This Saturday, thousands of Iowans will flock to the center of the state to cast a vote for their preferred Republican Presidential candidate at the Ames Straw Poll. The Ames Straw Poll is held ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses and serves as an important indicator of strength of the candidates in the critical early state. Although many other states and organizations have adopted straw polls, the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa has become one of the most important during the election cycle. This decades-old campaign trail tradition keeps politics local and personal -- and this time, we’re making it digital.
The Iowa Republican - a news site dedicated to producing original political commentary by and for Republicans - is kicking off the Iowa Republican Soapbox to bring the voices of local Iowans to the world. The Soapbox will let elected officials, candidates, and engaged Iowa Republicans speak out and have their say on issues and the direction of our country through The Iowa Republican’s YouTube Channel.
If you are planning on being in Ames on Saturday, August 13th, swing by our tent. We’ll have cold drinks, a roster of candidates stopping by and a spot for you on the Soapbox.
You’ve already made campaigns a more open political conversation using social media platforms like YouTube and Blogger, and now Google+. In the 2012 campaign, The Soapbox is our latest effort to help shift the balance back towards the voters. Everyday citizens across the globe are rolling up their sleeves, saying what they believe, and being heard.
As the country starts down the path to select our next President, we’re working to give you information and tools to be a larger part of the process from the beginning. We recently announced our participation in the Des Moines Register Debate to have candidates answer your questions in the final debate before the 2012 Iowa Republican Caucus. And we’re just getting started. We hope that a more open and local political conversation is useful to you, candidates, news organizations, and our democracy.
Posted by Ginny Hunt, Google Elections Product Manager
What do you get when you mix a city government that is prioritizing its digital presence with a homegrown, budding tech community? Reinvent nyc.gov, the City of New York’s first ever hackathon - an event where engineers meet to do collaborative programming. Held this past weekend at the entrepreneur campus General Assembly, the top prize at the hackathon was not money, but something even better: breakfast with Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
To call redesigning nyc.gov a challenging task would be an understatement: Since its launch in 1996, nyc.gov has expanded from around 1,000 pages to over 500,000, covering every city agency and task force. The number of yearly visitors to City-run web pages (33 million, or 24 million for nyc.gov) is approaching that of visitors to Central Park (37 million), according to New York City’s Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne. Of course, over the course of 2 days, the goal was to generate ideas and prototypes for the redesign.
The event kicked off with welcomes from city officials who framed the event and gave a glimpse of the city’s digital future. Deputy Mayor for Operations for New York Steve Goldsmith said, “we want to be transparent in a usable way, and encourage collaborative decision making.”
As a tech partner, Google demoed developer tools for Maps, YouTube, and Android, and held office hours for the over 60 participants from New York to Kansas to California. As teams formed, a few of us also participated as designers and developers.
The Google team (from left to right): Ginny Hunt (Public Sector & Elections), Jeffrey Posnick (YouTube), Jenny Ye (Public Sector & Elections), Adam Koch (Android), Hilary Worden (google.org), Arnaud Sahuguet (google.org)
Less than 36 hours later, submissions were in, and the demos began. By and large, teams presented UIs that were search-centric, user-focused, and social. Some envisioned the new nyc.gov as not only making it easier to find information but also making it easier to connect with city officials and other New Yorkers. Participants also voiced their hopes for more machine-readable data and more APIs. After the judges deliberated, awards were presented in the categories of Best Use of Local, Best Use of Social, Best User Interface, Most Innovative, and Judge’s Choice. Moving forward, we hope that the New York City moves quickly in its redesign of nyc.gov and uses some of the new ideas produced this weekend.
Participants and judges gather for demos and awards (photo from NYC Digital)
Hackathons organized by cities are not a new phenomenon - earlier this month, Google Chicago hosted an Apps for Metro hackathon with the City of Chicago - but there’s much more that can be done. Rachel Sterne, who worked to put together Reinvent nyc.gov, wrote about the advantages of city-led hackathon efforts. Perhaps NYC Digital’s slogan - “technology in the public service” - sums it up bests: by opening up access to more interesting, real-time data and and making the public sector more participatory, governments will be able to tap into engineering resources of its citizens and build a sustainable community of civic hackers.
Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager, google.org and Jenny Ye, Public Sector & Elections Intern
Posted by: Alon Halevy, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google Research
One of the things I most enjoy about working on data management is the ability to work on a variety of problems, both in the private sector and in government. I recently had the privilege of serving on a working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) studying the challenges of conserving the nation’s ecosystems. The report, titled “Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and the Economy” was presented to President Obama on July 18th, 2011. The full report is now available to the public.
The press release announcing the report summarizes its recommendations:
The Federal Government should launch a series of efforts to assess thoroughly the condition of U.S. ecosystems and the social and economic value of the services those ecosystems provide, according to a new report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), an independent council of the Nation’s leading scientists and engineers. The report also recommends that the Nation apply modern informatics technologies to the vast stores of biodiversity data already collected by various Federal agencies in order to increase the usefulness of those data for decision- and policy-making. One of the key challenges we face in assessing the condition of ecosystems is that a lot of the data pertaining to these systems is locked up in individual databases. Even though this data is often collected using government funds, it is not always available to the public and in other cases available but not in usable formats. This is a classical example of a data integration problem that occurs in many other domains.
The report calls for creating an ecosystem, EcoINFORMA, around data. The crucial piece of this ecosystem is to make the relevant data publicly available in a timely manner and, most importantly, in a machine readable form. Publishing data embedded in a PDF file is a classical example of what does not count as being machine readable. For example, if you are publishing a tabular data set, then a computer program should be able to directly access the meta-data (e.g., column names, date collected) and the data rows without having to heuristically extract it from surrounding text.
Once the data is published, it can be discovered by search engines. Data from multiple sources can be combined to provide additional insight, and the data can be visualized and analyzed by sophisticated tools. The main point is that innovation should be pursued by many parties (academics, commercial, government), each applying their own expertise and passions.
There is a subtle point about how much meta-data should be provided before publishing the data. Unfortunately, requiring too much meta-data (e.g., standard schemas) often stymies publication. When meta-data exists, that’s great, but when it’s not there or is not complete, we should still publish the data in a timely manner. If the data is valuable and discoverable, there will be someone in the ecosystem who will enhance the data in an appropriate fashion.
We look forward to seeing this ecosystem evolve and excited that Google Fusion Tables, our own cloud-based service for visualizing, sharing and integrating structured data, can contribute to its development.
[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to haveDominic Campbell, founder of FutureGov join us here. – Ed.]
Note: This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on Simpl's blog
On Friday and Saturday 17-18 June, a diverse bunch of energetic people came together in London for Interactivism Accessibility Hack Weekend (the first of its kind).
Some of those present - the student developers, Google developers and social innovators - were regular attendees at hack weekends, but it was those who had never even heard of a hack weekend - the members of the Gransnet website - that turned Interactivism into a hack weekend to remember.
Kicking things off, Andrew Eland (Google) and Dominic Campbell (FutureGov / Simpl) outlined the challenge that lay ahead of the teams, working together and using their creative, design and coding skills to turn their ideas into working prototypes by the end of the two days.
Before the hacking commences, two inspirational speakers to stepped up to the mic. Mike Bradley shared his experience of all things accessible through his current job as Senior Lecturer in Product Design and Engineering at Middlesex University and previous job as Accessibility Engineer at Ford. In short, listen to what people need and do that. Simple right?
Then came the star of the show, Peter Oakley, otherwise known by his renowned YouTube name: "Geriatric 1927". Peter spoke about his inspiration for joining YouTube, his love of all things web related, encouraged others to just give it a go as "you can't break it" and then demoed his YouTube skills.
And then it was time to get down to business. The people behind the ideas pitched to the room to get people motivated and moving into teams to start to get those ideas developed. Most of the teams gelled really quickly and stereotypes were quickly dispelled. Gransnet members later commented how impressed they were that the student developers really took time to listen to their ideas and everyone remarked on what good fun and great value the Gransnetters were.
Despite some healthy competitiveness, designers, developers and Gransnet members were bartered between teams, helping with sought after skills like logo design, understanding a complicated piece of coding or posing for a photograph or two to jazz up their final presentations.
