A couple of weeks ago I attended the Web Summit in Dublin, a large, tech entrepreneur event (my observations on the event are posted here). This week I spent three days at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, another event that considered how technology is being used to reshape social and economic life, but which had a very different vibe, a much more mixed constituency of exhibitors and speakers (a mix of tech companies, consultants, city administrations/officials, politicians, NGOs, and academics; over 400 cities sent representatives and 240 companies were present, and there were over 10,000 attendees), and for the most part had a much more tempered discourse. We presented our work on the Dublin Dashboard and the use of indicators in knowing and governing cities, attended the congress (keynote talks, plenary panels, and parallel paper sessions) and toured round the expo (a trade fair made up mostly of company and city stands). I thought it would be useful to share my observations with respect to the event and in particular some of the absences. Continue reading →
A chunk of the Programmable City team attended the Web Summit in Dublin last week. I was fortunate to be asked to MC the Machine Stage for Tuesday afternoon (on smart cities/smart cars), and also presented a paper, participated in a panel discussion, and chaired a private panel session, all on smart cities. As well reported in the media, it was an enormous event attended by 22,000 people, with 600 speakers across nine stages, and hundreds of stands, many of which changed daily to accommodate them all. No doubt a huge amount of business was conducted, personal networks extended, and thousands of pages of copy for newspapers, magazines and websites filed.
To me what was interesting about the event were the silences as much as what was presented and displayed. There were loads of very interesting apps and technologies demoed, many of which will have real world impact. That said, there was also a lot of hype, hubris, hope, self-promotion, buzzwords (to my ear ‘disruption’, ‘smart’, ‘platform’, ‘internet of things’ and ‘use case’ were used a lot), Californian ideology (radical individualism, libertarianism, neoliberal economics, and tech utopianism), and heads in the sand. In contrast, there was an absence of critical reflection about the following three broad concerns. Continue reading →
The world (or just fanboys) will soon be waiting with baited breath as Apple launches its entry into the wearable technology market with the release of the iWatch.
Apple’s HealthKit interface
With the bundling of the Apple HealthKit into iOS8, the trailblazers of the mobile digital technology industry have moved into the hybrid mobile/wearable space, and towards a wearable rather than haptic interface future for mobile technology.
The intertwining of mobile and wearable technology is in tandem with the tethering of these technologies to the body and to the vast databanks and data analytic algorithms of big data companies that use this information to assess the trends and predictabilities of everyday life. We term these technologies as enablers of the “quantified self”. The quantified self is itself a product of the continual measuring of datapoints harvested from the individual and continually compared to the measured past and a predicted future. On a different tack, the ever reliable Adam Curtis has recently argued that digital tracking technologies – the bedrock of the big data driven smart city – are responsible for holding people in a digitally-engineered stasis. Curtis traces a genealogy of the development of surveillance and spying technologies and relates this to growing paranoia and control in governance that can only be sated eventually by the algorithmic governance afforded by digital technology. In the present day, these hidden digital technologies and systems in effect freeze time by virtue of their withdrawn operations and recording and representations of the present, while comparing that present to the recorded past. The aim of such systems is “to discover patterns, coincidences and correlations, and from that find ways of stopping change”. The cumulative effect of the wealth of systems involved in cryptographic governance of our lives (consumerism, managing the body, the global financial system etc…) is, according to Curtis, to govern into a state of immobility that is responsible for perpetually repeating the past and that is terrified of change.
While Curtis’ arguments are open to critique and discussion far beyond what I will offer here, they do allow for a consideration of what kinds of spaces are being created for users and people subjected to these technologies. In this post I want to focus on the notion of data collecting technologies being a critical part of a logic of artificial homeostasis in the smart city, and what this might mean for us as critical theorists, geographers and philosophers. The state of immobility identified by Curtis is in opposition to the idea that we should be looking at new
Almost certainly what the iWatch will not look like. Source: wearechampionmag.com
and altered mobilities that are emerging through the continual co-presence of digital technology. As a phenomenologist, I am particularly interested in this with relation to the phenomenological appreciation of place and how these “technologies of immobility” may affect how place is experienced. In particular, the use of technologies that are involved in the production of information for the “quantified self” are of interest; these are technologies that on the whole promise benefits to the user through a disciplining to achieve a particular goal. As such, the notion of recording and comparing that Curtis bemoans is a feature of this kind of technology. Some key theorists have engaged with quantifiable self technology with regards to the spatialities and mobilities that they afford, and here I want to consider what kind of subjective experiences of space may arise from an ubiquitous presence of these technologies. Briefly, I will consider this utilising a three-faceted framework. Firstly, technologies of management of the body (as one of the categories of technology that Curtis considers so critical in this stasis-inducing milieu) will be positioned within Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self. From there, those technologies are scrutinised with regards to the intentionality or logics of digital media, drawing on Friedrich Kittler. Finally, I offer some a challenge for a research agenda that will allow for a greater understanding of these issues.
