open data can also be used to ensure that individuals and organizations receive the products and services that best meet their needs. There is an old saying in marketing that we know that half of marketing spending is wasted, but we don’t know which half. Open data can sometimes help marketers find the additional insights that can make their efforts more effective. For example, a provider of rooftop solar panels could narrow its targeted offers to customers who both have sufficient roof area, and sufficient solar exposure by using aerial imagery and weather data available from public sources.
78 |
79 | #### Augmenting and/or Automating Human Decision-Making
80 |
81 | Open data can be used to augment the data that is being analyzed to improve or automate decision-making. We know from research in behavioral economics and other fields that human decision-making is often influenced by cognitive biases. Furthermore, our minds are limited in the number of data points we can process. Advanced analytical techniques can help overcome these limitations. For example, researchers only identified the cardiovascular risks of COX-2 inhibitors (a class of anti-inflammatory drugs) after analyzing data on millions of individual doses. In some cases, data can be used to make real-time decisions automatically. For example, by combining data from embedded sensors with open data traffic information, it is possible to create systems that automatically adjust the timing of traffic signals to relieve congestion.
82 |
83 | #### Creating New Products, Services and Business Models
84 |
85 | Some of the most exciting applications of open data come about when it is used to create new products and services by existing companies, or to create entirely new businesses. For example, in 2012, more than two hundred new applications of open health-care data were submitted to the US Health Data Initiative Forum. One submission, from a startup called Asthmapolis, combines usage data from sensors on asthma medicine inhalers with open environmental data (e.g., pollen counts and data on other allergens) to develop personalized treatment plans for patients with asthma.
86 |
87 | ### Enablers to Create Economic Value
88 |
89 | Successful open data initiatives have many elements and the open data community is beginning to share practices and stories to make success more likely. Based on our ongoing research, we suggest that the following elements are needed for a successful open data initiative.
90 |
91 | #### Prioritize Open Data Efforts According to Potential Value
92 |
93 | Too often, open data initiatives seem to prioritize releasing data based on the ease of implementation (i.e., making available the data that is easiest to release). We believe the prioritization process should also take value creation potential into account. For instance, datasets collected for regulatory or compliance purposes that enable companies to benchmark their performance against other players in the marketplace (e.g., energy efficiency data, purchasing data) can drive significant increases in economic performance for companies and consumers, even if the release of this data doesn’t directly benefit the public sector agency. Of course, it isn’t possible to predict all of the ways in which open data can be used to create value, so it’s still important to release open data to the large community of potential outside innovators, even if it’s not clear how it will be used. But in the near term, considering potential value creation along with ease of implementation should be part of the prioritization process.
94 |
95 | #### Activate a Thriving Ecosystem of Developers to Use Open Data
96 |
97 | To a certain extent, open data is a “platform play,” i.e., a foundation on which third parties can build innovative products and services. Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, has famously described the concept of “Government as a Platform” (O’Reilly, 2011). To have a successful platform, you need to have a thriving ecosystem of contributors that build on your platform. For a successful open data initiative, it is important to activate a thriving ecosystem of developers that will build applications that use open data. This requires activities akin to marketing, including raising awareness of the availability of open data, convincing developers to try using open data (potentially through special offers, perhaps contests), supporting their experience, and even encouraging them to return to use other open data. The “Datapaloozas” that the United States Government has sponsored are an example of activating an ecosystem of developers to consume open data, as they convene developers at common events, celebrating successes and raising the visibility of and excitement around open data.
98 |
99 | #### Build the Infrastructure to Manage Data
100 |
101 | Clearly, a scalable and reliable data infrastructure has to be put in place. Ideally, an institution’s internal data infrastructure will be designed in such a way that makes it easy to open data to external connections when the decision is made to do so. One guiding principle that can help make this possible is to build internal interfaces as if they were external interfaces. Amazon.com requires all of its internal IT services to have standard application program interfaces. Then, when it wants to expose a new service that it has developed internally to the outside world, the process is relatively straightforward.
102 |
103 | #### Identify Channels to Release Data
104 |
105 | Thoughtful consideration must also be given to the channels through which open data is distributed. These decisions can greatly affect the uptake and continuing use of open data. Are you releasing data in open data formats that make it easy for third party developers to use? Do you provide appropriate metadata to help guide the users to the data? Do you provide means through which users of the data are alerted automatically when data has been updated?
106 |
107 | #### Protect Data That Needs to be Protected
108 |
109 | Some institutions have decided to make “open” the default for their data. However, there are often good reasons not to release all of an organization’s data or to restrict openness along one of more of the open data dimensions (e.g., with fees or restrictions on use). Thoughtfully identifying the criteria for such restrictions will be important; they could include safety, security, privacy, liability, intellectual property, and confidentiality.
110 |
111 | #### Provide Leadership to the Open Data Community
112 |
113 | Last but not least, a successful open data program needs real leadership and a commitment to supporting an open data culture. In some cases, the benefits of releasing data could be outweighed by the perceived risks to managers, who might see an open data initiative as adding more work (e.g., dealing with outside stakeholders), while simultaneously making it more likely that facts in the data might be misrepresented, or even reveal issues about their operations. Leaders will have to set a tone from the top that the overall benefits make an open data initiative worth the investments and risks. Furthermore, leaders will also have to engage with the external community of data consumers, learning to treat them as “data customers,” and being responsive to their concerns and suggestions.
114 |
115 | Particularly for smaller municipalities, it can be a challenge to find the resources, both financial as well as human, to invest in open data initiatives. One point
that can help the investment case for open data is that much of the infrastructure for open data, e.g. building internal IT service interfaces as if they were external interfaces, actually improves the efficiency and scalability of the institution itself. Secondly, technology innovations, such as cloud services, are making the level of required investment more manageable. And more generally, taking advantage of external resources, from open source software to innovation fellowships and civic hackathons, can also unlock additional capabilities. Ultimately, institutions will have to determine the relative priority of creating value through open data to support their missions in the context of the other priorities.
116 |
117 | Overall, open data can generate value for multiple stakeholders, including governments themselves, established companies, entrepreneurs, and individual citizens. Understanding the scope and scale of this value potential, particularly for stakeholders outside of the organization opening its data, and how to effectively create an ecosystem of data users, will be essential in order to generate this value.
