Policy by the Numbers

Better Permits, Better Cities: How Hacking City Policy Can Improve the Public Realm

2013-05-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Jake Levitas is a civic designer, organizer, and activist based in San Francisco. Cross-posted from Medium.com.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody. — Jane Jacobs

Cities are at their best when they change with their citizens; when, to quote Rebar principal Matthew Passmore, “a city’s evolution keeps pace with its own cultural evolution.” Unfortunately, cities are often preventing themselves from doing just that—from being responsive enough to their own changing dynamics to continue existing as accurate reflections of and platforms for their own cultures. Outdated permitting processes are keeping a large swath of promising projects in art, design, technology, and other modes of expression from ever becoming part of the urban landscape. Along the way, cities are missing opportunities to add economic and cultural value in a time of constrained resources.

In other words: cities can be more healthy, engaging, beautiful and productive if they make it easier for citizens to contribute to making them so.

Historically, projects that alter the public realm have been generally divided into two camps: those that play by the rules (city-sanctioned installations, community murals) and those that don’t (graffiti, vandalism). Recently, this dichotomy has been disrupted by projects that make practical and aesthetic improvements to public space—but don’t always ask for permission. This approach is driven by citizens with the passion to improve their cities and the impatience to not wait through the full public permitting process to take action. But what if that process weren’t so intimidating, time-consuming, and costly for the average city resident? Could we make cities better, faster?

Why Civic Design Policy is Like Rocket Science
In between powerful ideas and powerful change lies powerful bureaucracy.

Internally, city governments are tasked with ensuring that public infrastructure and funds are used safely and responsibly. Permits that utilize these funds or resources are, for good reason, a big part of this.

But from an outside perspective—for community members, designers, artists, architects, makers—the process of getting a project approved and permitted by city departments might as well be rocket science. The entire tactical urbanism movement exists largely as a band-aid solution for citizens who lack the resources, time, or patience to navigate this complex approval system, and prefer taking matters into their own hands to create local change. A key question moving forward is how this process can be opened up to look less like rocket science, and more like the DIY science kits that turn kids everywhere into excited, engaged brainstormers. How can we make the permitting process sexier to better engage the average citizen?

Let’s get into the details a little bit. Say you want to install an Urban Prototyping project like Urban Parasol in your city—attaching a modular shade structure to a light pole. In San Francisco, the light pole you’re attaching to is managed by SFPUC, the sidewalks people are standing on underneath your structure are managed by SFDPW, and the street thoroughfare your overhang stretches above is managed by SFMTA. You might need permits and approvals from all of these agencies before you even think of hitting the street—and often, existing permits aren’t set up to handle these types of ideas.

While you’re at it, you might want to talk to someone in the SF Arts Commission, City Administrator’s Office, Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Services, or your local Community Benefit District about gaining local support for the project. Then you’ll need to make sure it doesn’t make the area less beautiful, more dangerous, or more prone to attract noisy late-night revelry in the eyes of the neighbors nearby. And finally, you’ll also need a way to pay for the material costs, and find a way to get your work paid for if you’re not planning to donate your time as a civic volunteer. All of this work is on top of the citizens’ principal focus of creating the best public art piece, design intervention, or interactive installation they possibly can—which is a huge job in itself.

Understandably, it’s hard for most citizens who want to contribute to know where to begin. The process isn’t made easier by the fact that most government websites are difficult to navigate (though there are exceptions!), and most departments don’t have a liaison dedicated to making this process easy and accessible for the community.

Better permits will allow artists and designers to focus more on what they’re good at—creating great civic projects—while allowing city planners to focus on their own invaluable strengths—navigating the crucial regulatory nuances of City Hall that can make these projects a reality.

Why It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way
Cities want to help, and the barriers aren’t as big as they seem.

Here’s the good news: the obstacles to getting public design projects approved, built, and installed are actually not as complicated as they seem—and they’re pretty much exactly what you would think they are. In speaking with city officials in several San Francisco agencies recently, they all outlined the same five barriers as the root causes of bureaucratic slowness and difficulty. I’ve listed these below, along with some basic steps toward getting around them:

Liability + injury potential: Perhaps the biggest obstacle from a legal perspective is determining who is responsible if someone is injured or otherwise harmed directly or indirectly by a project. Most projects need someone to cover liability associated with them, which sometimes means working out a deal with the city or a local business owner who already has a policy in place. This can be tricky but certainly isn’t impossible, and could be streamlined by the city to make it even easier—for example, by creating a guide that helps citizens understand the liability process and their options for getting approved.
Citizen complaints: Many projects can be derailed due to concerns from locals over issues like noise, aesthetics, traffic, or safety. Working with the community and conducting preliminary testing and meetings before a full installation can go a long way toward easing the public’s mind and garnering support for a project
Funding + procurement: Procurement requirements—standards for the entities and people that can provide services to and receive funding from the city—can be a barrier for individual citizens and smaller organizations to create real projects that take advantage of city improvement funds and other public funding. There are a few easy ways to help remedy this: designers and artists can work through nonprofits and firms that are already city vendors; the city can make it easier for citizens to both become vendors and/or connect with existing vendors; and the city can also fast-track projects with external funding (from grants, individuals, or crowd funding) to increase the value they are able to capture from outside City Hall.
Lack of interagency dialog: Every city has a web of responsibilities that is often spread across a complicated web of departments and individuals. However, most cities lack an interagency review board or task force to streamline the process of approving public design projects. Others make it difficult for departments to simply talk to each other, making it harder to find the creative regulatory solutions sometimes necessary to bring projects to life. We’ve started forming an Urban Prototyping Task Force in San Francisco to help get the ball rolling on these issues, and a culture of dialog can also be taken much further when it is promoted from the top by a visionary mayor or planning director.
Lack of a good public interface: As mentioned above, there’s generally no central government touch point for citizens who want to design for the public realm. Ideally this touch point should be a combination of 1) well-designed and accessible informational resources and 2) dedicated staff members to support them and interface with the public directly. In San Francisco, we’re fortunate to have the SF Better Streets initiative—a simply fantastic effort that gets closer to this interface than anything else I’ve personally seen.

Finally, most city staff members I’ve met with are just as frustrated with the typical regulatory process as we on the outside are—and they’re actively looking for great new citizen-led projects and the means to take them forward. This may be somewhat unique to San Francisco, birthplace of the parklet, but my sense from speaking with officials in other cities is that the broader culture is changing—the permits themselves just haven’t been able to catch up yet.

Where We Go From Here
We know the problems—so let’s start tackling them together.

