Civic Engagement

Digital tools are championed in the name of citizen engagement, often to connect citizens to services. However, choosing the format for civic engagement, whether digital or analog, involves assessing what sort of engagement you’re after. Speaking at the Habitat III thematic meeting on civic engagement, part of the preliminary work for the 20-year urbanization strategy called the New Urban Agenda that will come out of next year’s U. N. cities conference, Joan Clos, the secretary-general of Habitat III, said “Civic engagement is about the roots of democracy...It’s about the personal rights of humans to have a say in their everyday life and the form of urbanization,” Citiscope reports. In other words, civic engagement is about the right to the city. That will require traditional face to face civic engagement as well as technological platforms. The work ahead is finding the right role for both.

Social and Policy Implications of What’s Next in Human-Computer Interaction

Technology is democratizing, not just as computing power gets cheaper and smaller, but also as human-computer interaction becomes more intuitive. Computers have become more accessible as they’ve gotten easier to use, largely a result of increasing improvements in software. The broader field of human-computer interaction, which embraces psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines, according to the New York Times, will involve software that focuses less on user interface improvements on websites or smartphones and more on design that improves deeper individual and broader social goals, like better education or healthcare. The future is in these socially minded designs that lay a foundation for stronger social cohesion and coordination.

Aims of Open Data

In response to a Technical.ly Philly article championing the city’s recent open data release, Mark Headd reminds us that the end goal of open data isn’t simply releasing more: “The end game on open data has always been about something larger than simply filling up an open data catalog—open data is a pathway to creating a new way of operating in government.” It’s a small part of a much larger, more fundamental, change in the way government is structured and organized.

Open Data in Cities Report

The Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Society’s Civic Tech USC project released its report on “Empowering the Public Through Open Data,” looking at Los Angeles County’s 88 cities. Since 2013, 18 cities within the county have launched open data initiatives, but lack of funding remains a major barrier, along with a need for more expertise and buy-in from city departments. Increasing public engagement with city data and showing its value will require new ways to track and publicize how open data creates value for the public.

A Cheaper Way to Get Value from Data with Less Data

TechCrunch says big data isn’t big, and good data is even smaller. This is because most firms have less data than they claim, of which only a tiny proportion yields meaningful insight. There are tools, like deep-learning algorithms, to separate the signal from the noise in big datasets, but most companies have neither the amount of data nor the funds to support it. An alternative is transfer learning--the improvement of learning in a new task through the transfer of knowledge from a related task that has already been learned.

New Website Consolidates Mobile Data to Study Real Time Human Behavior in Cities

Phone data is gaining value as a rich way to observe real-time human behavior. Dániel Kondor and other researchers at the SENSEable City Laboratory at MIT and at Ericsson, a company that produces network infrastructure technologies, have unveiled a powerful online tool that uses mobile phone data to visualize human activity in cities all over the world. This new tool, called ManyCities, allows anybody to study human activity in various cities with unprecedented detail and ease because it organizes and presents the data in intuitive ways that quickly reveal trends and special events, according to MIT Technology Review.

Emerging Tech

Most train-tracking apps show where your train is and when it’ll be at the station. But a new algorithm designed by Swedish mathematicians can also predict delays, computing the ripple effects a single delay can have on its broader system. This means commuters can more accurately plan their commutes and avoid delays, according to Gizmodo.

Mobile and Wearable Tech in Government

GCN says it's time for government to follow the private sector in integrating mobile devices like tablets and wearables into operations. Business processes enabled by mobile and wearable technology could improve the user experience for employees and citizens. Mobile tech could enable better access to enterprise data and encourage interagency collaboration at all levels of government.