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thinkahol *

Letter from Cairo - Infoshop News - 0 views

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    To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it's our turn to pass on some advice.
Johann Höchtl

Problems and Opportunities in Government Data - Input Output - 1 views

  • Problems
  • n Government Data
  • data loss privatization mis-publication greater respect for privacy and other citizen concerns, and excessive secrecy
thinkahol *

Misregulation Aiding Plunder of Fish, Other Resources - IPS ipsnews.net - 0 views

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    WASHINGTON, Jun 2, 2010 (IPS) - The resources society derives from nature have been horribly mismanaged and this will lead to the children of the world's poorest people remaining in poverty, according to Paul Collier. The easiest of these resources to regulate is fish, but we have not even managed to get that right, he said.
Parycek

SMALL CHANGE Why the revolution will not be tweeted - 2 views

  • The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns
  • There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
  • But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires
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  • “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,”
  • The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
  • social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
  • There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars.
  • The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.
  • it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability
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    Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell
Johann Höchtl

U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow | Nielse... - 0 views

  • If it seems like American teens are texting all the time, it’s probably because on average they’re sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month.
  • No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. Teen males also outpace other male age groups, sending and receiving an average of 2,539 texts.
  • Texting is Easier and Faster than Voice Calls
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  • Texting is currently the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. 43 percent claim it is their primary reason for getting a cellphone, which explains why QWERTY input is the first thing they look for choosing their devices.
  • Teens are not only using more data, but they are also downloading a wider range of applications. Software downloads among teen subscribers who use apps enjoyed a solid 12 percent increase in activity versus last year, from 26 to 38 percent.
Johann Höchtl

It's time for a new version of government - Fortune Tech - 0 views

  • Create a management framework that accepts and rewards internal entrepreneurs.
  • Government 2.0 is a citizen-centric philosophy and strategy that believes the best results are usually driven by partnerships between citizens and government, at all levels.  It is focused entirely on achieving goals through increased efficiency, better management, information transparency, and citizen engagement and most often leverages newer technologies to achieve the desired outcomes.
  • Government employees are traditionally risk-averse, a good thing when the pace of change is relatively slow.  However, in today's fast-paced world the pace of government change, the pace of government execution is often too slow.
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  • 1) Focus on success at the local level.
  • 2) Force competitive solutions for non-core services.
  • 3) Engage citizens in creating value and saving money. True results are being delivered in the private and public sector when customers/citizens are engaged in the process.  Platforms like BubbleIdeas, UserVoice, IdeaScale, and others, are being used to give citizens a voice in the daily execution of government. I
  • 4) Become agile, delivering on 100 day plans. While politicians often make promises for their first 100 days in office we rarely see clearly defined goals combined with execution plans and measurable outcomes publicly displayed. 
  • Government entities should select an easy to define project to complete every 100 days.  The projects goals, plans, and metrics for success should be published and updated weekly. 
Johann Höchtl

Announcing Google Refine 2.0, a power tool for data wranglers - Google Open Source Blog - 0 views

  • Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases.
  • you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it
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    Refine 2.0, a tool for data wranglers
Johann Höchtl

National Rail Have Killed My UK Train Times App - 0 views

  • About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.
  • When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.
  • To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others.  Not to make a profit. …and today National Rail killed it.
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  • the page on London Datastore has now been locked.  “Access Denied”.  Possibly because a lot of discussion appeared on there which was critical of ATOC’s decision to extract money from users of the service
  •  If you’re a user of the application and disagree with National Rail’s greed in trying to make money out of a data source which was hitherto free, I can only suggest you email nrelicensing@atoc.org and express your concerns.
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    Open Data API von National Railway UK wurde geschlossen - die Daten können potentiell zu viel Geld bringen
Johann Höchtl

When is Linked Data not Linked Data? - 0 views

  • production of a briefing paper that disambiguated some of the terminology for those that are less familiar with this domain
  • Linked Data must adhere to the four principles outlined in Tim Berners Lee’s Linked Data Design Issues
  • Use URIs as names for things Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL) Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.
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    Design Principles of Open Data
Johann Höchtl

Why Open Source is the New Software Policy in San Francisco - 0 views

  • We face many challenges today, none more urgent than the economic crisis, but with it comes an opportunity to seek new ways of governing. In San Francisco, like other cities, we are using this opportunity to engage our greatest resource, the public, to build a government that works better for all of us.
Johann Höchtl

Study links online transparency efforts, trust in government - Nextgov - 0 views

  • The first-ever quantitative assessment of online open government efforts has concluded that the perceived transparency of federal Web sites drives trust in government.
  • The longstanding approach to quantifying transparency has been, "well let's measure how much data they put out there," said Larry Freed, ForeSee Results' president and chief executive officer. "To me, that's not measuring transparency. That may be measuring confusion."
  • "If citizens find e-government transparent, they are more likely to return to the site, recommend it, and use it instead of a more costly channel," the study found. "They even express more trust in the government agency."
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  • Citizens who believe a site is highly transparent are 46 percent more likely to trust the overall government, 49 percent more likely to use the site as a primary resource and 37 percent more likely to return to the site, according to the study.
  • McClure also noted that a site's perceived transparency can save the government money by encouraging citizens to access services online, rather than through less efficient channels.
  • Other departments that want to make their sites more transparent "should stand firm when those at the helm pressure them to ignore what the audience wants, and instead design for the internal audience,"
Johann Höchtl

Why Every Brand Needs an Open API for Developers - 1 views

  • With APIs, you let other developers do your R&D for you. The benefit? You get development at scale with minimal investment. You effectively outsource risk because failures don’t cost you anything.
  • It’s easy to envision how brands whose core business revolves around technology or data could make use of an API
  • By providing access to that value through an API, they would allow the delivery of that value to spread exponentially.
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    Begründungen, warum offene API's einen Mehrwert bringen. Auch anwendbar für Open Data
Johann Höchtl

112th Congress live in Congress API - Sunlight Labs: Blog - 0 views

  • 112th Congress live in Congress API
  • all members of the 112th Congress are now available in our Congress API
  • All members are now added along with their ids on other sites
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  • The email field has been blank for all but about a dozen members for some time
  • it seems that the email addresses get flooded with non-constituent communication
Johann Höchtl

How Open Data is Used Against the Poor - 0 views

  • An 'effective use' approach to open data would thus be one that ensured that opportunities and resources for translating this open data into useful outcomes would be available (and adapted) for the widest possible range of users. Thus, to ensure the effective use of open data a range of considerations needs to be included in the open data process and as elements in the open data movement including such factors as the cost and availability of Internet access, the language in which the data is presented, the technical or professional requirements for interpreting and making use of the data, the availability of training in data use and visualization, among others.
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