If the good news is that barriers to permitting civic design projects are well-known and surmountable, the better news is that many cities are already heading in the right direction. San Francisco’s groundbreaking work creating the parklet permit has been well-documented, and Boston’s City Hall to Go program is another great example of making city services and processes more accessible to the general public. Even more importantly, the conversations between City Hall insiders and outsiders—those in need of city approvals and those providing them—have become much more frequent and robust in recent years—a welcome change from the sometimes stereotypical bureaucratic Iron Curtain. Technology and new forms of engagement are only making these interactions easier.

To be clear, “hacking” the permitting process—rethinking it to make it more efficient, effective, and attractive—isn’t necessarily going to be easy, fast, or fun. It took about five years to formally establish the parklet permitting process in San Francisco. If we’re going to hack city policy successfully, our best tool is the continued dialog between citizens and government. Understanding each others’ needs and contexts is the first step to change, and it’s already starting to happen today.

Every citizen can be a part of this change by tracking down supportive officials in the right departments, sharing successful project examples, and organizing open discussions (like this one) to promote understanding and (most importantly) action. Together, we can ensure that better permits will create better cities.

International Broadband Pricing Study: Updated Dataset

2013-05-17T12:00:00.000-07:00

Derek Slater is a Policy Manager at Google.

Last year, we hired a respected consultancy, Communications Chambers, to produce an international dataset of retail broadband Internet connectivity prices. The dataset can be used to make international comparisons and evaluate the efficacy of particular public policies—e.g., direct regulation and oversight of Internet peering and termination charges—on consumer prices.

We received a lot of positive feedback and suggestions—thank you!—and have now made available an updated dataset.

A Fusion Table containing the price observations for 1,523 fixed broadband plans can be found here.
A Fusion Table containing 2,167 mobile broadband prices can be found here.
Explanatory notes here, and ancillary data is here.

DataEDGE: A New Vision for Data Science

2013-05-16T11:11:00.000-07:00

Steven Weber is a professor in the School of Information and Political Science department at UC Berkeley.

It's commonly said that most people overestimate the impact of technology in the short term, and underestimate its impact over the longer term.

Where is Big Data in 2013? Starting to get very real, in our view, and right on the cusp of underestimation in the long term. The short term hype cycle is (thankfully) burning itself out, and the profound changes that data science can and will bring to human life are just now coming into focus. It may be that Data Science is right now about where the Internet itself was in 1993 or so. That's roughly when it became clear that the World Wide Web was a wind that would blow across just about every sector of the modern economy while transforming foundational things we thought were locked in about human relationships, politics, and social change. It's becoming a reasonable bet that Data Science is set to do the same—again, and perhaps even more profoundly—over the next decade. Just possibly, more quickly than that.

There are important differences which have equally come into focus. Let's face it: Data Science is just plain hard to do, in a way that the Web was not. Data is technically harder, from a hardware and a software perspective. It's intellectually harder, because the expertise and disciplines needed to work with this kind of data span (at a minimum) computer science, statistics, mathematics, and—controversially—domain expertise in the area of application. And it will be harder to manage issues of ethics, privacy, and access, precisely because the data revolution is, well, really a revolution.

Can data, no matter how big, change the world for the better? It may be the case that in some fields of human endeavor and behavior, the scientific analysis of big data by itself will create such powerful insights that change will simply have to happen, that businesses will deftly re-organize, that health care will remake itself for efficiency and better outcomes, that people will adopt new behaviors that make them happier, healthier, more prosperous and peaceful. Maybe. But almost everything we know about technology and society across human history argues that it won't be so straightforward.

Data Science is becoming mature enough to grapple confidently and creatively with humans, with organizations, with the power of archaic conventions that societies are stuck following. The field is broadening to a place where data science is becoming as much a social scientific endeavor as a technical one. The next generation of world class data scientists will need the technical skills to work with huge amounts of data, the analytical skills to understand how it is embedded in business and society, and the design and storytelling skills to pull these insights together and use them to motivate change.

What skills, knowledge, and experience do you and your organization need to thrive in a data-intensive economy? Come join senior industry and academic leaders at DataEDGE at UC Berkeley on May 30-31 to engage in what will be a lively and important conversation aimed at answering today's questions about the data science revolution—and formulating tomorrow's.

Visualization: TweetMap

2013-05-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis has released an incredible map-based visualization of global tweets, called TweetMap ALPHA (via Information Aesthetics). From the project site:

TweetMap is an instance of MapD, a massively parallel database platform being developed through a collaboration between Todd Mostak, (currently a researcher at MIT), and the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA).

The tweet database presented here starts on 12/10/2012 and ends 12/31/2012. Currently 95 million tweets are available to be queried by time, space, and keyword. This could increase to billions and we are working on real time streaming from tweet-tweeted to tweet-on-the-map in under a second.

MapD is a general purpose SQL database that can be used to provide real-time visualization and analysis of just about any very large data set. MapD makes use of commodity Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to parallelize hard compute jobs such as that of querying and rendering very large data sets on-the-fly.

California Civic Innovation Project Report Released

2013-04-18T16:04:00.000-07:00

Back in March, Rachel Burstein of the New America Foundation wrote about some of the findings from their research on civic innovation in California. The full report is now available for download, and Rachel has given us permission to repost her announcement from govloop.com.

Whether you work at the Department of Agriculture, the California State Treasury Office or the Planning Division of the City of San Jose, you have probably encountered the following scenario. You are tasked with solving a problem—say, how to encourage those eligible for food stamps to take advantage of the program, or how to eliminate a sizeable part of the public safety budget without also reducing costs—and you want to investigate possible solutions systematically. But you don’t know what approaches have been tried, the effectiveness of such approaches, or the applicability of those solutions to the specific situation your department and constituencies are facing.

What do you do? Perhaps you begin with a basic Google search. You find some examples that seem like they might relevant. Perhaps you read an article about a town government in another state that consolidated its police department with that of another community, thereby saving millions of dollars a year. The city manager and members of the City Council have good things to say about the arrangement, but you have trouble finding information about obstacles the town leadership faced in implementing the consolidation. Plus, given the difficulties you’ve had collaborating with a neighboring town on a recycling program and what you know about a nearby city’s approach to policing, you’re not sure if consolidation of departments is a good option for your town.

What’s your next step? If you're ambitious, maybe you find contact information for the city manager in the city that tried the consolidation strategy and ask him about difficulties he faced in the project. Or maybe you send a query to a professional association list-serv asking if anyone can direct you to resources on similar local projects. Or perhaps you bring up the topic at the next meeting of the city managers group to which you belong.

