Other News from Participating Centers

Montreal monitoring city traffic via drivers’ Bluetooth

Springwise: “Rather than rely on once-yearly spot checks of traffic throughout the city, Montreal, Canada, decided to build a more comprehensive picture of what was working well, and what wasn’t working very well, around the city. Working with traffic management company Orange Traffic, the city installed more than 100 sensors along the busiest vehicular routes.

Updates from our Network: Austria chapter takes strategy forward and explores new collaborations.

This blog post is part of our on-going Community series featuring updates from chapters across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the team of Open Knowledge Austria.
September was largely a transition period between the old and new board to facilitate the takeover of responsibilities. We also involved our team and the community in the strategic processes we started in August, through multiple feedback rounds and a team call.

Efficiency vs. Accountability? – Algorithms, Big Data and Public Administration

Efficiency vs. Accountability? – Algorithms, Big Data and Public Administration
By Ben Wagner, December 2016

Iran’s Civic Tech Sector

Leah Hunter at Forbes: “This is the story of Firuzeh Mahmoudi, founder of United4Iran and Irancubator, the first civic tech-focused startup incubator in Iran. She is also a creator of civil justice apps and a businessperson. Her business?

Could Technology Remove the Politicians From Politics?

Sue Brideshead at Motherboard: “The tech industry has talked long and hard about democratizing industries. Democratizing content, democratizing taxi-cabs, and democratizing bed and breakfasts. But what about democratizing democracy?

Fundamental rights in the digital age

The internet is a space where social relationships are cultivated, business is conducted, new knowledge is created, and all kinds of networks are built. But do fundamental rights exist in... MORE

Academic Paper release: A publisher’s intellectual property right

​NTU and German scientists turn memory chips into processors to speed up computing tasks

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Results of early Open Government Partnership initiatives

The Open Government Partnership: “The search for these stories ended with finding seven very different reform initiatives in different regions and covering a broad range of open government topics.

Open or Closed? Open Licensing of Real-Time Public Sector Transit Data

Teresa Scassa and Alexandra Diebel in Journal of e-Democracy: “This paper explores how real-time data are made available as “open data” using municipal transit data as a case study. Many transit authorities in North America and elsewhere have installed technology to gather GPS data in real-time from transit vehicles. These data are in high demand in app developer communities because of their use in communicating predicted, rather than scheduled, transit vehicle arrival times.

Investigadores exploran vía de administración bucal de insulina

Del Centro Avanzado en Enfermedades Crónicas (ACCDiS) y de la Facultad de Ciencias Químicas y Farmacéuticas provienen los académicos que están trabajando en una forma alternativa de administrar la insulina, que habitualmente se inyectan los pacientes, a partir de películas que contengan el medicamento para su absorción por las mucosas bucales, gracias a una tecnología que estabiliza sus partículas.

U. de Chile participó en propuestas sobre uso de agua y desastres

La Casa de Bello tuvo una significativa participación en las comisiones de investigación, desarrollo e innovación (I+D+i) sobre gestión del agua y resiliencia frente a desastres naturales que entregaron sus resultados a la Presidenta Michelle Bachelet.

The melting down of government: A multidecade perspective

Bert A. Rockman in the Special 30th Anniversary Issue of Governance: “The editors of Governance have asked me to assess the extent and nature of change in the governing process since the origins of the journal 30 years ago. This is an engaging task but a difficult one. It is difficult because trend lines rarely have a definitive beginning point—or at least if similar tendencies are seen across national boundaries, they rarely begin at the same time.

The legal macroscope: Experimenting with visual legal analytics

Nicola Lettieri, Antonio Altamura and Delfina Malandrino at InfoVis: “This work presents Knowlex, a web application designed for visualization, exploration, and analysis of legal documents coming from different sources. Understanding the legal framework relating to a given issue often requires the analysis of complex legal corpora.

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Measuring the quality of democracy

Introduction by , , and  of Special Issue of the International Political Science Review on Measuring the Quality of Democracy: “Within the last couple of years, scholarly interest in measuring democracy e

Big Data and the Paradox of Diversity

Bernhard Rieder at Digital Culture & Society: “This paper develops a critique of Big Data and associated analytical techniques by focusing not on errors – skewed or imperfect datasets, false positives, underrepresentation, and so forth – but on data mining that works.

India’s ruling party takes online abuse to a professional level

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) employs an army of trolls to harass and intimidate critics through social media, a new book claims.
The article by Samanth Subramanian was published in the National on December 31, 2016. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Getting Smart on Data: Challenges and Opportunities for Transport Authorities from Emerging Data Sources

Urban Transport Group: “Transformative technological changes are shaping the world and unleashing unprecedented volumes of data. Transport is a key generator of emerging data and also stands to be a significant beneficiary of new products, services, insights and ways of working that accompany this.

Open innovation in the public sector: A research agenda

Atreyi Kankanhalli et al in Government Information Quarterly: “New models of innovation are emerging in the marketplace and these are rapidly replacing traditional corporate research labs as the sole source of new ideas, new technologies, and new practices.