- March 29, 2018
- Civic Data
Each week we will bring you a summary of what happened this week on our site, on Twitter, and in the wider world of civic data. Suggest stories on Twitter with #ThisWeekInData.
Wired examined the contrasting approaches to data ownership in Europe and the United States. The European Union recently passed the General Data Protection Regulation, which treats personal data as a piece of property, requiring that any company, anywhere, must respect the data rights of EU citizens, or face stiff penalties. Europeans must provide positive consent for the ways their data is used, and they have the right to access and erase that data, as well as the “right to be forgotten.” On the other hand, the United States treats data as a good to be traded on the open market, subject to the same market forces at play elsewhere. The article argues that the EU’s approach will likely dominate, as public scrutiny over data protection has increased in the wake of Cambridge Analytica and other similar cases.
Fast Company profiled a project by a New York programmer to use AI and open data to analyze how often cars block bus and bike lanes. The programmer developed a machine-learning algorithm to analyze continuous camera footage on a single block in Harlem over a 10-day period. He found that bus stops are blocked by other vehicles 57 percent of the time, and bike lanes around 40 percent of the time.
GovTech chronicled the third annual Smart Cities Connect Conference and Expo, which brings together leaders from more than 200 cities and representatives from tech companies in an effort to galvanize tech-driven government. A panel discussion among city CDOs, CIOs, and agency leaders addressed the possibility of overlaying data from multiple sources in order to solve complex interdisciplinary problems like crime or transportation. While layering data can greatly enhance its value, cities must remain conscious of user privacy, a consideration that led Kansas City to ask private companies to not share individual private information on users.
Stephen Goldsmith and Chris Bousquet wrote an article in CityLab outlining a framework for cities to ensure transparency in the algorithms they use to make decisions. While many cities use algorithms for important tasks like assessing teacher performance and predicting the likelihood of criminal re-offense, the public often knows little about how these tools work due to concerns about security and proprietary secrets. To address this lack of information, New York City recently convened a task force to develop algorithmic transparency recommendations for the mayor. Goldsmith and Bousquet propose a few basic requirements the task force should consider: sharing the motivation for using algorithms, explaining what data goes into models and why, describing how developers analyzed the data, and publishing performance data.
The Pew Charitable Trust published a report “What Do State Chief Data Officers Do?” which maps state chief data officers across the country, explains how those positions came to be, and describes the primary responsibilities of state CDOs. The report underscores the increasingly important role of state CDOs in creating data-driven solutions for intermittent issues like hurricanes and traffic events, as well as for chronic problems like poverty.
NextBillion proposes that insights from behavioral science can make cash transfer programs more effective at combating poverty. Currently, payments are made often to cater more to administrators’ convenience than beneficiaries’ needs, but some innovators are already changing the timing, location and frequency of payments to suit recipients. Interventions include allowing beneficiaries to decide when they will receive payments, prompts that ask them to consider how they’d like to use their money right before receiving it, reminders to follow through on plans, systems to provide feedback to people on their savings progress, and wallets to help them physically separate what they want to spend routinely from what they want to set aside for the future.
On Data-Smart, Chris Bousquet examined the various ways in which cities are using environmental data to drive sustainability. In addition to facilitating optimization, better and more widely accessible environmental data is also a tool for inspiring change from both the top down and the bottom up. A building energy monitoring initiative in Boston, an air quality sensing project in Baltimore, and a sustainability dashboard in Austin illustrate these three different strategies.
An article in Project Syndicate argued that performance measurement systems have largely backfired, driving institutions to boost their performance metrics, often at the expense of performance itself. The piece argues that the outcomes of metric-driven approaches in health care, education, and public safety have been disappointing and even counterproductive, as institutions have learned to “game the system” in order to produce better metrics while ignoring deeper, less easily measured aspects of these issues. However, the author argues that performance metrics can be beneficial, especially when used not for reward and punishment, but for diagnostic purposes by practitioners themselves, and when shaped by their professional values, experiences, and expectations.
Nancy Torres profiled the City of Columbus’s progress in creating a smart transportation system in fulfillment of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge. Almost a year and a half into the project, Columbus has built a lean team to execute its smart city vision, partnered with organizations across sectors, and received additional funding to implement a proposal that includes connected vehicles, smart mobility hubs, and a comprehensive Smart Columbus operating system. Read more on Data-Smart.