The problem with any of these scenarios is that you have gleaned only limited, generic, or second-hand information from either unverifiable sources or from sources with limited understanding of how the solution will operate in the circumstances you face. For certain types of information—say, creating a new form for renting your agency's facilities, or determining what icons to use to designate recycling containers—this may not be a problem. But when it comes to government solving tough problems through innovative approaches, strong personal networks are key.

This finding is one of many found in a new report released by the New America Foundation’s California Civic Innovation Project. The report summarizes survey and interview data on perceptions of, obstacles to, and motivations for innovation in local government. It assesses how knowledge sharing between locales promotes innovation, and the particular importance of personal networks in facilitating effective knowledge sharing around innovation.

Among the report’s major findings are the following:

Internal organizational or managerial changes to improve service delivery while reducing costs—not e-government, public-private partnerships, or civic engagement projects—are the most important innovations adopted in cities and counties, according to those who work in local government.
Resource constraints both motivate innovation and serve as an obstacle to effective knowledge sharing and the potential for innovation diffusion in local government.
Pressure from elected officials and legislative mandates are more significant drivers than community input for city managers and county administrators when it comes to adopting new approaches.
By far, personal contacts—especially those in geographically proximate communities—are the most valuable source of knowledge for city and county administrators investigating and implementing new approaches.
Professional associations are more valuable as knowledge sources for innovation than the individual tools and services (e.g. list-servs, professional development opportunities, webinars, etc.) that such groups offer. Personal channels are the most typical way that local government staffers share knowledge about innovation with colleagues in other communities.
There are wide divides between urban and rural communities when it comes to perceptions of civic innovation and the ways in which knowledge is acquired and shared.

We hope to start a conversation among various stakeholders at all levels of government in order to develop specific recommendations deriving from this research. What can professional associations do to enlarge and strengthen the personal networks of their members? What can government managers do to communicate their strategies—successes, failures, and aborted projects—to others faced with similar problems? What types of institutional support need to be in place to facilitate such changes? These are the questions that we hope to begin to answer in the coming months. We hope that you will be part of the conversation!

In the meantime, you can download the full report here. We look forward to hearing from you.

Celebrating data-driven innovation in Brussels

2013-04-08T12:54:00.001-07:00

Sylwia Giepmans-Stepien is a Public Policy and Government Relations Analyst for Google in Brussels.

We now create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. And this rich flow is destined to accelerate. McKinsey projects 40% growth annually in global data generated. To showcase the potential of data for Europe’s economy and society, we recently teamed up with the European Innovation and Technology Foundation, the Bavarian Representation to the European Union and Euronews.

The forum, Data-Driven Innovation: The New Imperative for Growth, debated how data can improve the delivery of public services, provide accurate healthcare diagnosis, and generate higher business productivity. Androulla Vassiliou, European commissioner for education, culture and multilingualism, and Neelie Kroes, European commissioner in charge of the digital agenda, both called for unleashing a Big Data revolution in Europe. "This is the new frontier of the information age," Vassiliou said. "In the current path to stimulate European growth and jobs, there has never been a more critical time to harness the potential of data."

Androulla Vassilou

Alfred Spector

Senior representatives of the education, research, policy and business communities presented compelling evidence of how data could address big societal challenges. Computer-powered DNA sequencing open the possibility of accelerating medical diagnoses. Online college courses could revolutionize education. Google's own Vice President for Research Alfred Spector showed how we use data for products such as Google Translate.

Data also is powering entrepreneurs. New online business models make sense out of data include social media power startups such as news organiser Storify. Its founder Xavier Damman explained how established organisations and top politicians such as BBC, the White House or UK Prime Minister David Cameron use his company’s services to share knowledge from different online data sources, including Twitter, Google+, and traditional media websites.

The concluding panel looked at the ethical aspects of collecting, sharing and using data. Among other examples, they discussed how organizations such as DataKind are bringing together data scientists and NGOs to address social problems ranging from dirty water to urban sprawl. While speakers stressed that data-driven innovation is not based exclusively on data about people, they acknowledge, that all data regardless the source and type requires making tough ethical choices.

The Innovation Forum aims to inject data-driven innovation on the Brussels policy agenda. As well as focusing on privacy and data protection, we also need to encourage the unprecedented economic potential of data.

Imagining Better Cities through Apps

2013-04-03T12:51:00.000-07:00

Adrienne St. Aubin is a Policy Analyst at Google

Google is excited to sponsor this year’s international AppMyCity! Prize from the New Cities Foundation, celebrating mobile applications that improve the urban experience, connect people, and make cities more fun, vibrant, sustainable places.

We're bullish on the value of open public data to inspire innovation and improve citizens' daily lives. Last year Francisca Rojas of Harvard Kennedy School’s Transparency Policy Project highlighted the positive impact of open transit data on the number of transit apps developed—and the indication that more people are likely to utilize public transportation systems when apps help improve the experience via real-time information. Imagine the possibilities for other kinds of public data like health, employment, education, environmental, demographic and cultural info.

The first step toward generating value from public data is for governments to make data available in machine-readable formats, not just PDFs or image files, and ensure it stays up to date. No one wants to build or use an app that shows out-of-date schedules or last year’s parking zones. But governments aren’t the only ones who have a responsibility here, even though they are the generators and keepers of the data. Developers and citizens have a role to play too, by using what’s out there, giving feedback about how it can be improved, and growing the demand side of the market.

Of course, the value of open data isn’t just about apps. But creating and using apps is one of the most concrete ways we can engage with the public information around us. Imagine together how it can make our communities—and the world—a better place.

About the AppMyCity! Prize

Entries are now being accepted at www.appmycity.org and the submission deadline is April 26, 2013. The New Cities Foundation will announce ten semi-finalists on April 30, 2013. This list will be assessed by a panel of expert judges, who will select the three finalists. The finalists will be announced on May 7, 2013.

Three AppMyCity! Prize finalists will be invited to attend the New Cities Foundation’s New Cities Summit in São Paulo June 4-6 to present their project to an international audience of urban leaders, thinkers and innovators, and the winner will receive 5,000 USD to support further development of the app.

Visualization: The Atlantic's Class-divided Cities Series

2013-04-02T14:57:00.000-07:00

In January, Atlantic editor Richard Florida kicked off a series of posts called the "Class-divided Cities." Each post includes an analysis and map visualizations of socio-economic polarization within different areas of US cities.

This divide is seen most clearly in where members of each class live. A recent report from the Pew Research Center found that residential segregation between upper- and lower- income households has risen in 27 of America's 30 largest metros over the past several decades. Compounding this polarization between rich and poor neighborhoods, the share of middle-income neighborhoods has declined substantially.