Foucault’s Technologies of the Self is (in my reading) the most Nietzschean of Foucault’s works, even given the genealogical roots of Foucault’s accounts of the development of human sexuality or panoptical society that relates closely to Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality. I position Technologies of the Self as Nietzschean because of the clear line between the Apollonian and Dionysian views of the self that are presented, and how Foucault argues that technologies of the self have obscured the concept of the self. This obscuring comes from ancient Greek paradigm shifts from a “take care of yourself” view of the self to a “know yourself” view. In this, the concern for the soul and the self as soul is replaced or obscured with the technologies of writing and recording of the activities of the body as a way of “knowing thyself”. In essence, the need for contemplation and self-examination that Socrates relays as critical to Alcibiades in the dialogue Alcibiades is replaced with journalling and historicising the activity of the person. The self though is not clothing, tools or possessions; it is to be found in the principle that uses these tools (Foucault, 1988: 17). The types of technologies that are grouped in the quantified self debate are therefore technologies of “know thyself” where thyself is quantified and represented in a quantified form.
The impact of quantifiable self technologies is to conduct an abstraction of previously hidden or withdrawn human processes as data by wearable technologies, and to hermeneutically position this information as the self. The process of abstraction reveals human processes that then become both the conscious concern of the user and a commodity that can be used to reshape behaviour and potentially be used in the commodity form as a source of revenue or profit. The technologies are of course increasingly popular, networked gadgets that are part of the popular discourse on the emerging “Internet of Things” where data collection on an industrial (or some might argue super-industrial) scale can be enabled through the close integration of networked technology to the body and other entities. Berry (2014: 14) argues that such technology is indicative of the emergence of a new industrial internet, “a computational, real-time streaming ecology that is reconfigured in terms of digital flows, fluidities and movement”. Wearable technologies fit in this vision through their constant harvesting of information on the body and the user and the sharing and representation of that data. While the user may receive information on their behaviours that can assist in behavioural changes or adaptations, the information garnered from the total users of a device can be used in aggregated form to inform decision making, planning or predictions on behaviour and movement in emergent “smart cities” where “big data” informs the everyday management of the environment (Greenfield, 2013; Townsend, 2013).
The uses of these common and popular forms of this technology are in themselves well documented but worth commenting upon with regards to what “self” is presented. Jawbone’s “Up” promises to track how a user sleeps, moves and eats and then relays the data back to the user in order to promote their health, the Nike Fuel wristband (discontinued in April 2014) or the Fitbit wristband which makes similar promises to the Jawbone “Up”, with the potential added bonus of rashes or burns when using the Force model (Cambell-Dollaghan, 2014). Forthcoming consumer devices such as Google Glass will allow for an array of self-analysis; the Apple iWatch will already integrate with the extensive HealthKit to record, represent and relay the physical minutia of everyday life to the user.
Wilson (2012: 857) argues that process of data production in cities (such as quantified self technology) are afforded legitimisation through processes of standardisation and objectification, and that these processes in turn transduct (Dodge and Kitchin, 2012) urban space. Wilson expands on this view in this presentation from the Programmable City Launch. While Wilson’s argument concerns the physical characteristics of the city, rather than the processes that underlie human physical presence in the world, the two processes identified are useful in identifying the underlying logic behind wearable technologies and the arguments purported here. Standardisation refers both to the use of standardised technological artefacts and standardised processes used in the abstraction and collection of data concerning a physical entity. Wearable technologies are in themselves a medium that has an internal logic of the production, processing and furthering of data. This resonates with this view of internet-enabled computational devices as part of a wider framework of devices that perform bespoke, discreet tasks in the world and affect subjectivity and human perception accordingly.
Such an approach to media technology as causing alterations in human behaviour is part of a long tradition in theory, from McLuhan’s (2008) famous arguments that media are an extension of man in the world and the medium is the message, when one wants to assess the effects of media on human behaviour and society to Kittler’s (1999) argument that media structures “human affairs” through the production, processing, transmission and storage of data. The standardisation of process through the concretisation of the form of the device and the standard encoding and storage of data is in itself a standardisation of the abstraction of data. Objectification is the product of this standardisation; the abstraction of data from the body (such as heart rate, metabolic data, data on sleep patterns etc.) objectifies information that was previously beyond the conscious awareness of the user and presents that data in a form which can be operationalised.