118 |
119 | ### About the Authors
120 |
121 | Dr. Michael Chui is a principal of the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), McKinsey’s business and economics research arm, where he leads research on the impact of information technologies and innovation on business, the economy, and society. Prior to joining McKinsey, Michael served as the first chief information officer of the city of Bloomington, Indiana, where he also founded a cooperative Internet Service Provider. He is based in San Francisco, CA.
122 |
123 | Diana Farrell is a director in McKinsey & Company’s Public Sector Practice, and the global leader and a co-founder of the McKinsey Center for Government (MCG). Diana rejoined McKinsey in 2011, after two years as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council and Deputy Assistant on Economic Policy to President Obama. She is based in Washington, DC.
124 |
125 | Steve Van Kuiken is a director in McKinsey & Company’s Business Technology Office, and leads McKinsey’s Healthcare Information Technology work, serving a wide variety of healthcare organizations in developing and executing technology strategies, including payors and providers, pharmaceutical and medical products companies, and IT providers to the industry. He is based in McKinsey’s New Jersey office.
126 |
127 | The authors wish to thank their colleague Peter Groves, a principal at McKinsey & Company based in New Jersey, for his substantial contributions to this article.
128 |
129 | ### References
130 |
131 | * [Manyika, J., Chui, M., Brown, B., Bughin, J., Dobbs, R., Roxburgh, C., & Hung Byers, A. (2011). Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competitiveness and productivity. McKinsey Global Institute, May 2011. Available at http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation)
132 | * O’Reilly, Tim (2011). Government as a Platform. Innovations, Winter 2011, Vol. 6, No. 1, Pages 13-40.
133 |
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/chapters/part-3-chapter-14.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Local Scale and Local Data"
4 | chapter: 14
5 | part: 3
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: Alissa Black
9 | job: Director, California Civic Innovation Project
10 | employer: New America Foundation
11 | photo_url: /images/authors/alissa.png
12 | twitter: alissa007
13 | about: "Exploring the use of innovative technologies, policies, and practices that engage disadvantaged communities in public decision making throughout California."
14 | -
15 | name: Rachel Burstein
16 | job: Research Associate, California Civic Innovation Project
17 | employer: New America Foundation
18 | photo_url: /images/authors/rachel.png
19 | twitter: NewAmericaCA
20 | about: "Researching how innovation spreads within and between cities. PhD in History at the CUNY Graduate Center."
21 |
22 | permalink: /part-3/local-scale-and-local-data/
23 | ---
24 |
25 |
26 | Today, the town hall meeting conjures visions of televised, invitation-only debates in which candidates for national office respond in scripted paragraphs to the prepared questions of selected constituents. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, town hall meetings were a space in which citizens came to debate the issues of the day, and to vote on appropriate action. For Henry David Thoreau (1854), town hall meetings in which each man was afforded a voice on questions as morally significant and politically complex as Massachusetts’ enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act were the “true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.” Thoreau was fundamentally distrustful of the big cities of New York and Boston, where the press, politicians, and special interest groups obscured citizens’ voices.
27 |
28 | Of course, Thoreau’s assessment of the town meeting was steeped in romanticism. Non-citizens were largely excluded from the proceedings, and the homogenous population of the rural towns so loved by Thoreau allowed a purity of conscience more difficult to sustain in nearby Boston, in which a complex economy, population density, and diversity made the inclusion of individual residents’ voices more complicated, and policy decisions less tied to moral certitude alone. But still, in the town meetings of his beloved Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau saw the promise of American democracy most fully realized. The ideal of residents contributing directly to the governance of their communities through the town hall meeting is one that persists to this day.
29 |
30 | As in the town hall meeting system in which residents co-governed with elected officials, true engagement in the twenty-first century involves not only listening, but also collaboration and action. The full potential of the twenty-first century virtual commons is dependent not just on the voicing of ideas by residents, but on the incorporation of these ideas and concerns into innovative and constructive public policies by cities, and the ability of cities to address difficult issues of access, digital literacy, language barriers, and awareness that often interfere with the ability of the virtual commons to reach and empower all populations.
31 |
32 | Such exchanges need not rely on new technologies. Participatory budgeting, in which residents submit proposals for and vote on funding allocations for city-funded projects is one example of a non-technology driven approach to establishing a new civic commons. But new technologies and approaches developed or engaged by local government—including the sensible release and adequate guidance in the use of open data—can offer a path toward developing a new and vibrant public square.
33 |
34 | ### Towards a Twenty-First Century Town Hall
35 |
36 | The local level provides an unparalleled space for government to harness the power of community groups, neighborhood associations, other supporting organizations, and residents themselves to convene citizens, share knowledge, and identify and develop better ways of responding to community needs. Close proximity and the potential for developing personal relationships allow organizing to have a broader impact. Local government has the ability to serve and respond to the needs of diverse populations through engaging residents and community groups directly in a way that is not possible at the state or federal level.
37 |
38 | In fact, innovation at the local level of government looks very different than innovation pursued by federal agencies. With more direct contact with the public than their colleagues in Washington, local government innovation can be more directly responsive to an existing community need as articulated by community groups and ordinary citizens. The smaller scale of local government means that soliciting and incorporating feedback directly from the community is much more feasible. Innovation at the local level can change the relationship between residents and their government, rather than focusing on the transactional elements of government alone.
39 |
40 | Service delivery is at the heart of most residents’ engagement with municipal government, regardless of city size. Without the services offered by cities—as varied as schools, libraries, garbage pickup, public safety, and public transit—many residents would be in tough shape. Before ten o’clock in the morning, the average person might wake up, take his city-owned trash can to the curb for pickup, wave to the street cleaner funded by city coffers, and return his books to the city-supported library before hopping on a bus whose route has been set by city planners. His level of engagement with local services is far more tangible, personal, and expansive than his everyday experience of state or federal services.
41 |
42 | Because of this immediate relevance of municipal services to the average citizen’s life, the local level is a promising point of entry into establishing a modern day public sphere.
43 |
44 | ### From Data to Engagement
45 |
46 | Any conversation about relationships between government and citizens at the local level necessitates a consideration of data. Our cities are prolific generators of data that directly impacts our daily lives—everything from train schedules to trash pickup days. They’re also collectors of data, like enrollment in social services or parking meter usage. Local community groups also often serve as stewards and curators of important data about their own communities. Both city- and community-generated data can be powerful fuel for meaningful civic dialogue and action.