[...]

To get a better sense of the scale of the divide in American cities, my research team at the Martin Prosperity Institute — relying on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey — plotted and mapped the residential locations of today's three major classes: the shrinking middle of blue-collar workers in manufacturing, transportation, and maintenance; the rising numbers of highly paid knowledge, professional, and creative workers in the creative class; and the even larger and faster-growing ranks of lower-paid, lower-skill service workers. For the next few weeks, I'll be exploring the various divides in some of America's largest cities and metros.

The series began with New York, and yesterday, San Francisco became the 11th.

List of city analyses, in the order in which they were posted:

Visualization: A Week's Worth of Twitter Employee Tweets

2013-03-20T11:13:00.001-07:00

Via The Verge:

There's a huge amount of public data available on Twitter, and a new data-visualization tool really hammers that home — developer Santiago Ortiz has mapped out the relationships between every Twitter employee based on their tweets to each other. Ortiz used Twitter's API to pull all the tweets authored by Twitter employees for a one-week period, and then filtered those tweets by only those made between employees. The visualization Ortiz created is almost overwhelming in its depth of detail: hovering over a user's avatar shows all the tweet-connections made by that person during the week, and clicking the avatar zooms in on that person and his or her contacts. Even more dramatically, you can click a "play" button to see a fast-forwarded view of every connection as it happened throughout the entire week — you can see small one-on-one coversations quickly branch to include more and more people. You can even click one user and drag to another to see a stream of any conversations the two individuals had.

All of the information the developer used is publicly available, showing the potential for mapping networks and public conversations by using Twitter's API. Say goodbye to at least 10 minutes of your day and click the image below to play with the visualization.

Google Policy Fellowship applications due March 15, 2013

2013-03-12T12:55:00.001-07:00

Kate Sheerin is a Policy Analyst at Google

This Friday is the last day to apply for the 2013 Google Policy Fellowship—all applications must be submitted by March 15, 2013 at midnight PST. Please visit the website for application and program details.

The Google Policy Fellowship supports students and organizations working on the critical technology policy issues of our time. Fellows will have the opportunity to work at public interest organizations at the forefront of debates on broadband and access policy, content regulation, copyright and trademark reform, consumer privacy, open government, and more. The Google Policy Fellowship is open to students of all levels and disciplines.

Good luck on your application!

Hanging out with the Department of Energy

2013-03-08T09:48:00.000-08:00

Back on February 21, the Department of Energy hosted a Google+ Hangout to talk about open data in conjunction with an early launch of energy.gov/data. Moderated by Presidential Innovation Fellow Ian Kalin, the Hangout featured Monisha Shah (Deputy Associate Director for Energy and Climate Change at the Council on Environmental Quality), Riggs Kubiak (Founder and CEO of HonestBuildings.com), and Jess Hemerly, Google. The conversation touched on the value of open public sector data to innovation in both the public and private sectors, the barriers to providing access to open data, and the future of open data and innovation generally.

Rethinking Cost and Technology in Local Government

2013-03-05T11:02:00.002-08:00

Rachel Burstein is a Research Associate at the New America Foundation's California Civic Innovation Project.

Technology provides tremendous tools for local government leaders hoping to better serve community needs. Consider the efficiencies created by online payment systems, or the potential for community improvements through the publication of open data sets. Unfortunately, however, local government staffers often don’t recognize technology as important or valuable. In order to change these attitudes, technologists, citizens and others will need to articulate the value of tech to fulfilling central governmental functions.

The New America Foundation’s California Civic Innovation Project recently concluded a survey of city managers and county administrators in California. We found that of a list of ten motivations for innovation, reducing costs was by far the most important factor (Table 1). City managers and county administrators do not regard inadequate technological infrastructure as a noteworthy obstacle for innovation. Instead, financial considerations are judged to be much more important (Table 2). So, what gives? Given that there is often a correlation between cost and technology, are we to assume that local government administrators simply don't regard technology as important to the innovation process? Or is something else going on?

The answer may be found in four different ways. First, although departmental heads may see things differently, local government administrators do not generally view innovation as dependent on technology. We saw that a majority of respondents at both the county and city level identified shared services and compliance with new legislative requirements as the most important new approaches in their jurisdictions in the last five years. Some of these projects may involve technology, but initiatives that required technological infrastructure—an open government project, or a new town website, for example—were mentioned in only a handful of responses.

Second, community resources and vision have a lot to do with how technology is integrated into an administrator’s understanding of innovation. The economic downturn in California has put local governments in a tough spot. But the pain is not felt equally across municipalities. Our interviews reveal significant divides among different types of local governments. While administrators in communities with greater resources report that they prioritize programs in which technology is a key component, smaller and poorer communities are far less concerned with adopting new technologies. And of those cities and counties who report having limited capacity to adopt new approaches, the vast majority are rural, and none are urban.

Third, lack of concern over the adequacy of technological infrastructure may have more to do with the fact that local government leaders don’t believe they have the time or human resources to use technology effectively. Cost may not be the key consideration in these cases. Our survey reveals that a lack of time for employees to implement the solution, lack of qualified or skilled personnel, and lack of sufficient managerial capabilities are all much more important than adequate technological infrastructure (Table 2).

Finally, the technological solutions that many local governments pursue don’t actually cost all that much. An assistant manager in a large city in California told us that while much of the opposition to transparency measures adopted in his city originally centered around financial concerns, in fact, the new policies of posting meeting announcements or contracts online cost the city very little.

These survey results give us some clues into how local government officials perceive the relationship between cost and technology. But they also show that for many city and county leaders, technology just isn’t that important when viewed alongside other ways of responding to community or organizational needs. Convincing them otherwise will require reframing the value of technology to show how tools can meet needs that cities have already identified as important. We also need to show the affordability of certain kinds of technology and how cash-strapped cities and counties can embrace those solutions.

Table 1: Motivations for Innovations in Local Government

In general, how important are the following reasons for adopting new approaches in your city or county? (Very Important, Moderately Important, Slightly Important, Not Important, Not Applicable; these descriptions were assigned numeric equivalents on a 4 point scale in order to generate a ranked list of mean responses).

Table 2: Obstacles to Innovation in Local Government

Over the course of the last five years, how significant has each of the following factors been in your choice to use acquired knowledge in decision-making or your decision to implement and sustain new approaches? (Very Important, Moderately Important, Slightly Important, Not Important, Not Applicable; these descriptions were assigned numeric equivalents on a 4 point scale in order to generate a ranked list of mean responses).