As such, the internal logic of this technology is both to harvest and share information. The goal of this logic could be argued to be the behavioural change of the user towards a desired behavioural or physical state (i.e. more active or fitter). However, this is contingent a number of factors, such as motivation, time to engage in activity or physical ability. The logic of the creation and continuation of a data stream that shapes human affairs a la Kittler (1999) is a more solid and arguable position. From this view, it is argued that the media device (the wearable technology) is responsible for an ordering of the human in the world. In this case, the ordering is threefold: the human perception of the body is reordered; the human perception of the world itself is reordered through the alteration of the perception of the body and through the role of the body in perceiving the world; and subjective notions of spatiality and mobility are altered as the body is enrolled into the role of connected consumer that comes from the use of wearable technologies. Wearable technology is both co-existing with the body but also responsible for a revealing of the internal mechanisms of the body that would be previously have been hidden or withdrawn from consciousness. The revealing of these processes and bodily functions is problematic; while the representation of particular functions is an expressed aim of the technology, the harvesting of this information is a both a privacy issue in that the knowledge of such processes has bypassed an appreciation by the person and an issue of subjective knowledge of self and world.
The data on the “self” has immediately moved from a hidden, withdrawn state to a shared, commoditised representation of the functions of the body that can be used to shape behaviour, understanding and self-appreciation. The “self” itself is problematised, and the mobility and subjective spatiality of the self in the data-infused environment becomes an issue. What kind of “self” is being presented through these technologies? Should I be wearing a shiny new iWatch with my health and fitness information continually measured and available at a flick of the wrist, what does this mean to the sense of space that I have when I move through the world? It is tempting to offer a view of the subjective experience of world as a solipsistic, self-enclosed bubble where the measuring of self goes with an angst engendered by continual surveillance of the once hidden internal states of the body. Research into the subjective, phenomenological experience of the world when using this technology is needed, and needed now to understand the existential effects of living to “know thyself”.
Bibliography and further reading
Berry, David M., 2014. Critical Theory and the Digital. London: Bloomsbury Academic
Last Friday I acted as a discussant for three sessions (no. 1, no. 2, no. 3) on Digital Geography presented at the RGS/IBG conference in London. The papers were quite diverse and some of the discussion in the sessions centred on how to frame and make sense of digital geographies.
In their overview paper, Elisabeth Roberts and David Beel categorised the post-2000 geographical literature which engages with the digital into six classes: conceptualisation, unevenness, governance, economy, performativity, and the everyday. To my mind, this is quite a haphazard way of dividing up the literature. Instead, I think it might be more productive to divide the wide range of studies which consider the relationship between the digital and geography into three bodies of work:
Geography of the digital
These works seek to apply geographical ideas and methodologies to make sense of the digital. As such, it focuses on mapping out the geographies of digital technologies, their associated socio-technical assemblages and production. Such work includes the mapping of cyberspace, charting the spatialities of social media, plotting the material geographies of ubiquitous computing, detailing the economic geographies of component resources, technologies and infrastructures, tracing the generation and flows of big data, and so on.
Geography produced by the digital
This body of work focuses on how digital technologies and infrastructures are transforming the geographies of everyday life and the production of space. Such work includes examining how digital technologies and ICTs are increasingly being embedded into different spatial domains – the workplace, home, transport systems, the street, shops, etc.; how they mediate and augment socio-spatial practices and relations such as producing, consuming, communicating, playing, etc; how they shape and remediate geographical imaginaries and how spaces are visioned, planned and built; and so on.
Geography produced through the digital
An increasing amount of geographical scholarship, praxis and communication is now undertaken using digital technologies. For example, generating, recording and analyzing data using digital devices and associated software and databases; the collection and sharing of datasets and outputs through digital archives and repositories; discussing ideas and conducting debate via mailing lists and social media; writing papers and presentations, producing maps and other visualizations using computers; etc. A fairly substantial body of work thus reflects on the difference digital technologies make to the production of geographical scholarship.
Taken together these three bodies of work, I would argue, constitute digital geography.
At the same time, however, I wonder about the utility of bounding digital geography and corralling studies within its bounds. To what extent is it useful to delimit it as a defined field of research?
