Alex Howard

Alexander B. Howard is the Government 2.0 Washington Correspondent for O'Reilly Media, where he writes about the intersection of government, the Internet and society, including how technology is being used to help citizens, cities, and national governments solve large-scale problems. He is an authority on the use of collaborative technology in enterprises, social media and digital journalism. He has written and reported extensively on open innovation, open data, open source software and open government technology. He has contributed to the National Journal, Forbes, the Huffington Post, Govfresh, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, CBS News' What's Trending, Govloop, Governing People, the Association for Computer Manufacturing and the Atlantic, amongst others. Prior to joining O’Reilly, Mr. Howard was the associate editor of SearchCompliance.com and WhatIs.com at TechTarget, where he wrote about how the laws and regulations that affect information technology are changing, spanning the issues of online identity, data protection, risk management, electronic privacy and cybersecurity. He is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

A marriage of data and caregivers gives Dr. Atul Gawande hope for health care

How transparency, real-time feedback, and lessons from the police can improve health outcomes.

Dr. Atul GawandeDr. Atul Gawande (@Atul_Gawande) has been a bard in the health care world, straddling medicine, academia and the humanities as a practicing surgeon, medical school professor, best-selling author and staff writer at the New Yorker magazine. His long-form narratives and books have helped illuminate complex systems and wicked problems to a broad audience.

One recent feature that continues to resonate for those who wish to apply data to the public good is Gawande’s New Yorker piece “The Hot Spotters,” where Gawande considered whether health data could help lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care. That story brings home the challenges of providing health care in a city, from cultural change to gathering data to applying it.

This summer, after meeting Gawande at the 2012 Health DataPalooza, I interviewed him about hot spotting, predictive analytics, networked transparency, health data, feedback loops and the problems that technology won’t solve. Our interview, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows.

Read more…

President Obama participates in first Presidential AMA on Reddit

The President's participation in a user-driven Q&A was a notable precedent in digital democracy.

Starting around 4:30 PM ET today, President Barack Obama made history by going onto Reddit to answer questions about anything for an hour. Reddit, one of the most popular social news sites on the Internet, has been hosting “Ask Me Anything” forums — or AMAs – for years, including sessions with prominent legislators like Representative Darrell Issa (R-CA), but to host a sitting President of the United States will elevate Reddit’s prominence in the intersection of technology and politics. AllThingsD has the story of Reddit got the President onto the site. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian told Peter Kafka that “there are quite a few redditors at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave and at the campaign HQ — given the prominence of reddit, it’s an easy sell.”

President Obama made some news in the process, with respect to the Supreme Court decision that allowed super political action committees, or “Super PACs,” to become part of the campaign finance landscape.

“Over the longer term, I think we need to seriously consider mobilizing a constitutional amendment process to overturn Citizens United (assuming the Supreme Court doesn’t revisit it),” commented President Obama. “Even if the amendment process falls short, it can shine a spotlight of the super-PAC phenomenon and help apply pressure for change.”

President Obama announced that he’d be participating in the AMA in a tweet and provided photographic evidence that he was actually answering questions in an image posted to Reddit (above) and in a second tweet during the session.

Read more…

Balancing health privacy with innovation will rely on improving informed consent

In the age of big data, Deven McGraw emphasizes trust, education and transparency in assuring health privacy.

Society is now faced with how to balance the privacy of the individual patient with the immense social good that could come through great health data sharing. Making health data more open and fluid holds both the potential to be hugely beneficial for patients and enormously harmful. As my colleague Alistair Croll put it this summer, big data may well be a civil rights issue that much of the world doesn’t know about yet.

This will likely be a tension that persists throughout my lifetime as technology spreads around the world. While big data breaches are likely to make headlines, more subtle uses of health data have the potential to enable employers, insurers or governments to discriminate — or worse. Figuring out shopping habits can also allow a company to determine a teenager was pregnant before her father did. People simply don’t realize how much about their lives can be intuited through analysis of their data exhaust.

To unlock the potential of health data for the public good, informed consent must mean something. Patients must be given the information and context for how and why their health data will be used in clear, transparent ways. To do otherwise is to duck the responsibility that comes with the immense power of big data.