47 |
48 | For example, in the Tenderloin, a low-income and predominantly minority neighborhood in San Francisco, the City failed to respond to noise complaints because there were no data to support the claim that the noise level was beyond an acceptable limit. So, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), a non-profit digital arts and technology organization located in the Tenderloin, joined with residents and local civic hackers, to place noise sensors around the district to collect data on noise levels throughout the day (see http://tendernoise.movity.com/). Armed with data from the noise sensors, GAFFTA was able to prove that the noise levels in the Tenderloin exceeded the allowable levels because, for example, most of the city’s fire and emergency vehicles used streets in the Tenderloin to travel across town, and the City permitted more emergency construction permits that allowed crews to begin and end loud construction work late in the day.
49 |
50 | This story illustrates how community groups and other nonprofits can use data to improve the lives of those living and working around them. Residents, community groups, non-profit organizations, and businesses already play important roles in local governance as knowledge disseminators, identifiers of community needs, and as advocates for the implementation of governmental policies and programs—and data can be a tool to further this engagement. Empowered with the data proving that noise levels were above those acceptable in other parts of San Francisco, GAFFTA and Tenderloin residents were able to make a case for rerouting emergency vehicles and reducing construction in the noise polluted district.
51 |
52 | When civic data held by the government is made open for diverse populations to use and remix, it expands the possibilities for data to facilitate civic engagement and enable citizens to collaborate with their city to co-create better public services. Open data has the potential to empower citizens to identify community needs, propose and develop new approaches, and engage new constituencies.
53 |
54 | This is exemplified by a number of cities that publish crime data and the neighborhood groups that emerge to deter crime in the city. Equipped with data, the neighborhood groups are better able to identify trends in crime and take proactive measure to prevent crime. In this way, citizens’ use of datasets—such as transportation and crime—have the potential to reshape the way that local governments deploy public safety or public transit services, making them more efficient and equitable systems. When approached in the right way, these open datasets can serve as catalysts for meaningful exchange about community priorities—in some ways a modern-day public square for multiple constituencies.
55 |
56 | But to realize the full potential requires more than simply declaring a dataset open and putting a PDF version on a website. First of all, the data must be not only open and available, but also in a useful (and preferably machine-readable) format. When civic data is conducive to being repurposed and interpreted by government and citizens, new value and meaning can be unlocked. For example, a list of crime reports in an Excel format is not that helpful for a parent trying to understand whether the route her child takes to school every day is safe. But when that list of crime incidents is mapped, the information becomes much more consumable. The data become even more useful when the parent can input his child’s route to school and a system displays only the crimes reported within a five-block radius of that route. This shows the power of data to improve citizens’ lives when those data are made accessible to the average citizen.
57 |
58 | It can also be made more powerful when multiple datasets are used to tell a more comprehensive story. For example, in charting the location of abandoned vehicles, it is possible to tell a larger story about crime. In neighborhoods where more vehicles are abandoned, more crime generally occurs, and understanding the correlation between the two allows local governments to take crime prevention measures in areas where vehicles are being dumped, providing a better way of assessing community need than simply responding to the loudest voices.
59 |
60 | Standardization can help scale the impact of open civic data to millions of people when government and private companies partner to create a consistent way of formatting data and making it available to the public. In 2005, Google and Portland’s Tri-Met transit agency made it possible to plan a trip in Google using public transportation, and then published their standard specification. Called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), this created a standard way of presenting transit information from any transit agency, like fares and schedules, which could be used by Google’s Transit Trip planner. This standard allowed millions of people in cities throughout the world to plan their public transportation trips more effectively. This seemingly small action changed the public’s expectation for transit planning and transit data sharing.
61 |
62 | ### The Challenge of Inclusive Engagement
63 |
64 | Open data that powers inclusive citizen engagement requires a level of co-governance that goes beyond simply publishing data for transparency’s sake. This next step from transparency to engagement is not always easy, but promising examples show that when done right, the impact can be significant.
65 |
66 | For instance, an app developed by Sam Ramon’s Fire Department is used to leverage bystander performance and active citizenship to improve cardiac arrest survival rates. The City makes 911 emergency call information publicly available via the app, PulsePoint, in which residents trained in CPR are alerted if a person in a location near to them has gone into cardiac arrest. The tool goes beyond the mere presentation of data by promoting “active citizenship” so that residents are supporting their neighbors and public safety agencies. PulsePoint demonstrates the potential to move beyond openness to forming the cornerstone of a new public square in which government, citizens, and other groups work together to improve their communities.
67 |
68 | In order for open data to fulfill the mission of inclusivity, open data platforms must speak to multiple publics. By making data more accessible to those without technological know-how, open data can democratize the conversation leading to a better understanding of community needs and resulting in more responsive government. Ordinary citizens can serve as important sources of data and can help to analyze those data if information is presented in understandable ways. Coupling the release of open data with digital literacy training and increased government-supported access to internet for underserved populations can make open data more inclusive. Putting open data in service to the public’s priorities and interests can also assist in this process.
69 |
70 | An obstacle is that many cities still don’t see pursuing an open data policy and developing accompanying resources to make those data meaningful as within their reach. This is more than just a perception problem. San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago grab headlines when it comes to technological innovation, but most cities do not have the resources of these major urban areas. There are fewer than three hundred cities in the United States with populations of 100,000 or more, yet there are over 7,500 municipalities with populations above 2,500 nationwide (International City/County Management Association, 2012). The vast majority of the nation’s cities have populations of 25,000 or fewer residents. And over 3,500 cities have council-manager systems of governance, rather than the strong mayor systems predominant in the country’s largest cities.
71 |
72 | The size and form of government have implications for the resources available and the method through which change happens in local government. According to one recent survey, while seventy-nine percent of cities of populations of 300,000 or more have open data portals, just thirty-six percent of cities with populations under 50,000 do (see Hillenbrand, 2013). And an approach in which a charismatic mayor green-lights civic technology projects, as has been the pattern in Boston and Philadelphia, is not open to most locales where a council-manager system predominates.
73 |
74 | With budget shortfalls and increasing demands for service, most local government employees have other priorities besides open data. In a recent survey of city managers and county administrators in California, thirty-five percent of respondents identified a service delivery project as the most important new approach instituted by their locale in the last five years (Burstein, 2013). Twenty-eight percent of cited projects involved some element of regional collaboration. Projects that fell into two areas that commentators often hail as the holy grail of local government innovation—civic engagement and e-government—each accounted for only eleven percent of responses. While elements of both of these areas were certainly features of other kinds of projects, civic engagement and e-government were not the end goals. Instead, improving service delivery to residents was the primary objective. This shows the deep disconnect between the potential of open data and perceptions and abilities to create sound open data policies and practices in city governments across the country.
