Wonks for Geeks?

Posted on August 29, 2011 by JimHendler

In my more recent interactions with government I’ve been discovering a number of cases where policy people lament that they don’t have access to various “tools” that would let them explore things that matter to them. These range from data visualizers (“I wish I could explore my data better and make quick and dirty infographics”) to social media tools (“How do I track a twitter stream better”) and to “data search” tools (“How do I know whether the EPA facilities database tracks so and so?” “Does anybody have that data?”)

We here at RPI have been developing a number of demos using technologies that help us to do rapid demonstrations and some powerful tools (see the p.s. below) but we are looking for ideas that can really help policy folks. If you have anything you really wish you could see or do, let us know (comments to this post are a good way to start) – we’d love to figure out what we could do next that could really help policy-makers make better decisions.

Cheers
Jim Hendler, RPI
(http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~hendler has my contact info if you prefer that means)

p.s. To see what we’ve been up to, check out http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demos and, if you’re not limited to IE, try http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/demo/international_dataset_catalog_search and scroll to the left – click on the various facets or type keywords to quickly search for over 300,000 datasets from around the world.

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Geeks Seeking Wonks: Law School Project Based Learning Class Seeks Wonk Projects

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Geeks for Wonks

New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy runs a year-long, faculty supervised “tech law lab” course where tech-savvy law students work in teams of 4-8 students to design prototypes of law, technology, and/or policy projects with social impact.

For example, our students have:

  • Designed content and technology for the federal government’s first expert networking system: Peer to Patent.
  • Designed content and technology for a kiosk to aid litigants in landlord-tenant court.
  • Authored a white paper on next generation citizen consultation systems.
  • Developed a wiki to connect volunteer intellectual property lawyers to public school administrators wishing to acquire open source technology for student assessment.

You can see more examples of our work at dotank.nyls.edu.  In addition, the entire law school faculty engages in project based learning in areas ranging from immigration to publishing law. See more examples here.

The course begins in the fall and we are seeking interesting projects with a legal and policy dimension. “Clients” must be willing to have monthly conference calls with the student team to provide direction.

For more information, please contact Beth Noveck at beth dot noveck at nyls dot edu.

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The Case for Metrics

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Ted Smith

First, congrats on putting together this great resource to bridge the unnecessary divide between geeks and wonks. I confess to being a bit of both so plan to blend into the background here quickly. I come to this having served as a evaluation/measurement lead volunteer for OpenTheGovernment.org when the US federal agencies released their initial Open Government Plans and then went on to champion new metrics for evauating implementation. Now I work in the “Health Department” (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) sitting on the other side of the table from the grassroots open government community and startup with a differently-informed view of the many collaborations that OGD makes possible.

 So what is the case for metrics? Something I learned years ago when I headed an R&D team at Accenture “What gets meausred, gets done” – Once we get beyond good intentions and ideals, we must push to set the bar, to know what failure is and to create a propagand-free zone to exchange ideas. There are two forces that can destroy a good movement – Jeerleading and Cheerleading. We don’t need to fill the room with criticism or worse unwarranated praise. So this is where metrics come in. At the end of the day, the media indusrty has a lot to offer us to understand the lowest levels of impact. Five citizen reporting pot holes is perhaps not evidence of transformation of government and meaningful levels of citizen engagement. If not five, what is the number? Who is doing a good job in other domains reaching critical mass? These are areas for metrics that we should all have in mind when we birth these innovations. 

Now to blend into the background…

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Great idea: Geeks for Wonks

Posted on March 22, 2011 by gfw_guest

Thanks to Beth Noveck for creating this site, and I’m pleased to try to be part of the Do Tank. A quick introduction – for years I’ve been working on how we bring data to the Web in machine-readable forms, esp the Semantic Web and its now-maturing linked-data technologies.

I discovered data.gov soon after it opened, and some students and I started playing around with it — we learned we could visualizations and “mashups” pretty easily. Within a few months we had about 50 demos built by students that showed different govt datasets in various ways. You can see some of these demos in http://data.gov/semantic which is where our stuff was eventually recognized by the data.gov team (and long story short, I now serves as an “Internet Web Expert” for the U.S. government, providing guidance to the Data.gov project.)

As well as lots of demos, we’ve tried to take our academic mission very seriously – we want to help people learn how to do this stuff more easily. Our main Web Site is now http://logd.tw.rpi.edu (LOGD = Linked Open Govt Data) and you can find tabs there for tutorials, videos, tools and technologies, and demos where all the code is open and freely available.

For a good example of some undergraduate generated projects, the page at http://logd.tw.rpi.edu/projects_web_science_class_spring_2010 was created by RPI undergraduates in my “Web Science” class – none of these students had seen RDF or SPARQL before the project, and they had only one lecture on how to create these, mainly they built them copy and paste. (We did help them convert datasets that they found on open govt sites into linked data formats – we’re working on making that easier)

We welcome ideas for meaningful demos, we hope you’ll steal the ideas here and make really effective tools for enhancing government transparency, and we hope that we can help small communities to learn how they can use the data assets of government to help themselves.

Jim Hendler
http://www.data.gov/communities/people/james-hendler

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Open Government and Public Sector Innovation Research

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Geeks for Wonks

On his first day in office, President Obama issued the Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government, calling for changing the culture of government and creating more effective institutions characterized by unprecedented transparency, participation, and collaboration. Every major department and agency now has its own Open Government Plan with proposed innovations.

At the Open Government R&D Summit on March 21-22, 2011 at the National Archives of the United States, government officials and academics gathered to:

set the foundation for a robust R&D agenda that ensures the benefits of open government are widely realized, with emphasis on how open government can spur economic growth and improve the lives of everyday Americans.

The goal of the conference was to articulate how best to gauge the effects and effectiveness of open government and encourage the engagement of the research community with the government community — Geeks and Wonks — across various disciplines in identifying the most important questions that must be studied.

To make it easier to connect Geeks and Wonks for this purpose, we are inviting academics seeking projects for themselves or their students and public officials seeking help with assessing impact to “advertise” to one another. If you are a policymaker experimenting with open data, enhanced citizen participation, prizes and challenges, and public-private partnerships or you are a researcher who wants to study these phenomena, this is the place for you!

  • Post a project seeking data
  • Post a class/clinic seeking projects
  • Post a problem/challenge seeking research help

To list your project/problem, please email info@geeksforwonks.org to receive an account on this blog or to have your request posted. If you have a project in mind, try to be specific about the scope, any deadlines, skills and disciplines implicated, whether there will be faculty supervision, and  any other conditions of the project. Even if you don’t have a project, if you are simply open to hearing from academics/govvies who do, let people know your interests.

If you need assistance developing your request, email us.

We want as many authors and partners for this site as possible.

To get updates about new projects/problems without having to visit the site, click on the RSS link in the sidebar to sign up with the reader of your choice or sign up to get updates via email.

Beth Noveck and the Do Tank Team

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