It might be more productive to reframe much of what is being claimed as digital geography with respect to its substantive focus. For example, examining the ways in which digital technologies are being pervasively embedded into the fabric of cities and how they modulate the production of urban socio-spatial relations is perhaps best framed within urban geography. Similarly, a study looking at the use of digital technology in the delivery of aid in parts of the Global South is perhaps best understood as being centrally concerned with development geography. In other words, it may well be more profitable to think about how the digital reshapes many geographies, rather than to cast all of those geographies as digital geography.
Nonetheless, it is clear that geographers still have much work to do with respect to thinking about the digital. That is a central task of my own research agenda as I work on the Programmable City project. I’d be interested in your own thoughts as to how you conceive and position digital geography, so if you’re inclined to share your views please leave a comment.
Note – I have received some feedback since last night and have updated the post accordingly. Thanks to those who provided it!
The Republic of Ireland, Department of Public Expenditures and Reform (DPER) launched its first Open Data Pilot Portal data.gov.ie on July 22nd. The new portal was created by INSIGHT Galway who answered the DPER call for tender of January 24, 2014. The following suite of products were delivered on April 7th and officially approved by the Government on July 1st. This is an important milestone.
On the following day, July 23rd, the Government released Ireland’s first Open Government Partnership (OGP) National Action Plan. The newly launched data.gov.ie portal falls within Ireland’s OGP Plan under section 4 entitled: Open Data and Transparency – opening-up Government data for greater accountability, improving public services and achieving economic growth. It was also something civil society, academia and government have been advocating for, for some time.
The first draft of this plan was released at the OGP European Regional Meetings held in Dublin in May of 2014, and part of the package of deliverables listed above are related to Ireland’s May 2013 commitments to join the OGP. The Government also aspires to sign onto the G8 Open Data Charter. The OGP plan was informed by a number of stakeholders from civil society, academia and the public and private sectors. The documentation related to this process is available on the OGP page for Ireland and on the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland website. There are many strategies in these reports, if implemented, will greatly make government more accessible and transparent to the public.
Subsequently, the DPER invited members of the public service, involved with the production and dissemination of public sector data in Ireland, to attend an information session, held on the 29th of July, to discuss the documents, the portal, to solicit feedback on the development of an open data strategy for the Republic and to seek support. A public briefing will also be held September 8th with civil society stakeholders and the public who have been actively engaged in the production of the OGP DRAFT Plan and engaged in Open Data and open government in Ireland.
This blog post is the first of a three part series on open data.
This post sketches part of the open data landscape for the past 5 years.
The next post will discuss the DPER/INSIGHT documents, the portal and provide recommendations.
The final will discuss the open government plan.
Sketching the Open Data Landscape in Ireland
Members of the Programmable City Project have been actively engaged in the theory and practice of open data and making data accessible in both Ireland and Canada for 15 years. As part of this ERC funded Project researchers are producing open data genealogies and data assemblages for Ireland, Canada and Boston in the US. The following is but a sketch of the open data landscape in Ireland. In the last 5 years much important work has been done prior to the DPER launch and it important to feature some of this work as it provides context to the Irish Open Data Story.
The public sector in collaboration with the private and academic sectors have been advocating for both open data and open government for some time. For example, In June of 2011, National Cross Industry Working Group was formed “to support and inform government in the delivery of their Open Data objectives. [They were] committed to realising Open Data opportunities for Government, society and industry while simultaneously re-enforcing [Ireland’s] international reputation as a global technology hub”. Their Report includes recommendations, many of which were included in the DPER/INSIGHT reports and a history of open data activities from 2009-2011. WG members also held a number of events as part of Open Data Week between Nov. 7-11 in 2011. Shrotly thereafter, on November 17, 2011, the DPER as part of its 2011 Public Sector Reform Plan includes making data more accessible and opening government more broadly. The current DPER/INSIGHT reports are therefore not the first time the government announces open data and open government plans.
data.gov.ie is also not the first portal as other levels of government, civil society and academia, as well as the private sector have: produced their own portals, have integrated portals; have shared some of their own datasets; have added value to some; have produced some civic apps and have helped shape the discourse of openess.
Many of the early public and academic sector data dissemination initiatives, in Ireland would not be considered as pure ‘open data’ according to the Open Definition. Some of the County level portals listed below might not meet all of the open criteria, since many stipulate that data cannot be used for commercial purposes or passed onto third party entities. The Fingal Open Data portal is the exception. These would be classified as open access to data projects. They are nonetheless precursors to the ‘open data’ DPER launch. These initiatives have been sharing their data as part of their normal dissemination practices or as an institutional policy. For example, statistical and geospatial data producing communities in particular are renowned for their good practices in Ireland and internationally.