75 |
76 | With the advent of open source and low cost tools that can help streamline the process of opening up data, and the increasingly open attitudes towards collaborative approaches like city-sponsored hackathons, it’s more feasible for even small cities to pursue open data policies. But in order for open data to emerge as a powerful civic commons in which diverse residents are engaged and involved in the process of collaborative co-governance in cities throughout the nation, open data advocates need to do a better job of connecting the open data movement with the service delivery goals at the forefront of the minds of most city administrators. We need better ways of illustrating the value of open data to residents, and we need better ways of talking about open data as a strategy for supporting existing policy goals.
77 |
78 | Cities also need more resources. The open data community of hackers, businesses, non-profits, community groups, residents, philanthropic foundations, and local government employees who have implemented open data initiatives elsewhere need to play a bigger role in developing resources for smaller, less well resourced communities. We can make valuable contributions—including building and maintaining open source civic software—to help transform the meaning of civic innovation beyond service delivery and toward collaborative, co-governance.
79 |
80 | Open data has the ability to reshape the public’s relationship with government, reinvigorating the long dormant space of the public square in the increasingly digitized but equally fragmented cityscape of the twenty-first century. Open data is a piece of a larger movement toward civic innovation capitalizing on the advantages of a smaller scale that holds enormous promise for our nation’s cities and for twenty-first century democracy. But that will only occur if the open data community moves forward with sensitivity and wisdom to the realities of our cities’ ecosystems and needs.
81 |
82 | ### About the Authors
83 |
84 | Alissa Black directs the New America Foundation’s California Civic Innovation Project. Based in the Bay area, Ms. Black is exploring the use of innovative technologies, policies, and practices that engage disadvantaged communities in public decision-making throughout California. Prior to joining New America, Ms. Black was the Government Relations Director at Code for America, a non-profit organization that helps governments work better through the use of technology and new practices. She also has extensive experience as a leader in local government, having worked in the New York City Mayor’s Office and the City of San Francisco’s Emerging Technologies team, where she led the development and deployment of Open311, the leading national standard for citizen reporting.
85 |
86 | Rachel Burstein is a research associate at the California Civic Innovation Project at the New America Foundation.
87 |
88 | ### References
89 |
90 | * [Burstein, Rachel (2013). The Case for Strengthening Personal Networks in California Local Government: Understanding local government innovation and how it spreads. Retrieved from http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/The_Case%20for%20Strengthening_Personal_Networks_in_CA_Local%20Government.pdf](http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/The_Case%20for%20Strengthening_Personal_Networks_in_CA_Local%20Government.pdf)
91 | * [Hillenbrand, Katherine (2013). From Hieroglyphs to Hadoop: The Development of Civic Data. Retrieved from http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/from-hieroglyphs-to-hadoop-192](http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/from-hieroglyphs-to-hadoop-192)
92 | * [International City/County Management Association (2012). Form of Government Statistics - Cities (2012). Retrieved from http://icma.org/en/icma/knowledge_network/documents/kn/Document/303818/Form_of_Government_Statistics__Cities_2012](http://icma.org/en/icma/knowledge_network/documents/kn/Document/303818/Form_of_Government_Statistics__Cities_2012)
93 | * [Thoreau, Henry David (1854). Slavery in Massachusetts. Retrieved from http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Slavery_Massachusetts.html](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Slavery_Massachusetts.html)
94 |
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2 | layout: chapter
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7 | title: Driving Decisions with Data
8 | permalink: /part-4/
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10 |
11 | ## Editor’s Note
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 | What happens when local governments focus on open data as a tool for making better decisions—moving beyond transparency to become data-driven entities themselves? In this section, we hear from practitioners who share the rationale and results behind their efforts to help government not only open data for public use, but to internally leverage data to continuously improve business processes, policy, and resource allocation.
16 |
17 | In Chapter 15, Mike Flowers, the first-ever Chief Analytics Officer for New York City, describes New York City’s success of applying predictive data analytics to create efficiencies in government leading to real service delivery improvements. From their bootstrap beginnings based on leveraging existing open datasets, he traces the arc of their program’s successes and expansion.
18 |
19 | Next, Beth Blauer shares her experience building the first statewide performance improvement program with Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley in Chapter 16. She documents the key success factors she learned while building that program, and shares how she is now using her work in the private sector at open data provider Socrata to help make performance management programs easier for other local governments to implement.
20 |
21 | Chapter 17 provides of a case study of Louisville’s evolution of the StateStat approach. Louisville’s Theresa Reno-Weber (Chief of Performance Management) and Beth Niblock (Chief Information Officer) describe the tangible successes of open data for performance management through the LouieStat program—including reducing the amount spent on unscheduled overtime by $3 million annually. Focusing on Louisville’s adoption of the lean startup “minimum viable product” model, they extrapolate lessons that can help cities across the country better use open data to build capacity to do more with less.
22 |
23 | Ken Wolf and John Fry, who have extensive experience at working with local governments to implement their performance management software, build upon the case studies of data-driven performance management in other cities with an outline of the long term vision for collaborative benchmarking and sharing of best practices in comparative advantages between cities. In Chapter 18, they share the early indications that this opportunity exists, and what’s needed to take it further.
24 |
25 |
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/chapters/part-5-chapter-0.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | author: someone
4 | part: 5
5 | chapter: 0
6 | ispart: true
7 | title: Looking Ahead
8 | permalink: /part-5/
9 | ---
10 |
11 | ## Editor’s Note
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 | What is needed to take the open data movement even further? What obstacles, challenges, and concerns remain to be addressed? This section is devoted to identifying those issues, and envisioning a future of civic innovation powered by open data.
16 |
17 | First, Greg Bloom, a long-time advocate for better social services data in Washington, D.C., explores the idea of open data as a common good. In Chapter 19, he outlines a vision for a future of “data cooperatives” to ensure better management and maintenance of this public resource.
18 |
19 | In Chapter 20, we take a step back with John Bracken, Director of Media and Innovation for the Knight Foundation, one of the biggest philanthropic funders of open government initiatives. Based on his experience running the Knight News Challenge, he shares observations of ten key lessons the community needs to embrace to take the open government movement to the next level and better enable the potential of open data to be fully realized.
