Suchergebnisse

This study examines the challenges and the expectations that civic hackers bring to the use of open government data, building on Gurstein's theory of barriers to effective use. Civic hackers are hobbyists who use open government data for social good applications. Drawing on individual interviews and a focus group with fifteen total civic hackers in Seattle, Washington, we synthesize findings on their experiences using open government data, including their expectations for the kinds of data formats, metadata, API functionality, and datasets that should be provided on the city's open data portal. Respondents report challenges using the data, including low data availability, outdated datasets, limited API functions, proprietary formats, lack of metadata, and untidy datasets. These acted as barriers to their effective use of open data. Respondents expect higher quality data and more usable data portal functionality, in part because of their professional experience in the technology sector. In our discussion, we examine the organizational structure of the open data program, and the constraints it poses for the achievement of respondent expectations. Our analysis points to a demand for an additional, third party civic institution (like a local newspaper) to host cleaned data for wider use. \

Municipal open data raises hopes and concerns. The activities of cities produce a wide array of data, data that is vastly enriched by ubiquitous computing. Municipal data is opened as it is pushed to, pulled by, and spilled to the public through online portals, requests for public records, and releases by cities and their vendors, contractors, and partners. By opening data, cities hope to raise public trust and prompt innovation. Municipal data, however, is often about the people who live, work, and travel in the city. By opening data, cities raise concern for privacy and social justice. This article presents the results of a broad empirical exploration of municipal data release in the City of Seattle. In this research, parties affected by municipal practices expressed their hopes and concerns for open data. City personnel from eight prominent departments described the reasoning, procedures, and controversies that have accompanied their release of data. All of the existing data from the online portal for the city were joined to Municipal open data raises hopes and concerns. The activities of cities produce a wide array of data, data that is vastly enriched by ubiquitous computing. Municipal data is opened as it is pushed to, pulled by, and spilled to the public through online portals, requests for public records, and releases by cities and their vendors, contractors, and partners. By opening data, cities hope to raise public trust and prompt innovation. Municipal data, however, is often about the people who live, work, and travel in the city. By opening data, cities raise concern for privacy and social justice. Results suggest the need for more comprehensive measures to manage the risk latent in opening city data. Cities should maintain inventories of data assets, produce data management plans pertaining to the activities of departments, and develop governance structures to deal with issues as they arise—centrally and amongst the various departments—with ex ante and ex post protocols to govern the push, pull, ...

Motivated by the extensive documented disparate harms of artificial intelligence (AI), many recent practitioner-facing reflective tools have been created to promote responsible AI development. However, the use of such tools internally by technology development firms addresses responsible AI as an issue of closed-door compliance rather than a matter of public concern. Recent advocate and activist efforts intervene in AI as a public policy problem, inciting a growing number of cities to pass bans or other ordinances on AI and surveillance technologies. In support of this broader ecology of political actors, we present a set of reflective tools intended to increase public participation in technology advocacy for AI policy action. To this end, the Algorithmic Equity Toolkit (the AEKit) provides a practical policy-facing definition of AI, a flowchart for assessing technologies against that definition, a worksheet for decomposing AI systems into constituent parts, and a list of probing questions that can be posed to vendors, policy-makers, or government agencies. The AEKit carries an action-orientation towards political encounters between community groups in the public and their representatives, opening up the work of AI reflection and remediation to multiple points of intervention. Unlike current reflective tools available to practitioners, our toolkit carries with it a politics of community participation and activism.