The following is a selection of open access, open data and transparency initiatives in Ireland:
Kildare Street (launched 2009) makes parliamentary records accessible and records what parliamentarians say and do;
Active Citizen (founded 2010) has been working with andadvocating for Ireland becoming a member of the Open Government Partnership since 2011, and develop. In 2012 an OGP Business Case which included the fostering of an open data ecosystem was provided to DPER. It founded the Open Knowledge Foundation Ireland local group (2013) which became OKF Ireland Chapter (2014);
CKan Open Data Portal (launched September 2013), it is no longer on line. An inventory of close to 200 public sector data initiatives were added into this demo portal during a one day hackathon;
AIRO.ie (All-Island Research Observatory launched 2010), disseminates datasets from agencies both from the North and the South as interactive online graphs and maps and also in an open data store. It was initially the Cross-Border Regional Research Observatory founded in 2006.
Public, Academic and Private Sector Partnership
Dublinked.ie(Launched June 2011), a partnership project which disseminates a variety of static and real time data.
Public & Private Sector
There are far too many open access to data initiatives in Ireland to list here, the DPER/INSIGHT Data Audit Report provides a partial list, organizations like AIRO have created their own inventories which they make accessible in their Data Store, the Irish Spatial Data Exchange(ISDE) has integrated the metadata of a number of important data catalogs, dublinked.ie lists hundreds in their portal and the Ckan portal, now offline, listed close to 200 initiatives in a one day hackathon. The private sector also disseminates data on behalf and with the public sector. ESRI Ireland for examples disseminate data in a number of ways, as products and as web services services. Finally, there is also the GeoPortal.ie which was developed by the Department of Environment, Community & Local Government (DECLG) and Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) with guidance and oversight fromIrish public bodies on the Irish Spatial Data Infrastructure (ISDI) project steering committee.
The following is a very small list of how some public sector organization open access to data initiatives disseminate their data:
integrated and interoperability – spatial data infrastructures, and spatial data strategies are integrated web based geospatial data delivery processes that include standards, portals, interoperability and framework data. Geoportal, ESRI, AIRO, EPA, Marine, Fingal, Roscommon, DECLG mentioned earlier and many others have been disseminating their data in this way for quite some time.
terms and conditions – some data are shared according to pre-existing agreements between researcher and research participant (e.g., Irish Qualitative Data Archive);
practices – whereby data that are value added (e.g., cleaned, aggregated, geocoded, mapped, visualized, analyzed) often in partnership with a public sector institution are simply disseminated as data or rendered into maps (E.g., All-Island Research Observatory).
Linked data: data are made discoverable according to linked data principlessuch as the Central Statistics Office.
Shaping the Terrain:
There a number of initiatives that help shape debates on openness and transparency and some of these are:
TheStory.ie sheds light on law, policy and freedom of information in Ireland (based on Gavin’s Blog launched in 2002);
Creative Commons Ireland produces open licences enabling data producers to share their data more openly (founded in 2003);
Coder Dojo builds capacity by teaching people to code and to understand open source and open data (founded in 2011);
advocating open access publishing, Open Access Ireland (committee formed in 2012).
Code for Ireland (launched January 2014), apps are voluntarily created in a hackathon type of environment with open data, or data are produced to address civic issues and these are rendered into apps.
A number of app contests and hackathons have been taking place since 2010.
Indicators and Evaluation
Ireland’s openness has also been ranked according to a number of measures, and these too have inspired action within and outside the public service. These ranking schemes were discussed in an earlier post entitled on Mapping Openness and Transparency.
Research
Finally, there are research projects which are part of a new emerging field called critical data studies, The Programmable City Project being one of the few doing so internationally, and data discovery and semantic interoperability projects such as the INSIGHT Linked Data project based at NUIG.
Open Data Assemblage
The above is by no means complete nor exhaustive list of projects and activities. For instance the open source community; the private sector (e.g., IBM); lawyers, geomaticians, scientists, programmers, journalists, business associations, citizen scientists, and other individuals; are part of this landscape. As are those who provide collaborative working spaces (e.g., T-Cube); sponsors of open data events (i.e., ESRI) or donate space (i.e., the Engine Yard, Facebook); informal virtual server use arrangements, or the library community. Furthermore, only the OGP, EU and OKF are mentioned as international influences, yet there are other national programs (e.g., UK, US), NGOs, standards organizations, and data infrastructures that are a part of this story. A data assemblage analysis will be used as a way to situate these actors in the open data and the data landscape in Ireland in general.