20 |
21 | Next, Mark Headd, the first Chief Data Officer for Philadelphia, proposes that open data is an important first step to spurring new approaches to government service delivery in Chapter 21. He outlines why changing the way government procures technology is needed to enable more far-reaching change—both cultural and operational—within city hall.
22 |
23 | And finally, in Chapter 22, open government advocate Tim O’Reilly concludes by outlining his vision of algorithmic regulation. How can government take advantage of innovations like advances in sensor technology and the emergence of the sharing economy to inform more effective regulation and governance? He argues that open data—when combined with clear desired outcomes and smart analysis—can be a key enabler to ensure accountability and continuous improvement in twenty-first century government.
24 |
25 |
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/chapters/part-5-chapter-20.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "The Bigger Picture: Ten Lessons for Taking Open Government Further"
4 | chapter: 20
5 | part: 5
6 | author:
7 | -
8 | name: John Bracken
9 | twitter: jsb
10 | job: Director of Media Innovation
11 | employer: Knight Foundation
12 | photo_url: /images/authors/bracken.png
13 | about: "John S. Bracken is director of media innovation for the Knight Foundation. He oversees the Knight News Challenge, Knight’s prototype fund, its journalism and technology investments."
14 |
15 | permalink: /part-5/the-bigger-picture-ten-lessons-for-taking-open-government-further/
16 | ---
17 |
18 | My job at the Knight Foundation is to identify people with promising ideas and help them execute them. Our primary tool for that is the Knight News Challenge, through which we’ve supported nearly a hundred projects, with more than $30 million over six years. We’ve supported several open government-related projects and groups like LocalWiki, the Open Knowledge Foundation, Ushahidi, EveryBlock, and Open Street Maps.
19 |
20 | The code, insights, and talent networks we’ve supported through the News Challenge moved us to focus a recent iteration on open government. Our goal was to expand the table of people who engage with open government. In addition to practical open government applications, we hoped to uncover ideas about how the internet can change the ways in which citizens and governments interact. We wanted to involve more people in the use of technology to solve community problems, and we sought to expand the geographic footprint beyond what’s become the standard open government metropoles of San Francisco, Chicago, and the Boston-New York- DC Acela nexus. Silently, I hoped that at least one of the winners would not even consider themselves as part of the open government movement.
21 |
22 | During the application period, we partnered with locally based organizations to conduct events in fourteen cities, including less typical open government cities, like Lexington, Kentucky; Macon, Georgia; San Diego; and St. Paul, Minnesota. Out of the 860 submissions we received, several themes emerged that captured the open government zeitgeist. These included:
23 |
24 | * Increasing citizens’ direct participation in policymaking
25 | * Strengthening policies for data transparency
26 | * Making sense out of multiple datasets
27 | * Understanding government spending and campaign contributions
28 | * Making better use of public spaces and vacant land
29 |
30 | After our analysis of the contest process and submissions, our assessment was that open government is generating more aspirational ideas than practical tools and approaches that address citizens’ needs and wants. We learned a lot by talking directly with civic leaders, government officials, and hackers, particularly with those outside of the leading open government cities. I spoke with high-ranking government workers who were worried about the security and sustainability of open source projects, elected officials who were curious about citizen demand for data, and journalists who were dubious about governments’ commitment to openness.
31 |
32 | Our trustees ended up approving eight projects as winners. Not coincidentally, each of the eight had already demonstrated their idea and was able to talk to us about what was and was not working. Also, for the most part, they have been around the open government block for a while. (My hopes of supporting people entirely new to the field failed.)
33 |
34 | Fundamentally, the eight winning projects are practical rather than aspirational. They address identified needs of citizens and governments. Despite our exhortations, few of the ideas that made it to the final rounds re-imagined democracy in the age of the internet. They are about building practical tools that citizen-consumers can use to more easily build businesses, reclaim abandoned land, and sell services to the government. They don’t seek to engage citizens in re-imagining democracy or co-creating their communities. That could reflect the bias of the Knight Foundation and the investors, journalists, and developers who advised us, but the list may also be a reflection of where the open government movement is at this point in its development: in a field driven by aspiration, the value lies in practical businesses and services.
35 |
36 | For a guide on moving more robustly from the aspirational to the practical, we might look to Kevin Costner. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Kevin Costner was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Near the apex of his career, Costner starred in Field of Dreams, a 1989 fantasy-drama designed to make high school jocks weep. Prompted by the whispers of a disembodied voice, Costner’s character plows under his cornfield, turning it into a baseball diamond for ghosts from the 1919 Chicago White Sox. “If you build it, he will come,” the voice promises him.
37 |
38 | “If we build it, they will come,” has been open government’s operative mode for the last few years. Like other social movements before it, open government is inspired by dreams of what might be, not on an evidence-based assessment of what people want or need. It’s a movement based on the belief that by pushing out data, our fellow citizens will build things, government will be more efficient, and we will all live happier lives. Inevitably, we’ve been disappointed when those idealistic outcomes don’t pan out and we realize that the vast majority of our neighbors lack the skills, wherewithal, time, or inclination to actively participate. Our aspirations for engagement have outpaced the reality—a status appropriate for such a young social project. As open government emerges into adolescence, though, we need to bridge the gaps between innovators and citizens, who are the ultimate users.
39 |
40 | To make that leap, we need to consider a later Kevin Costner movie: The Postman. Based on David Brin’s 1985 post-apocalyptic fantasy novel, this movie features Costner playing a drifter who dons the uniform and identity of a dead mail carrier. In so doing, he inadvertently becomes the personification of the disbanded US government. Costner’s uniform and the act of distributing mail between previously disconnected towns rekindle a civic spirit among those he visits. (The movie was a dog, but Brin’s novel is pretty great.)
41 |
42 | How does open government move from building fields of dreams to delivering like a postman? How do we stop making baseball fields out of Iowa cornfields and start going town-to-town, knocking on doors, and building links, one community at a time? Now that we have the vision of it all down, it’s time to shift into the practicalities of building useful tools. Here are ten things we need to prioritize to move from dreaming to doing:
43 |
44 | #### Realistic Expectations
45 |
46 | We need to learn how to build projects and businesses that bring value to customers, not just venture capitalist moonshots. Civic technology will not produce companies with a hundred times the return on investment. We need to be okay with that and build the financing and support services that will enable entrepreneurs’ visions to become real and sustainable.