Note: The tables in this post summarizes data from a survey conducted by the New America Foundation’s California Civic Innovation of county administrators and city managers in California from November 2012 through January 2013. The sample size was 78, comprised of 24 county administrators and their deputies who belong to the California State Association of Counties (CSAC); 34 city managers and their deputies who belong to the California division of the International City/County Management Association (Cal-ICMA); and 20 city managers and their deputies who do not belong to Cal-ICMA.

Applauding the White House Memorandum on Open Access

2013-02-27T07:58:00.000-08:00

Originally posted on the Google Research Blog by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Research and Special Initiatives

Last week the Obama Administration issued a Memorandum that could vastly increase the impact of federally funded research on innovation and the economy. Entrepreneurs, businesses, students, patients, researchers, and the public will soon have digital access to the wealth of research publications and data funded by Federal agencies. We're excited that this important work will be made more broadly accessible.

This memorandum directs federal agencies with annual research and development budgets of $100 million or more to open up access to the crucial results of publicly funded research (including both unclassified articles and data). These agencies will need to provide the public with free and unlimited online access to the results of that research after a guideline 12 month embargo period. Before today only one agency, the National Institutes of Health, had a public research access policy.

The federal government funds tens of billions of dollars in research each year through agencies like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy. These investments are intended to advance science, accelerate innovation, grow our economy, and improve the lives of all Americans and members of the public. Opening this research up to the public will accelerate these goals.

Federal investment in research and development only pays off if it has an impact. Researchers, businesses, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and the public need to be able to access and use the knowledge contained in the articles and data generated by those funds. Making the results of scholarly research accessible and reusable in digital form is one important way to increase the impact of existing taxpayer investments.

The Legal Landscape of Involuntary Porn

2013-02-21T10:36:00.000-08:00

Erica Johnstone is a co-founder of the privacy nonprofit, Without My Consent, and a partner with Ridder, Costa & Johnstone LLP.

Imagine there are naked photos of you online that appear on the first page of search results when someone searches for your name. The images are linked to your true name, place of business, and home address. Worse still, every hate-filled troll has piled on to harass and stalk you. The comments leave you terrified for your and your family's personal safety. Is the perpetrator’s conduct legal? Generally speaking, no. "Involuntary porn", also called "revenge porn," is the creation, publication, or dissemination of a person's private intimate image without that person’s consent and for no legitimate public concern. It is legally actionable in almost every situation. Is there a path to justice? It's complicated.

Your first question might be: how do the images get online? The most common scenarios are nightmare exes, hackers, and peeping Toms.

And then you might wonder, how many people are actually victims of involuntary porn? We need better data and more of it data to provide a satisfactory answer. Concrete examples like those cited above are sometimes criticized for being "one-off" events. But the truth is that everyone who engages in online activities knows the harassment, stalking, and trolling happen with alarming frequency, and abuse often involves the publication or threat of publication of private intimate images.

According to a recent McAfee study, "Love, Relationships, and Technology: When Private Data Gets Stuck in the Middle of a Breakup," 10% of ex-partners have threatened to expose risqué photos of their exes online, and those threats were carried out almost 60 percent of the time. 36% of Americans plan to send sexy or romantic photos to their partners via email, text and social media on Valentine's Day. But those people are not the only victims of involuntary porn. Hackers and peeping Toms have a way of finding photos and posting online as well. For instance on January 29, 2013, the FBI arrested one man whom investigators estimate is responsible for terrorizing more than 350 women.

What is being done about the problem?

There is a lawsuit pending against the revenge porn site Texxxan.com seeking actual and punitive damages and injunctive relief for invasion of privacy, negligence, wrongful appropriation of names of likenesses, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy, on the basis that section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not immunize websites that are themselves responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of unlawful content.
There is anticipated copyright litigation against the revenge porn site IsAnybodyDown.com, on the basis that even if the website is immunized against some claims by Section 230, the website may be vulnerable to intellectual property–related claims such as those arising under copyright law.
University of Miami Law Professor Mary Anne Franks is working on a proposed law to criminalize the misconduct at the federal level (which would not be immunized by section 230). She outlines her proposal here.
Without My Consent (a non-profit I co-founded) is working to publish and keep updated an informational website, WithoutMyConsent.org, that includes legal and practical information for victims of involuntary porn and the attorneys who advocate on their behalf. WMC is currently undertaking a 50-State survey to compile a comprehensive overview of the possible civil claims that a victim of such conduct might explore, and the potential criminal consequences of the unlawful conduct, in each jurisdiction.

Here are some simple concrete steps everyone can take to stop involuntary porn.

Speak out about the fact that privacy is worth protecting.
Enact a criminal invasion of privacy statute in every state that doesn’t already have one. New Jersey has a noteworthy Invasion of Privacy statute, N.J.S.A. 2C:14-9y int, which prohibits both recording and disclosing a private image of another person without consent. If your state does not already have a criminal invasion of privacy law on the books, you may petition your state lawmakers to pass a law modeled after N.J.S.A. 2C:14-9 in your state.
If the prosecution of technology-related crimes is an issue that matters to you, contact your state’s Attorney General and let him/her know that the residents of your state believe privacy matters. Begin a dialogue in your state. There is already a model in place, developed by the state of California. In 2011, the California DOJ created an eCrime Unit that: (1) trains police and prosecutors in light of new technologies; and (2) prosecutes criminal online invasions of privacy, among other crimes.
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Apply for a 2013 Google Policy Fellowship

2013-02-19T10:50:00.001-08:00

Nicklas Lundblad is Director of Public Policy at Google.

The Internet policy world is ripe with fascinating issues. From cybercrime to government surveillance and security, to public procurement, trade and open access to information, there has never been a more exciting time to get involved. We’re excited to launch the 6th summer of the Google Policy Fellowship, with new opportunities to work with organizations from Africa, Europe and Latin America in addition to ones in U.S. and Canada. Applications are open today, and students of all levels and disciplines are welcome to apply before March 15, 2013.

Fellows will spend ten weeks this summer working on a broad portfolio of topics at a diverse set of organizations, including:

Africa

Europe

Latin America

North America

You can learn about the program, application process and host organizations on the Google Public Policy Fellowship website.

Measuring the spectrum across Europe

2013-02-14T10:51:00.001-08:00

Petri Mähönen is the head of the Institute for Networked Systems at RWTH Aachen University in Aachen, Germany. Janne Riihijärvi works as a senior research scientist in the institute.