Some motivating factors and issues:
Open data stakeholders prior to the launch of the DPER/INSIGHT documents and the portal, were motivated into action because of a number of issues beyond transparency, efficiency and collaboration. The following is a sample of some of the more high level issues:
the disappointment and missed public benefit opportunity of the postal code system (eircode.ie) in Ireland, both how it is being deployed, the cost recovery model and the regressive licencing regime (See Map Scribbles for details). the fees, and general lackadaisical approach to fulfilling Freedom of Information requests, See The Story for backgrounder.
the cost recovery and licencing practices of the Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSI). OSI produces important framework data that are mostly inaccessible to civil society, and are costly even to the public sector, who also have to pay for them. The OSI has however begun to share some of its data to some academic institutions. Beyond access, it means that important work is not being done, effort is being duplicated, and framework data standards are being undermined as people are creating their own datasets. Open Street Map in Ireland is an OSI workaround, and in the UK, the lack of access to OS data spearheaded the UK Guardian open data campaign.
Uncertainty about the procurement agreements between the city and the private sector regarding access to data and the science behind the deployment of smart city like sensor initiatives.
These issues have not gone away, and some were debated during the Open Government Partnership meetings in Dublin, have been discussed in the media, and the DPER/INSIGHT Best Practice Handbook briefly addresses others.
Local Context:
Finally, the local context matters, the history of the public sector and its reform, the political economy which includes foreign direct investment and the political system in general provide a backdrop for the unique made in Ireland version of open data. This will be studied more fully as part of the Programmable City genealogical and data assemblage research.
Until then, this sketch of the Irish open data landscape illustrates the rich culture of openness in Ireland, has identified some programs, stakeholders and issues that pre-existed release of data.gov.ie and the DPER/INSIGHT documents. The documents did not discuss these projects in any great detail, which is unfortunate as much expertise exists in and outside of the public sector in Ireland and capturing best practices and mobilizing that knowledge would be beneficial. Others were very briefly addressed in the Open Government Plan.
The DPER did however invite some of these actors to their July 29th and the up and coming September meetings and there is now a mandate for greater collaboration between stakeholders and the government. And DPER is soliciting feedback more generally on these plans.
As part of the Programmable City project, some of our research involves looking at hackathons, hack nights, and their role in city governance. Hackathon’s are increasingly being used by city governments as a way to tap into the creativity of its citizens and make use of open data to help manage the city and address issues that citizen’s may find important.
Meyer and Ermoshima (2013, 3) categorise hackathons into three types: “issue oriented”, centred around a problem or set of problems; “tech oriented”, focused on developing systems; and “data oriented”, where the data sets required to be worked upon are supplied by the organisers. These events are becoming increasingly appealing to entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and governments who see potential in these events to “reform their structure, renew their methods of functioning, and attract the attention of developers” (Meyer and Ermoshima 2013, 3). The social and ethical benefits derived from the use of open governmental data has seen an increase in “civic hackathons”. Following the American “coding for democracy” movement, Meyer and Ermoshima described civic hackers as “technologists, civil servants, designers, entrepreneurs, engineers – anybody – who is willing to collaborate with others to create, build, and invent to address challenges relevant to our neighbourhoods, our cities, our states and our country… a hacker is someone who uses a minimum of resources and a maximum of brainpower and ingenuity to create, enhance or fix something” (2013, 3).
Thus as Meyer and Ermoshima (2013, 5) note hackathons contain an experimental element of bricolage as well as being collaborative, heterogeneous and constituted by hybrid networks, through which they question divisions of technical experts and others. This creates an innovation and problem solving tool that creates “appropriate conditions to work on a social challenge, to develop software and hardware solutions and to create a sustainable community or ecosystem of technical and non-technical experts, lawyers, activists and citizens” (Meyer and Ermoshima 2013, 6)
With regards to civic hackathons or those encouraged by the government, the belief is that hackathons are methods of connecting communities, developing relationships between communities, governments and tech people, and creates a better city for all. It is reflective of the ideal of letting “the collective energy of the people in the room come together and really take that data and solve things in creative and imaginative ways” (Llewellyn 2012).
But do they actually live up to the promise? Are there any success stories where hackathon’s have produced apps which have made a significant change to the city? Or is it more rhetoric with limited real world application and difference? As part of our research we are attending regular hack meet ups such as Code for All Ireland, Coding Grace and Pyladies to get an idea about the dynamics of the groups, what they do for participants and what participants in turn give back to the group and the broader community.
As our research within Dublin hacking spaces is a work in progress, I will look at another example of hacking oriented problem solving for cities. Let’s have a look at where the government has run app competitions to try and provide solutions to city-based problems. A perennial favourite in these contexts and contests, is public transport. How can an app help negotiate the challenges of the public transport commute?