47 |
48 | #### Delight
49 |
50 | No one waits excitedly at the window for the postman to deliver us information about voting, taxes, or municipal budgets. Messages from loved ones, narratives in magazines, and holiday cards are what I look for when the mail arrives. We need apps and tools that are fun to use and don’t feel like homework.
51 |
52 | #### Drama
53 |
54 | “We have 2,000 bills. Little bill bits,” said California Governor Jerry Brown earlier this year. “You can’t run a world on bill bits. That’s not what moves people. There has to be drama. Protagonist and antagonist. We’re on the stage of history here.” We need to do a better job of taking civic data and presenting it to our neighbors in stories, visualizations, and culture.
55 |
56 | #### Literacy
57 |
58 | To appreciate the mail, it helps to be able to read. What are the skills and approaches citizens need to contribute to and benefit from open government, and how do we identify and develop them?
59 |
60 | #### Research
61 |
62 | What is the baseline for what does and does not work? How do we know how we’re doing and determine what to do better? What are we measuring? How do we know whether what we’re doing works, and how can we brag to others about it? How can we demonstrate an ROI to governments and potential investors? The fact that we don’t have answers to these questions this late in the game is worrisome.
63 |
64 | #### Models
65 |
66 | When people ask us how to do open government, where can we point them? We need solid, well-documented success stories of real results.
67 |
68 | #### Talent
69 |
70 | When they need to hire, where do governments go? Programs like the Code for America Fellowship are a great start, but they aren’t enough to form a workforce. We have a great set of leaders, but most of them could fit into one conference. We need to set up places for them to go when they leave government so we don’t lose their experiences and networks to other fields.
71 |
72 | #### Professional Development
73 |
74 | Many people who take government jobs don’t do so to be agents of change or to drive innovation. They often take them because they are good, solid jobs. Where do career government workers and civilians go to develop the skills we need to drive the movement forward from the inside out?
75 |
76 | #### Leadership Transitions
77 |
78 | We put a lot on the shoulders of individual government leaders to drive change. How do we build the systems so that the innovations built by a chief executive are not dismantled with their administration? What tools would help with transitions from one mayor or governor to another?
79 |
80 | #### Risk Tolerance
81 |
82 | How can we encourage and enable government leaders and workers to take risks that they are generally dissuaded from trying? We need to build a culture inside government that is tolerant of taking smart, well-calculated risks.
83 |
84 | For open government to succeed, it needs to make its principles—transparency, openness, and data-driven decision-making—become synonymous with democracy. In order to fully benefit from the values of sharing and the wisdom of community, we need to move beyond placing our hopes in whispered promises toward doing the practical work of building useful, sustainable tools and a supportive ecosystem.
85 |
86 | ### About the Author
87 |
88 | John S. Bracken is the director of media innovation for the Knight Foundation. He oversees the Knight News Challenge, Knight’s prototype fund, its journalism, and its technology investments. Bracken has over ten years of experience as a philanthropic investor in digital media, media policy, innovation, and global internet freedom, having previously worked at the Ford Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
89 |
90 |
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/chapters/part-5-chapter-99.md:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: chapter
3 | title: "Afterword: What's Next?"
4 | part: 6
5 | chapter: 99
6 |
7 | author:
8 | -
9 | name: Abhi Nemani
10 | job: Co-Executive Director (Interim)
11 | employer: Code for America
12 | photo_url: /images/authors/abhi.png
13 | twitter: abhinemani
14 | about: "Co-Executive Director (Interim) at Code for America, a national non-profit dedicated to reinventing government for the 21st century."
15 |
16 | permalink: /afterword/
17 | ---
18 | >The principle binary struggle of the 21st century is not left or right, but open societies versus closed.
19 |
20 | > —Alec J. Ross
21 |
22 | The early history of the open data movement, as chronicled in these pages, tells us that data will certainly play a critical role in optimizing service delivery, creating new business opportunities, and setting new policy. Cities ranging from Asheville and Portland to Chicago and London have set up open data shops; millions of dollars of economic activity have been stimulated both at the local and national levels; and core civic services such as childhood welfare in Maryland and Public Works in Louisville are being constantly renovated through data. Beyond these tactical enhancements, cultural and social shifts are emerging as citizens build more trust in their government and become more engaged in its work.
23 |
24 | Still, the legacy of the open data movement remains to be seen. The long-term success of our current efforts should be measured not only by their efficacy now, but by their ability to catalyze future action into new challenges and harder issues. While progress has begun in difficult areas such as personal data, platform integration, and inter-agency coordination, we have only just scratched the surface. As open data becomes mainstream, political and philosophical issues are coming to the fore. How can we design for inclusion? How can we reconcile privacy and openness? We must take on these questions next.
25 |
26 | To address these challenges and realize future opportunities, a key lesson from these narratives must be taken to heart. Data is at best a tool—sometimes a blunt one—and tools are only as good as their operators. The open data movement must look not only beyond transparency as an end goal, but beyond any single constituency as operators. “How to open data” is not only a question for governments, and neither is “what to build with it” one for civic startups. New York City has pioneered some of the most impressive applications of data analytics, while BrightScope has opened up millions of rows of data. The Smart Chicago Collaborative, Philadelphia’s Chief Data Officer, and SmartProcure have all used data to advance policy reform. Civic hackers and journalists have played a critical role in making data more meaningful and available.
27 |
28 | There are countless other examples—many detailed in this anthology—of unexpected open civic data operators from all facets of our society. In this way, open data has served to blur the lines between our public and private lives, to reconnect the consumer, citizen, and civil servant. When looking ahead, this may be part of open data’s greatest legacy: the emergence of a new kind of connective tissue that enables us to create governments of the people, by the people, that work in the 21st century.
29 | ### About the Author
30 |
31 | Abhi Nemani is the Co-Executive Director (Interim) at Code for America (CfA). For nearly four years, Abhi has led CfA’s strategic development and growth, including the development of multiple new programs including the launch of a first-of-its-kind civic startup accelerator and the CfA Peer Network, designed to connect cities to help them work together. Abhi has been featured as a speaker at SxSW, the World Bank, and various universities and conferences around the world. He graduated magna cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a honors degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics.
