Q&A: Designing a Tool to Track Floods That Everyone Will Love

http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2014/12/03/qa-designing-a-tool-to-track-floods-that-everyone-will-love/ 

http://petajakarta.org/banjir/en/

Jakarta has a new tool to monitor and respond to flooding in the low-lying capital. Developed by researchers from the SMART Infrastructure Facility at Australia’s Wollongong University in collaboration with Twitter TWTR -0.19% and Jakarta’s Disaster Management Agency, the tool – known as PetaJakarta, or Jakarta Map – will draw on data used in tweets to pinpoint areas on a map impacted by flooding.

PetaJakarta was launched at City Hall by Gov. Basuki Tjahaja Purnama. Beforehand, The Wall Street Journal spoke to the two lead researchers on the project, Entienne Turpin and Tomas Holderness, about the value of Twitter data and how the tool was designed with the aim of everyone loving it. Edited excerpts.

WSJ: What’s the value of the information you can draw from the tweets?Mr. Turpin: It allows for navigation on the side of the citizens–avoiding areas, getting around the traffic – but then you also have the capacity for the government to see events faster, and then that allows for a faster deployment. The primary incidents of mortality in flooding happen in the first hour, so the faster the response the lower the mortality rate.

MORE...http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2014/12/03/qa-designing-a-tool-to-track-floods-that-everyone-will-love/ 

Dutch research on the barriers for local government releasing open data

Abstract: Due to expected benefits such as citizen participation and innovation, the release of Public Sector Information as open data is getting increased attention on various levels of government. However, currently data release by governments is still novel and there is little experience and knowledge thus far about its benefits, costs and barriers. This is compounded by a lack of understanding about how internal processes influence data release. Our aim in this paper is to get a better understanding of these processes and how they influence data release, i.e., to find determinants for the release of public sector information. For this purpose, we conducted workshops, interviews, questionnaires, desk research and practice based cases in the education program of our university, involving six local public sector organizations. We find that the way data is stored, the way data is obtained and the way data is used by a department are crucial indicators for open data release. We conclude with the lessons learned based on our research findings. These findings are: we should take a nuanced approach towards data release, avoid releasing data for its own sake, and take small incremental steps to explore data release.

Read and/or download the full article at doi:10.1016/j.giq.2014.01.003

Visualizing 800,000 public comments about net neutrality

Ignoring the politics inherent in this - it is a pretty amazing data visualisation.

And the data is available for download so you can do your own analysis.

Graphic credit: Sunlight Foundation. 

On Aug. 5, the Federal Communications Commission announced the bulk release of the comments from its largest-ever public comment collection. We've spent the last three weeks cleaning and preparing the data and leveraging our experience in machine learning and natural language processing to try and make sense of the hundreds-of-thousands of comments in the docket. Here is a high-level overview, as well as our cleaned version of the full corpus which is available for download in the hopes of making further research easier.

Our first exploration uses natural language processing techniques to identify topical keywords within comments and use those keywords to group comments together. We analyzed a corpus of 800,959 comments. Some key findings:

• We estimate that less than 1 percent of comments were clearly opposed to net neutrality1.
• At least 60 percent of comments submitted were form letters written by organized campaigns (484,692 comments); while these make up the majority of comments, this is actually a lower percentage than is common for high-volume regulatory dockets.
• At least 200 comments came from law firms, on behalf of themselves or their clients.

The interactive visualization that lets you explore these groupings and view individual comments within the groups.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/02/what-can-we-learn-from-800000-public-comments-on-the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan/

Towards a data literate citizenry - Article

Abstract:

We believe that data literacy should be a skill not just for scientists, but for all citizens. We make the case by considering literatures on various kinds of literacy, and using a number of examples to explore some of the challenges that emerge from trying to move to a more data literate citizenry. We consider the opportunities arising from developing technologies to help individual communities and intermediaries in understanding how data should inform personal and societal decision-making.

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/38385