Sydney buses
I’ll use Sydney as an example here. In 2012 the New South Wales (NSW) Government held an app hacking competition for developing public transport apps that used real time data and which were intended to help commuters better plan their journey and create a better public transport experience. The three successful apps, TripView, TripGo and Arrivo Sydney were launched in December 2012. According to the NSW Government, the apps contain data spanning 8,200 stops, more than 1,900 buses and close to 1,200 routes throughout Sydney. It is claimed that TripView is one of the most popular apps with close to 1 million requests each week. According to the Minister for Transport, Gladys Berejiklian,
Real Time information for buses is changing the way public transport customers travel – they are now able to plan ahead, not just by looking at the timetable but by actually seeing where their bus is located on the route, and its estimated time of arrival… This is just one of the many improvements we are making to improve technology across the transport network to make customer journeys easier.
The apps do seem to be useful. On one morning commute, I overheard a conversation about the realtime apps. This fellow commuter reasoned the apps helped you decide when you needed to leave the house in order to catch your bus on time or let you know how long you had to wait, and observed that “It adds value to the waiting experience”. A happy customer it seems.
The apps were the product of a Transport for NSW (TfNSW) App Hot House which was facilitated by PWC’s Digital Change team. The Hot House was held over a two day period and during this time the teams worked with General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data and API feed that delivered real time bus information to create prototypes of consumer products for mobile phones which they had to pitch to judging panel consisting of Transport for NSW, industry experts and PWC’s Digital Change Team. It was particularly important for teams to demonstrate that their business model could work in the real world and that it would improve the travel experience. The winning teams received:
First access to the real time information
The opportunity to collaborate with TfNSW stakeholders
There was some criticism of Transport NSW’s App Hot House project however. The data was made available to only a selected group of developers and there were claims that this created an anti-competitive market which did not benefit consumers. Transport NSW commented that they are considering opening up real time data to other than the approved app users but need to make sure that their internal infrastructure for data delivery is robust and secure enough to support all subscribers and deliver a consistent level of service to customers. Additionally, the real time information was not available to all Sydney commuters:
The real time information will initially be available in the Sydney CBD, the eastern suburbs, the inner west, southern suburbs, northwestern suburbs, the northern beaches and lower North Shore. The apps contain real-time data spanning some 8200 stops, more than 1900 buses and almost 1200 routes across the Sydney Bus Network.
The success of the real time bus apps prompted the State Government to run a similar competition to develop real time train apps for Sydney trains. RailCorp developed a data feed of real time train locations which was made available to developers. Live information from the trains, received by markers placed at stations, was immediately fed back to customers via apps on their handheld devices. According to the Minister for Transport, Gladys Berejiklian, Transport NSW was
keen to improve the customer experience on the rail network and we know that a Real Time Train App will give customers the information they need to make decisions about their journey, all in the palm of their hand.
But it was not always a government that was promoting citizen use of data to create tools that would help city service users. There were examples of apps made prior to the App Hot House which the government shut down citing the argument that the transport data system could not yet provide reliable and sustainable feed and therefore the apps couldn’t offer a reliable service. There is also some controversy about the non-universal access to the data when the government did eventually provide it in real time.
Prior to the government endorsed apps, some developers had created apps without support from Transport NSW. In 2012 the government and Google announced that transport data would be available on Google maps, joining 400 other cities which were already doing this. However, the information remained static timetable data, updated once a week, and it seemed the government was resisting releasing real-time data to third parties.
In 2011 Ben Hosken created a real-time app from data released by the government for a two week period before an “app day”. The app was a success receiving 200,000 views in the two weeks it was available before Hosken’s was asked by the NSW government to take it down. The government justified their request to remove the app by saying the system was not yet reliable enough to provide a reliable and sustainable feed, while maintaining that they were committed to providing data to developers. A similar reason was also given to another developer, Marcus Schappi, in 2010.
Accessing the data would however require developer’s signing agreements with the state government. According to Berejiklian, “That’s a formal relationship, and obviously if we do embark on that in the future we want to make sure the organisation we are dealing with is going to respect the integrity of the data we are providing them and is going to make sure that they are used in a good way that’s going to help people.”
Hosken and Schappi, were not the only developers who were ahead of Transport NSW’s ideas on the use of their data. TripView developer, Nick Maher was also threatened with copyright infringement, along with other developers who created the apps, Metro Sydney and Transit Sydney, by NSW government agency, Railcorp. This was despite Railcorp not offering a comparable service.