So those final projects presented to the judging panel:
1. Our Town: a location based site with user generated content about local volunteering opportunities and ideas for projects
3. Gene Pool: an easy to use and fun genealogy game (a bit like Foursquare Family History)
4. Timetag: using the web to show patients if their hospital appointment is going to be delayed because of an overrunning clinic
5. TV Mate: an easy to use remote control made from a computer tablet that can be personalised with photographs and sounds
6. EZPZ: a simplified web browser that removes all the clutter and makes internet browsing clear and straightforward for the inexperienced user
7. Echoing: helping people in care homes connect and add value to the outside world by recording memories specific to local places that can be accessed by people visiting those locations
8. Spotted: an app for sharing likes and dislikes related to accessibility through photographs and individual profiles, for example a photograph of something that impedes good accessibility (a combination of Accessify Places and On the Go)
9. Milly and Jake: an interactive story that can be read by grandparents and grandchildren regardless of their location, for example by using Skype.
After tough deliberation, the expert panel of judges awarded EZPZ as the Interactivism - Accessibility Hack Weekend winners. The students from this team received a sought after Google Interactivism Award. Our Gransnetters were also invited to form their own judging panel and voted for Spotted as their favourite idea.
Last week, the Google Earth Outreach and Google.org teams, in collaboration with the Global Canopy Programme, hosted partners from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the first gathering of the Community Forest Monitoring Working Group. The goals of the working group are to provide a platform for groups engaged in community forest monitoring activities - across continents - to share knowledge and experience. Equally important is for these groups to provide recommendations for the development of tools, methodologies, and common protocols. For example, the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon is using modern technology to implement their community’s Surui Carbon Project.
This effort isn't isolated, as many NGOs and stakeholders support community-based approaches to forest monitoring for their efficiency, cultural relevance, and reliability. Community Forest Monitoring will play a role in the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) effort which aims to incentivize developing countries to adopt a low-emission path to development. In thinking about best methods for data collection, this working group is tackling a host of data collection issues including usability, security, accountability, cultural relevance, and scalability.
These are all concerns that the team at Open Data Kit (ODK), an open source suite of data collection tools, have fleshed out and iterated upon. ODK was born in 2008 as a Google sabbatical project of University of Washington computer science professor Gaetano Borriello. Borriello wanted to take advantage of Google’s data collection tools: maps, visualization, databases and has said that his team saw a gap in mobile data collection. Thus, Borriello’s team developed ODK Build, ODK Collect, and ODK Aggregate, mobile tools that have attracted thousands of users and dozens of active developers.
As ODK iterates and evolves, the Public Sector Engineering team is learning about the challenges and opportunities in mobile data collection and exploring how we can contribute to this space. ODK already gives users the option to visualize data in Google Earth and Google Fusion Tables, and we are exploring how to take advantage of some of Google’s other tools (what if photos collected on the ground could be easily posted to Picasa, or videos to YouTube?) It’s our goal to make sure that all meaningful data is effectively organized and made discoverable, accessible and usable.
Ultimately, community forest monitoring represents just one slice of the potential that effective data collection tools create. ODK was initially motivated by the needs of community health workers and has proven flexible enough to be used to track everything from human rights violations in the Central African Republic to water quality in Ghana. As the nature of scientific research diversifies and the volume of data collected increases, reliable, flexible, and lightweight tools will become more and more crucial.
What’s next? As the engineering teams continue to work on improving mobile data collection tools, this working group will convene policymakers at the next workshop to discuss standards and best practices. “The greatest barrier isn’t a technological one, but the challenge of leveraging this data so that communities can help ensure better governance for their forests,” says Niki Mardas, Head of Strategy and Communications for the Global Canopy Programme and theredddesk.org. As with many other public data collection efforts, it will become the job of advocates and analysts to shape meaningful narratives and press for the change the world needs. We're proud to be playing a part in this effort and we're committed to working with our partners to transform data collection from a passive, closed process into an active and empowering one.
Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach and Jenny Ye, Public Sector Engineering Intern
This past Sunday Turkish citizens went to the polls to cast their vote at a critical juncture in their country's history. After the polls closed, voters across the country turned to Google first to understand the results and the impact of the election. Providing access to useful information like results for elections are closely aligned to Google’s mission and help improve democracies across the globe. In Turkey, the team at Google helped visualize and explore the latest election results as they became available. Using Fusion Tables and the Google Maps API, our elections team built a gadget that displayed province and district-level results in real-time “directly from the ballot box.” To facilitate this, we partnered with Cihan News who recruited 50,000 volunteers to provide real-time election data and received praise from voters and other media outlets for their quick and accessible reporting of election results.
By making it easy for multiple collaborators to integrate data, create visualizations and work with a variety of data types, Fusion Tables allowed us to quickly build a prototype. We created tables with static content such as district shapes and names and separate tables with dynamic content such as the number of votes received and counted ballot boxes. We wrote a simple program to periodically parse Cihan’s XML feed of results and populate the dynamic content tables. We then were able to merge both the static and dynamic tables and visualize them directly in Fusion Tables without writing a single line of new code. As soon as Cihan uploaded the data, we were ready to visualize. The result was a quick and easy mashup that we could check for accuracy.
The gadget was built using PolyGonzo, an open source library for the Google Maps JavaScript API. PolyGonzo provides fast rendering and highly interactive polygons in most modern browsers using the HTML5 canvas element and GeoJSON shape data. From Fusion Tables, we exported the static content for Turkey’s 957 districts to KML and we then converted the shapes into simplified GeoJSON. Using the Fusion Tables JavaScript API, the gadget also periodically read from the same dynamic content tables we used to build our prototype. The end result was an engaging gadget whose static and dynamic content could be traced back to Fusion Tables.
We hosted the gadget off of Google Project Hosting. By 7:30 in the evening local time we were seeing over 500 queries per second to load the gadget’s static content from Project Hosting and over 1000 queries per second to load the gadget’s dynamic content from Fusion Tables - both astounding figures. As evidenced by the volume of updates on Twitter and elsewhere on election night, Turkish voters were indeed eager to share the details of the election outcome courtesy of this custom mapping platform.
Projects like this help people around the world view and explore information and also allow people to collaborate and merge different data sources. For instance, a tech savvy reporter could incorporate publicly available socioeconomic or past election data to the Fusion Table and use the Google Maps API to overlay the data directly onto the existing map. The web holds much promise to continue to transform politics and elections from a passive process to an active, participatory one. The elections team here at Google will continue to seek solutions and build tools and platforms to help inform and connect voters and candidates across the globe.
As evidenced by this latest project, Google is committed to partnering with and helping news organizations succeed online and off. The Turkish election results gadget is the first of many election visualizations we hope to create in the future. Soon, we’re creating an election results specification so any news organization can provide the public data and can work with us to provide visualized and - importantly - searchable results on election day. We can’t wait to see what tools and products we can cook up together for elections around the world!
Posted by Chetan Sabnis, Software Engineer, Public Sector Engineering
Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor took another strong step towards an open and accountable Congress, calling for better access to House legislative data in a letter to the Clerk of the House:
“...Openness, once a proud tradition of the House, is again the new standard. At the start of the 112th Congress, the House adopted a Rules Package that identified electronic documents as a priority for the institution. Towards that end, we are asking all House stakeholders to work together on publicly releasing the House’s legislative data in machine-readable formats...Ultimately, legislative data is the property of the American public. It is our hope that these reforms will continue to rebuild the trust between Congress and the people we serve.”
Open, standard data formats are fundamental to helping engineers, entrepreneurs and citizens access and use legislative information. We applaud Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor for their continued leadership on transparency.
Across industries, we’ve seen how well organized information can improve operations and reduce spending. In the same way that barcodes made merchandise easier to track and supply chains more efficient, using standardized machine-readable formats will be a large step in improving transparency around lawmaking.
And one day, it will be as simple for citizens to understand and track a bill as School House Rock makes it look:
This Saturday, thousands of Iowans will flock to the center of the state to cast a vote for their preferred Republican Presidential candidate at the Ames Straw Poll. The Ames Straw Poll is held ahead of the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucuses and serves as an important indicator of strength of the candidates in the critical early state. Although many other states and organizations have adopted straw polls, the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa has become one of the most important during the election cycle. This decades-old campaign trail tradition keeps politics local and personal -- and this time, we’re making it digital.