32 |
33 |
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/index.html:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: default
3 | title: Beyond Transparency
4 | ---
5 |
6 | {% include chaptermenu.html %}
7 |
8 |
53 |
54 |
55 |
56 |
57 |
58 |
59 |
Some of our contributors
60 |
61 |
62 |
63 | {% for page in site.pages %}
64 | {% if page.layout == "chapter" %}
65 | {% if page.featured == true %}
66 |
67 |
68 |
69 |
70 |
{{ page.author[0].name }}
71 |
{{ page.author[0].job }}
72 |
{{ page.author[0].employer }}
73 |
74 | {{ page.title }}
75 |
76 |
78 |
79 | {% endif %}
80 | {% endif %}
81 | {% endfor %}
82 |
83 |
84 |
85 |
86 |
88 |
89 |
90 |
91 |
92 |
93 |
94 |
What critics have to say
95 |
96 |
97 |
“Beyond Transparency combines the inspirational glow and political grit of Profiles in Courag e with the clarity of an engineer’s calm explanation of how something technical actually works…. This compilation presents us with a great deal to admire, ample provocation, and wise guidance from a group of remarkable individuals.”
98 |
— Susan Crawford, author of Captive Audience
99 |
100 |
101 |
“Just as he did during his time in my administration, Goldstein has brought together industry leaders to discuss issues of relevance in the open data movement and the practical implications of implementing these policies… This book will help continue the work to make open government a reality across the country.”
102 |
— Mayor Rahm Emanuel, City of Chicago
103 |
104 |
105 |
106 |
Beyond Transparency is an invaluable overview of how open data enables the free flow of information. This collection of stories from the field illustrates how technology and collaboration can support transparency and help communities transform ideas into actions.”
107 |
— Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
108 |
109 |
110 |
111 |
“A must-read for anyone who is passionate about what open data can do to transform city living.”
112 |
— Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
113 |
114 |
115 |
116 |
“Beyond Transparency surveys the latest open data initiatives and outlines a compelling vision of how data and technology can reshape urban governance in America. Compiled by the best experts in the country, this book provides a compelling roadmap to take government to the next level.”
117 |
— Steven Goldsmith, Harvard Kennedy School
118 |
119 |
120 |
121 |
122 |
124 |
125 |
126 |
127 |
128 |
129 |
About this book
130 |
131 |
132 |
This book is a resource for (and by) practitioners inside and outside government—from the municipal chief information officer to the community organizer to the civic-minded entrepreneur. Beyond Transparency is intended to capture and distill the community's learnings around open data for the past four years. And we know that the community is going to continue learning. That's why, in addition to the print version of the book which you can order on Amazon , we've also published the digital version of this book on this site under a Creative Commons license. The full text of this site is on GitHub — which means that anyone can submit a pull request with a suggested edit. Help us improve this resource for the community and write the next edition of Beyond Transparency by submitting your pull requests.
133 |
Code for America is a national nonprofit committed to building a government for the people, by the people, that works in the 21st century. Over the past four years, CfA has worked with dozens of cities to support civic innovation through open data. You can support this work by contributing to the book on GitHub , joining the CfA volunteer community (the Brigade), donating to Code for America , or connecting your city with CfA.
134 |
135 |
136 |
Interested in more about open data and Code for America?
137 |
144 |
145 |
146 |
147 |
148 |
149 |
150 |
152 |
153 |
160 |
161 |
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/js/jquery-scrollspy.js:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | /*!
2 | * jQuery Scrollspy Plugin
3 | * Author: @sxalexander
4 | * Licensed under the MIT license
5 | */
6 |
7 |
8 | ;(function ( $, window, document, undefined ) {
9 |
10 | $.fn.extend({
11 | scrollspy: function ( options ) {
12 |
13 | var defaults = {
14 | min: 0,
15 | max: 0,
16 | mode: 'vertical',
17 | buffer: 0,
18 | container: window,
19 | onEnter: options.onEnter ? options.onEnter : [],
20 | onLeave: options.onLeave ? options.onLeave : [],
21 | onTick: options.onTick ? options.onTick : []
22 | }
23 |
24 | var options = $.extend( {}, defaults, options );
25 |
26 | return this.each(function (i) {
27 |
28 | var element = this;
29 | var o = options;
30 | var $container = $(o.container);
31 | var mode = o.mode;
32 | var buffer = o.buffer;
33 | var enters = leaves = 0;
34 | var inside = false;
35 |
36 | /* add listener to container */
37 | $container.bind('scroll', function(e){
38 | var position = {top: $(this).scrollTop(), left: $(this).scrollLeft()};
39 | var xy = (mode == 'vertical') ? position.top + buffer : position.left + buffer;
40 | var max = o.max;
41 | var min = o.min;
42 |
43 | /* fix max */
44 | if($.isFunction(o.max)){
45 | max = o.max();
46 | }
47 |
48 | /* fix max */
49 | if($.isFunction(o.min)){
50 | min = o.min();
51 | }
52 |
53 | if(max == 0){
54 | max = (mode == 'vertical') ? $container.height() : $container.outerWidth() + $(element).outerWidth();
55 | }
56 |
57 | /* if we have reached the minimum bound but are below the max ... */
58 | if(xy >= min && xy <= max){
59 | /* trigger enter event */
60 | if(!inside){
61 | inside = true;
62 | enters++;
63 |
64 | /* fire enter event */
65 | $(element).trigger('scrollEnter', {position: position})
66 | if($.isFunction(o.onEnter)){
67 | o.onEnter(element, position);
68 | }
69 |
70 | }
71 |
72 | /* triger tick event */
73 | $(element).trigger('scrollTick', {position: position, inside: inside, enters: enters, leaves: leaves})
74 | if($.isFunction(o.onTick)){
75 | o.onTick(element, position, inside, enters, leaves);
76 | }
77 | }else{
78 |
79 | if(inside){
80 | inside = false;
81 | leaves++;
82 | /* trigger leave event */
83 | $(element).trigger('scrollLeave', {position: position, leaves:leaves})
84 |
85 | if($.isFunction(o.onLeave)){
86 | o.onLeave(element, position);
87 | }
88 | }
89 | }
90 | });
91 |
92 | });
93 | }
94 |
95 | })
96 |
97 |
98 | })( jQuery, window );
99 |
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/js/jquery.scrollTo.min.js:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | /**
2 | * Copyright (c) 2007-2013 Ariel Flesler - aflesler
gmailcom | http://flesler.blogspot.com
3 | * Dual licensed under MIT and GPL.