Maher developed TrainView in 2007 and TripView in 2008 had to stop selling both apps after threats from RailCorp. Maher claims that he had asked them at the time whether they had any problems using the data and they had said they didn’t have any. He continued to sell the applications before recently contacting them about some updates. RailCorp then said they had changed their stance with regard to copyright and that they weren’t giving people permission to use their data in third-party apps.
RailCorp has contacted about four developers requesting them to remove from sale mobile applications that breach RailCorp’s copyright over its timetables because these applications were providing out-of-date timetables that had the potential to confuse and mislead our customers…Copyright in all CityRail timetables is owned by RailCorp. Any unlicensed republication of the timetables represents a breach of this copyright. We have not pursued any legal action to date.
Railcorp did however open up its data through a competition in 2013. According to Maher, this was a good thing: “They could have built their own app but instead opened it up to competition which is good because you get more innovation that way.” He added that the concern with the earlier apps had been because the government was worried the data was incorrect. NSW premier, Nathan Rees, had to intervene after a social media storm, and gave his support to the developers.
Intellectual property lawyer, Trevor Choy, said that even though RailCorp was a public service, copyright law was “biased” in favour of the Government and did not make any distinction between information that should be a public service, like train timetables, and private information. “Government agencies are supposed to use their powers wisely, but here they are behaving exactly like a private company preventing a competitor from launching a ‘competing product'” said Choy.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Dr Nicholas Gruen, former chairperson of the Australian federal government’s Web 2.0 taskforce, who welcomed Berejiklian and the transport’s department’s move to open up the transport data to Google, noting that people have been attempting to access that data in NSW for five years. He cautioned however, that in Sydney’s case there was evidence bureaucracy was weighing the minister down, and referred to the fact that there “are over 400 cities in the world that provide that sort of data to Google and others, and many of them do it on an open basis”. Gruen suggested that to fully utilise government data, required lowering hurdles to its use which means “making it as easy as possible for the developer’s computer to tap into a stream of information provided by the government without, if possible, stopping to ask permission”.
There is clearly a debate about the openness of the data and the way the government utilises both this data and the skills of developers to manage city systems. This example is not true of all cities as Gruen alluded to. Cities have their own approaches to data, whom they make it accessible to, and to which areas it is applied. The Sydney transport apps example does however provide insight into the complexity and legal issues surrounding the use of data. It is also an example of where the product of the hackathon has been successfully adopted by city users.
The hackathon is not without critique. Referring to the city solutions driven hackathons, Mattern for example notes that they reflect the increasing “widgetization” and individualism of the city. Mattern discusses this observation, claiming that the apps derived from open government data often only serve a single function and rarely survive without institutional support, framing their users as both sources and consumers of data interested in their own consumption of city spaces,
These interfaces to the smart city suggest that we’ve traded in our environmental wisdom, political agency and social responsibility for corporately-managed situational information, instrumental rationality and personal consumption and convenience. We seem ready to translate our messy city into my efficient city.
Hackathons and the apps they produce may not therefore serve all or benefit the majority of the community and are often inspired by an individual’s perspective on what they think would make the city better and their own life within that city more pleasurable. While the Sydney transport apps discussed above do seem to have been enthusiastically adopted and have no doubt improved many commuters transport experience, it should also be remembered that not all areas in the wider Sydney region were given access to real time transport information, and that not all transport users utilise the technology that enables the app. When discussing hackathons as part of the wider programmable city discourse we should continue to ask what and who’s vision of the city does it present and how does this shape the city spaces and urban experience for everyone.
We’ll be trying to gain further insight into the role of hackathons in the city and whether they are successful and live up to their hype through our ongoing research and by attending regular hackathons and hack meet ups. We’ll keep you posted on the work that hackathons do in the smart city.
Works Cited.
Llewellyn, A. (2012, June 29). The power of hackathons in government. (S. Herron, Editor, & NASA) Retrieved 2 May , 2014, from open.NASA: http://open.nasa.gov/blog/2012/06/29/the-power-of- hackathons-in-government/
Mattern, S. 2014. Interfacing Urban Intelligence. Places: Design Observer. http://places.designobserver.com/feature/how-do-we-interface-with-smart-cities/38443/ (accessed 17 June 2014).
Meyer, M. and K. Ermoshina. 2013 Bricolage as collaborative exploration: transforming matter, citizens and politics. Draft paper for the i3 Conference Cooperating for innovation: devices for collective exploration Telecom ParisTech 2.12.2013 accessed 15/7/14 from http://www.i-3.fr/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Meyer_conferenceI32013.pdf