The debate over radio spectrum regulation has become one of the most intense and crucial telecommunications policy debates. Radio spectrum, in the sense of availability of radio frequencies for wireless data communications, is scarce. Wireless technologies have inherent limitations. Understanding the current radio spectrum use in different environments is important and harder than it might sound. First, as is now well understood, not all spectrum that is allocated is actually used. Second, spectrum measurements and realistic usage models are harder to make than people assume. Third, while regulatory databases and similar sources, such as white space databases, contain a lot of information how spectrum might be used, inevitable errors in propagation models significantly limit the value of this information. Finally, for unlicensed frequency bands and user-deployed networks, particularly emerging femtocells, there really is no substitute for in situ measurements.

The policy debate needs to be quantitative and data driven, and several research groups around the world have been conducting different types of measurement campaigns on spectrum use for quite some time. Measurement campaigns by the Shared Spectrum Company are early examples, while longer-running efforts include the Spectrum Observatory of the Illinois Institute of Technology, as well as our own efforts in this domain. However, most existing campaigns have focused on measurements at a single location. Such measurements are invaluable to gauge the promises of new technologies, but ultimately lack statistical coverage. They also cannot support regulatory enforcement, national security applications, or dynamic radio environment based optimization.

As part of the recently concluded European research project FARAMIR, we collaborated with industry and academic research groups to carry out extensive measurements on spectrum use across different urban and rural regions. During this work, we spent a week collecting measurements in different regions of London, UK, ranging from downtown shopping streets and tourist haunts to outer suburbs. Some 150 different locations were covered during the week, and at each location several hundreds of received power measurements were taken on different frequency bands. The first results were presented recently in the IEEE DySPAN 2012 conference in Seattle. Our measurements show that while the cellular bands are, as expected, practically fully utilized in urban environments, the usage of many other bands was significantly lower. Further, even the usage of cellular bands varied highly across the different measurement locations, falling to surprisingly low levels outside dense population centers. These results indicate that while availability of cellular spectrum in urban region is indeed limited, there seems to be little shortage of available frequencies in rural settings especially if low power transmitters are used. Overall the dynamics of spectrum use were observed to be very complicated as can be seen from the example below, illustrating spectrum use on the 900 MHz GSM downlink band at a location near Oxford Street in downtown London.

In addition to the results from our own analysis, we will gradually make the raw data from our measurements available to the research community. Last week we released the first data sets from the London measurement campaign, as well as our earlier comparison measurements of spectrum use across several different European cities. All of these data sets as well as documents describing results from our analysis can be obtained from the website of the FARAMIR project. In the future all the publicly available measurement data from the Institute for Networked systems will be made available through iNets Measurement Data Archive (currently under construction). We believe that sharing data from such measurement campaigns is key to developing global understanding on spectrum use, thereby providing solid foundation for making policy decisions for future spectrum use.

Data on the changing role of libraries in the digital age

2013-02-08T11:34:00.000-08:00

Derek Slater is a policy manager at Google.

Ten years ago, the U.S. Congress looked at Internet access in libraries as "no more than a technological extension of the book stack." In fact, the Supreme Court cited this statement in the United States v. American Library Association decision, upholding government regulations requiring that, as a condition of funding for Internet access in the library, libraries must install content filtering software. The Court asserted that "A public library does not acquire Internet terminals in order … for Web publishers to express themselves."

Ten years later, data suggests otherwise. A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows that today Internet access plays a much bigger role in libraries. Over a quarter of Americans say they get Internet access at libraries, with "African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than whites to access the internet at their local library, as are parents of minor children, those under age 50, those living in households earning less than $30,000, and those with at least some college experience." What's more, a Gates Foundation report finds that "people use library computers to perform both life-changing and routine tasks," both in discovering information and as a means of expression. For example, over a half-million Americans used library computers to start a local club or nonprofit group.

What impact has Congress' initial judgment and policy had as technology use has changed? It's clear that all filtering tools are overbroad and block some lawful speech, but we’re not aware of any studies analyzing what the economic and social impact of filtering has been. As Congress and states look at how to support libraries in a time of shrinking government budgets, this empirical question is worth tackling.

Visualization: Submarine Cable Map 2013

2013-02-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

Ever wondered how Internet traffic moves across the oceans? TeleGeography has put together a beautiful map experience for exploring the deployment of submarine cables around the world (via Slate).

Mapping creates jobs and drives global economic growth

2013-01-30T10:01:00.001-08:00

Brian McClendon is VP of Google Geo (cross-posted from the Official Google Blog).

Twenty years ago, we used paper maps and printed guides to help us navigate the world. Today, the most advanced digital mapping technologies—satellite imagery, GPS devices, location data and of course Google Maps—are much more accessible. This sea change in mapping technology is improving our lives and helping businesses realize untold efficiencies.

The transformation of the maps we use everyday is driven by a growing industry that creates jobs and economic growth globally. To present a clearer picture of the importance of the geo services industry, we commissioned studies from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Oxera. What we found is that maps make a big economic splash around the world.

In summary, the global geo services industry is valued at up to $270 billion per year and pays out $90 billion in wages. In the U.S., it employs more than 500,000 people and is worth $73 billion. The infographic below illustrates some examples of the many benefits of maps, whether it’s improving agriculture irrigation systems or helping emergency response teams save lives.

Click the image for a larger version

1.1 billion hours of travel time saved each year? That's a lot of time. Also, consider UPS, which uses map technology to optimize delivery routes—saving 5.3 million miles and more than 650,000 gallons of fuel in 2011. And every eight seconds, a user hails a taxi with Hailo, which used maps and GPS to deliver more than 1 million journeys in London alone last year. Finally, Zipcar uses maps to connect more than 760,000 customers to a growing fleet of cars in locations around the world.

Because maps are such an integral part of how we live and do business, the list of examples goes on and on. That's why it's important we all understand the need to invest in the geo services industry so it continues to grow and drive the global economy. Investments can come from the public and private sectors in many forms—product innovation, support of open data policies, more geography education programs in schools and more.

We’re proud of the contributions that Google Maps and Earth, the Google Maps APIs and our Enterprise solutions have made to the geo services industry and to making maps more widely available, but there’s a long way to go. To learn more about the impact of the maps industry, see the full reports.

Data Privacy Day: Google’s approach to government requests for user data

2013-01-28T15:35:00.002-08:00

Data Privacy Day is recognized every year on January 28 in the US, Canada, and many EU countries (27, according to Wikipedia). In honor of Data Privacy Day 2013, Google SVP and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond wrote for the official Google blog about how Google handles government requests for data. We're reposting the text from his post, Google's approach to government requests for user data.

Today, January 28, is Data Privacy Day, when the world recognizes the importance of preserving your online privacy and security.