4 | * @author Ariel Flesler
5 | * @version 1.4.6
6 | */
7 | ;(function($){var h=$.scrollTo=function(a,b,c){$(window).scrollTo(a,b,c)};h.defaults={axis:'xy',duration:parseFloat($.fn.jquery)>=1.3?0:1,limit:true};h.window=function(a){return $(window)._scrollable()};$.fn._scrollable=function(){return this.map(function(){var a=this,isWin=!a.nodeName||$.inArray(a.nodeName.toLowerCase(),['iframe','#document','html','body'])!=-1;if(!isWin)return a;var b=(a.contentWindow||a).document||a.ownerDocument||a;return/webkit/i.test(navigator.userAgent)||b.compatMode=='BackCompat'?b.body:b.documentElement})};$.fn.scrollTo=function(e,f,g){if(typeof f=='object'){g=f;f=0}if(typeof g=='function')g={onAfter:g};if(e=='max')e=9e9;g=$.extend({},h.defaults,g);f=f||g.duration;g.queue=g.queue&&g.axis.length>1;if(g.queue)f/=2;g.offset=both(g.offset);g.over=both(g.over);return this._scrollable().each(function(){if(e==null)return;var d=this,$elem=$(d),targ=e,toff,attr={},win=$elem.is('html,body');switch(typeof targ){case'number':case'string':if(/^([+-]=?)?\d+(\.\d+)?(px|%)?$/.test(targ)){targ=both(targ);break}targ=$(targ,this);if(!targ.length)return;case'object':if(targ.is||targ.style)toff=(targ=$(targ)).offset()}$.each(g.axis.split(''),function(i,a){var b=a=='x'?'Left':'Top',pos=b.toLowerCase(),key='scroll'+b,old=d[key],max=h.max(d,a);if(toff){attr[key]=toff[pos]+(win?0:old-$elem.offset()[pos]);if(g.margin){attr[key]-=parseInt(targ.css('margin'+b))||0;attr[key]-=parseInt(targ.css('border'+b+'Width'))||0}attr[key]+=g.offset[pos]||0;if(g.over[pos])attr[key]+=targ[a=='x'?'width':'height']()*g.over[pos]}else{var c=targ[pos];attr[key]=c.slice&&c.slice(-1)=='%'?parseFloat(c)/100*max:c}if(g.limit&&/^\d+$/.test(attr[key]))attr[key]=attr[key]<=0?0:Math.min(attr[key],max);if(!i&&g.queue){if(old!=attr[key])animate(g.onAfterFirst);delete attr[key]}});animate(g.onAfter);function animate(a){$elem.animate(attr,f,g.easing,a&&function(){a.call(this,targ,g)})}}).end()};h.max=function(a,b){var c=b=='x'?'Width':'Height',scroll='scroll'+c;if(!$(a).is('html,body'))return a[scroll]-$(a)[c.toLowerCase()]();var d='client'+c,html=a.ownerDocument.documentElement,body=a.ownerDocument.body;return Math.max(html[scroll],body[scroll])-Math.min(html[d],body[d])};function both(a){return typeof a=='object'?a:{top:a,left:a}}})(jQuery);
8 |
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/js/main.js:
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1 |
2 | $(".menu-btn").click(function(){
3 |
4 | if($(".chapter-nav").is(".show")){
5 | $(".chapter-nav").removeClass("show");
6 | $(".page").removeClass("withsidebar");
7 | $(".navbar").removeClass("withsidebar")
8 |
9 | } else{
10 | $(".page").addClass("withsidebar")
11 | $(".chapter-nav").addClass("show");
12 | $(".navbar").addClass("withsidebar")
13 | }
14 |
15 | });
16 |
17 | $(".chapter-nav .close").click(function(){
18 | $(".menu-btn").click();
19 | })
20 |
21 |
22 | $(function(){
23 |
24 | if($("div.in-chapter-nav").length > 0){
25 | $(".chapter-text").find("h3").each(function(i,el){
26 | $el = $(el);
27 | var slug = $el.text().toLowerCase().replace(/\s/g, "-").replace("'", "");
28 | $el.append(""+$el.text()+" ");
30 | (function($el){
31 | $sectionLink.click(function(){
32 | $(document).scrollTo( $el, 500, {offset:{top:-120}, easing:"swing" });
33 | });
34 | })($el);
35 | $("div.in-chapter-nav ul.sections").append($sectionLink);
36 | });
37 | }
38 | });
39 |
40 |
41 | // Fix chapter navigation in place when it's about to be scrolled off the window
42 | var $fixedEl = $('.in-chapter-nav')
43 | var fixedElPosition
44 | var fixedElWidth = $fixedEl.width()
45 |
46 | $(window).scroll(function () {
47 | if ($fixedEl.length > 0 ) {
48 | if ($(window).scrollTop() > $fixedEl.offset().top - 110 && !fixedElPosition) {
49 | fixedElPosition = $fixedEl.offset().top - 110
50 | $fixedEl.css('position', 'fixed').css('top', '90px').css('width', fixedElWidth + 'px');
51 | $('.return-top').show()
52 | }
53 | else if ($(window).scrollTop() < fixedElPosition) {
54 | fixedElPosition = null
55 | $fixedEl.css('position', 'relative').css('top', '0');
56 | $('.return-top').hide()
57 | }
58 | }
59 | });
60 |
61 | $('.return-top').click(function() {
62 | $(document).scrollTo('.page', 500, {easing:"swing"})
63 | })
64 |
65 |
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/pdf/BeyondTransparency.pdf:
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https://raw.githubusercontent.com/codeforamerica/beyondtransparency/6a0514ecf8cc3f1f21dcd1d5711890b4b753007d/pdf/BeyondTransparency.pdf
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/toc.html:
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1 | ---
2 | layout: default
3 | title: Beyond Transparency - Table of Contents
4 | ---
5 | {% include chaptermenu.html %}
6 |
7 |
8 | {% include header.html %}
9 |
10 |
11 |
Table of Contents
12 |
13 | {% for page in site.pages %}
14 | {% if page.layout == "chapter" %}
15 | {{ page.title }} {{page.author}}
16 | {% endif %}
17 | {% endfor %}
18 |
19 |
20 |
39 | 
23 | 
Buy it on Amazon
38 | 
Get the PDF
39 | 
Donate to CfA
40 | 
48 | 
59 | 70 |
{{ page.author[0].name }}71 |{{ page.author[0].job }}72 |{{ page.author[0].employer }}73 | 74 |{{ page.title }}75 | 76 |
78 |
79 | {% endif %}
80 | {% endif %}
81 | {% endfor %}
82 |
83 | 
94 | 
129 |