If it's like most other days, Google—like many companies that provide online services to users—will receive dozens of letters, faxes and emails from government agencies and courts around the world requesting access to our users' private account information. Typically this happens in connection with government investigations.

It's important for law enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe. We're a law-abiding company, and we don't want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it's just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information.

To strike this balance, we're focused on three initiatives that I'd like to share, so you know what Google is doing to protect your privacy and security.

First, for several years we have advocated for updating laws like the U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents. We’ll continue this effort strongly in 2013 through our membership in the Digital Due Process coalition and other initiatives.

Second, we'll continue our long-standing strict process for handling these kinds of requests. When government agencies ask for our users’ personal information—like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email—our team does several things:

We scrutinize the request carefully to make sure it satisfies the law and our policies. For us to consider complying, it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law.

We evaluate the scope of the request. If it's overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request. We do this frequently.

We notify users about legal demands when appropriate so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer. Sometimes we can’t, either because we’re legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don’t have their verified contact information.

We require that government agencies conducting criminal investigations use a search warrant to compel us to provide a user's search query information and private content stored in a Google Account—such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos. We believe a warrant is required by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S.Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure and overrides conflicting provisions in ECPA.

And third, we work hard to provide you with information about government requests. Today, for example, we've added a new section to our Transparency Report that answers many questions you might have. And last week we released data showing that government requests continue to rise, along with additional details on the U.S. legal processes—such as subpoenas, court orders and warrants—that governments use to compel us to provide this information.

We're proud of our approach, and we believe it’s the right way to make sure governments can pursue legitimate investigations while we do our best to protect your privacy and security.

Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer

Today is Data Innovation Day!

2013-01-24T10:56:00.000-08:00

The Information and Technology Innovation Foundation is sponsoring Data Innovation Day today, with events around the US. From the site:

The purpose of Data Innovation Day is to raise awareness about the benefits and opportunities that come from increased use of information by individuals and the public and private sector.

Today we live in an era in which massive amounts of information are collected, analyzed, integrated, and disseminated in novel ways to make the world a better place. The unprecedented volume of data being generated today is transforming virtually every industry, including, health care, transportation, energy and manufacturing. In every sector data analytics are allowing organizations to extract more value from increasingly larger data sets. And every day new advances in computing technology, including faster processors, cheaper storage, lower-cost sensors, better displays, and ubiquitous wireless networks, are unlocking additional opportunities to harness data and create a world that is alive with information. Data Innovation Day is a celebration of the benefits generated by the current revolution in data, and it will give participants around the world the opportunity to showcase the latest innovations in the use of data and the economic value of the information economy.

There's a live webcast of the Data Innovation Day event at UC Berkeley, available here, which includes a range of speakers talking about techniques and methodology for making sense of massive amounts of different kinds of data. The panel happening now is all about generating value through analysis of public opinion. Really interesting work from Michelle Zhou (IBM), Galen Panger (UC Berkeley School of Information), and Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley CITRIS and Center for New Media).

Visualization: Foreign aid, corruption and internet use

2013-01-16T17:02:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, we posted the winner of the second Google/Guardian Datastore data visualization competition. For the next few Wednesdays, we'll share other competition entries here. Today's featured entry, "Foreign aid, corruption and internet use," is an interactive chart created by Nikhil Sonnad.

The chart below shows OECD data on the total amount given -- since 1960 -- to every aid recipient country. Two other data points underlie the simple bar graph: the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index produced by Transparency International, and rates of internet use per 100 people, provided by the World Bank (for 2011 or the bank's most recent figures). You can use the menu below to manipulate how these data points affect the order and coloring of the chart.

The image below shows corruption index data (sort) and internet access data (color). Click the image to play with Nikhil's visualization.

Open Access to Scholarly Literature and How to Achieve It

2013-01-09T14:16:00.003-08:00

Andrew Adams is a Professor of Information Ethics in the Graduate School of Business Administration and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics at Meiji University in Tokyo. This is the second of two Policy By the Numbers posts by Andrew on open access publishing (see "Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Why It Matters").

The recent Finch Report, sponsored by the UK government, claimed that Green Open Access had failed to deliver substantial Open Access to scholarly/scientific journal papers and that instead extra funding should be provided to pay for Gold Open Access author fees.

Gargouri et al. put that to the test. Using data from the ROARMAP register of Mandates they clearly showed that strong mandates for deposit generate a deposit rate of over 70% of published papers within 2 years.

Many top-rated journals charge significant fees, whether the entire journal is open access or authors pay a separate charge to make their individual articles open access. For example, Springer offers hybrid open access under its "Open Choice" scheme, charging $3000 USD to make one article available freely. UK academics produce the third largest number of published articles in the world at just under 100,000 per year. According to the Finch Report, the average author charge is more than two thousand dollars, although that figure is disputed as unrepresentative by Peter Suber. Using Suber's estimate of around $900, a very rough estimate for paying OA publication fees where demanded for all articles by UK authors is $90 million USD. Unless every other country adopted the same approach, the UK would still need to continue paying their subscriptions to journals in order to access the rest of the world's output.

The Finch committee seems to many to have been more concerned with maintaining both publishers' existing profits and their potential for increasing their profits. Academic journal publishing is currently a highly profitable busines; estimates vary, but profit margins of 30% or more were reported by McGuigan and Russell in 2008, well in excess of almost any other stable industry, including other areas of publishing, as shown by the sub-5% margins reported in that article for periodical publishing in general.

Instead of pursuing the "Gold Fever" of requiring authors to choose Open Access journals or pay for individual gold access for articles, the solution is quite simple: funding bodies and research organisations can require the deposit of papers published by their grant-holders/employees into their institutional repository. The majority of publishers and publications allow this without any embargo period on the availability being set to open access. For the rest, nearly all publishers allow open access in the repository after an embargo period (typically six to 12 months, though sometimes longer). Even for those articles within an embargo period or in a published in a journal that does not ever permit open access, repository software allows readers to make an individual request for access to the article. Such access is simple for the author to provide so long as the full text has been placed in the repository: a single click on the link in the email authorises an individual mailing of the paper, a process that journals have always allowed. The requirement to deposit, called a deposit mandate, is entirely within the reasonable rights of both funding agencies and employers, being little more than a requirement to maximise the impact of their researchers' output. It’s just a little icing on the cake of requiring publication in the first place to justify funding, promotion or tenure decisions. The University of Liege and the Belgian funding body FRS-FNRS have adopted mutually reinforcing deposit mandates held up as the ideal by many open access archivangelists: researchers must deposit their author final text—not the publisher's layout, just text/illustrations as peer reviewed—immediately upon acceptance for publication; this deposit must be in the institutional repository; evaluation of researchers for promotion at the institution or future funding can refer only to deposited papers; and access to the deposits must be set to open where publisher policies allow.

High Energy Physics, a field which has had near 100% open access for well over a decade via the central repository of the ArXiv (easily compatible with institutional deposit since the software can automatically copy records between the institutional repository and ArXiv) has demonstrated that repository access does not automatically lead to the collapse of journals. No HE physics journal has gone bankrupt nor even seen substantial drops in revenue so far. There is no reason for funders and research institutions not to adopt a deposit mandate along the Liege/FRS-FNRS model and doing so, as presented in the previous post is beneficial to science, scholarship and the reputations of both institutions and the individual researchers.

Social Media Recommendations for Public Transit Providers

2013-01-03T14:05:00.000-08:00

Sarah M. Kaufman is a researcher and Assistant Adjunct Professor at NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.

Social media networks give transportation providers access to large numbers of people simultaneously and without a fee. The NYU Rudin Center’s new report, "How Social Media Moves New York, Part 2," based on earlier findings (see "Twitter's Importance to Transportation," October 2012) recommends social media policies for transportation providers seeking to inform, engage, and motivate their customers.

The goals of social media in transportation are to inform (alert riders of a situation), motivate (to opt for an alternate route), and engage (amplify the message to their friends and neighbors). Marketing messages are also essential to inform riders about new services, and to be compelling enough to retain the follower base that will help amplify important information. Our study of tweets by transportation providers throughout the New York region during the summer of 2012 showed a wide disparity in proportions of service information, engagement and marketing posts between different agencies:

Appropriate timing of messages alters the ideal proportions, and can vastly enhance a transportation provider’s follower base—e.g., providing essential delay information during rush hour—or turn customers off entirely—e.g., over-posting marketing messages during rush hour. Based on the research in this report, the following chart shows recommended proportions of social media posts:

More generally, to communicate effectively using social media, transportation providers’ online presence must be:

Accessible: Easily discovered through multiple channels and targeted information campaigns
Informative: Disseminating service information at rush hour and with longer-form discussions on blogs as needed
Engaging: Responding directly to customers, marketing new services, and building community
Responsive: Soliciting and internalizing feedback and self-evaluating in a continuous cycle

To the last point, a large portion of responsiveness is accountability. In our analysis, we found a major discrepancy in the use of “thanks” and “sorry” in the Twitter feeds of private transportation providers (specifically, American Airlines and JetBlue) versus public agencies. Specifically, the airlines apologized far more than public transportation providers for delays and cancellations: in the two months studied, American Airlines wrote “sorry” and its synonyms 3,949 times; PATH, 62 times; Metro-North, 39 times; NJ Transit, 25 times; and the others, three or fewer times. Similarly, while customer engagement dominated both airlines’ Twitter accounts (85% on average), demonstrating their need to be constantly responsive to and direct with customers, public transportation providers communicated less directly with their customers (34%). These patterns indicate a universal orientation toward customer service throughout the private companies, which must earn and maintain customer loyalty. However, public transportation providers, which often have a monopoly on customers, likely do not feel the same need to focus on them.

In contrast, the public transportation providers accepted ‘thanks’ at a greater rate than they issued apologies (on average 17.7 “thanks” versus 12.6 “sorry”). This pattern was most pronounced in NYC Transit’s feed, which posted 26 “thanks” and variants, but only 3 “sorry” and variants, and NJ Transit, which posted 73 thanks and 25 apologies. See the chart below for all Sorry/Thanks comparisons. This diversion may result from the typically thankless work of transit management, making compliments especially meaningful.

Instances of “Sorry” and “Thanks” in Tweets

Accountability, like accurate information and direct engagement, is essential in building trust between transportation agencies and their customers. While accessibility, information, engagement and responsiveness compose the four pillars of transportation and social media, the human facet is essential to the online presence, and displaying one requires a cultural shift from the pre-social media press releases and opaque, one-way information streams.

Policy & Innovation in the Internet of Things: Findings from Europe and China

2013-01-02T13:04:00.002-08:00

Mailyn Fidler is a student at Stanford University.

The "Internet of Things" (IoT) connects objects to each other and the Internet, transmitting data about their environments. Current examples include Internet-connected diabetes pumps and sensors for energy monitoring systems in buildings. In 2008, the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on Earth. Cisco predicts that by 2020, 50 billion things will be using the Internet to connect and monitor the world around us.

In the IoT, China sees an opportunity to increase its visibility as an international technology innovator. In 2008, China identified the IoT as a strategic industry and plans to invest $800 million USD in IoT by 2015. The European Union also sees economic potential in the IoT, especially for small and medium enterprises. Even with European recessions, interest and funding in IoT enterprises has not slowed, and the EU has invested 70 million Euros in at least 50 research projects since 2008.

The way these regions regulate IoT will influence IoT’s ability to meet high economic expectations, and I set out to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the choices the countries are making. Over the last six months, I conducted 24 interviews in Europe and 11 in China with representatives from government, industry, and academia.

In Europe, the government must balance perceived privacy risks with encouraging IoT innovation. Overall, IoT governance in Europe so far has been patchwork. Privacy approaches towards IoT range from technology-specific recommendations to broader legislation like the Data Protection Directive. This fragmentation creates unclear guidance, particularly for small companies, where uncertainty about the law may hinder innovation.

Meanwhile, security receives much attention from lawmakers, who call for better security technologies for IoT such as light cryptography. Lawmakers have struggled, however, to create incentives for real progress. For example, in the 2010 Cluster of European Research Projects on IoT, only 1 of the 33 funded projects explicitly investigated security. In a 2010 EU study on IoT standards, only 2 of 175 dealt with security.

EU lawmakers emphasize privacy and security more than technical issues such as standardization. Currently, there are no accepted standards for the IoT in Europe. Although any standards-making process is slow, the IoT standards story is more complicated. Two additional barriers with IoT include Europe’s prioritization of social IoT aspects and its hesitation to push for standardization until it can be sure that the IoT will be standardized to its advantage. The global standards bodies the EU relies on often involve multiple stakeholders across borders, limiting the EU’s influence. But without greater progress in these forums, the EU may find itself with silos of IoT, diminishing its economic benefits.

China provides a set of contrasting governance choices. China prioritizes standards over privacy and security regulations. The nation is pursuing its own standards regime that is slated to contain 150-200 usable standards by 2015. The number of standards does not translate to use or quality, but China is attempting to influence global adoption.

With considerable economic gains desired, the EU must critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of its IoT governance approach against those of its competitors, particularly China and the U.S., next on my research agenda.