In search of an informed opinion on all of these issues, I called up Deven McGraw (@HealthPrivacy), the director of the Health Privacy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). Our interview, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows. Read more…

With new maps and apps, the case for open transit gets stronger

OpenPlans looks to improve transportation infrastructure with open data and open source code.

OpenTripPlanner logoEarlier this year, the news broke that Apple would be dropping default support for transit in iOS 6. For people (like me) who use the iPhone to check transit routes and times when they travel, that would mean losing a key feature. It also has the potential to decrease the demand for open transit data from cities, which has open government advocates like Clay Johnson concerned about public transportation and iOS 6.

This summer, New York City-based non-profit Open Plans launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new iPhone transit app to fill in the gap.

“From the public perspective, this campaign is about putting an important feature back on the iPhone,” wrote Kevin Webb, a principal at Open Plans, via email. “But for those of us in the open government community, this is about demonstrating why open data matters. There’s no reason why important civic infrastructure should get bound up in a fight between Apple and Google. And in communities with public GTFS, it won’t.”

Open Plans already had a head start in creating a patch for the problem: they’ve been working with transit agencies over the past few years to build OpenTripPlanner, an open source application that uses open transit data to help citizens make transit decisions.

Read more…

The risks and rewards of a health data commons

John Wilbanks on health data donation, contextual privacy, and open networks.

As I wrote earlier this year in an ebook on data for the public good, while the idea of data as a currency is still in its infancy, it’s important to think about where the future is taking us and our personal data.

If the Obama administration’s smart disclosure initiatives gather steam, more citizens will be able to do more than think about personal data: they’ll be able to access their financial, health, education, or energy data. In the U.S. federal government, the Blue Button initiative, which initially enabled veterans to download personal health data, is now spreading to all federal employees, and it also earned adoption at private institutions like Aetna and Kaiser Permanente. Putting health data to work stands to benefit hundreds of millions of people. The Locker Project, which provides people with the ability to move and store personal data, is another approach to watch.

The promise of more access to personal data, however, is balanced by accompanying risks. Smartphones, tablets, and flash drives, after all, are lost or stolen every day. Given the potential of mhealth, and big data and health care information technology, researchers and policy makers alike are moving forward with their applications. As they do so, conversations and rulemaking about health care privacy will need to take into account not just data collection or retention but context and use.

Put simply, businesses must confront the ethical issues tied to massive aggregation and data analysis. Given that context, Fred Trotter’s post on who owns health data is a crucial read. As Fred highlights, the real issue is not ownership, per se, but “What rights do patients have regarding health care data that refers to them?”

Would, for instance, those rights include the ability to donate personal data to a data commons, much in the same way organs are donated now for research? That question isn’t exactly hypothetical, as the following interview with John Wilbanks highlights.

Wilbanks, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation and director of the Consent to Research Project, has been an advocate for open data and open access for years, including a stint at Creative Commons; a fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium; and experience in the academic, business, and legislative worlds. Wilbanks will be speaking at the Strata Rx Conference in October.

Our interview, lightly edited for content and clarity, follows.

Read more…

Palo Alto looks to use open data to embrace ‘city as a platform’

Palo Alto CIO Jonathan Reichental talks about the city's vision for open data.

In the 21st century, one of the strategies cities around the world are embracing to improve services, increase accountability and stimulate economic activity is to publish open data online. The vision for New York City as a data platform earned wider attention last year, when the Big Apple’s first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne, pitched the idea to the public.

This week, the city of Palo Alto in California joined over a dozen cities around the United States and globe when it launched its own open data platform. The platform includes an application programming interface (API) which enables direct access through a RESTful interface to open government data published in a JSON format. Datasets can also be embedded like YouTube videos, as below:

Read more…

On email privacy, Twitter’s ToS and owning your own platform

The lesson from this week's #TwitterFail is that publishers of all sorts should own their own platform.

If you missed the news, Guy Adams, a journalist at the Independent newspaper in England, was suspended by Twitter after he tweeted the corporate email address of a NBC executive, Gary Zenkel. Zenkel is in charge of NBC’s Olympics coverage.

When I saw the news, I assumed that NBC had seen the tweet and filed an objection with Twitter about the email address being tweeted. The email address, after all, was shared with the exhortation to Adams’ followers to write to Zenkel about frustrations with NBC’s coverage of the Olympics, a number of which Jim Stogdill memorably expressed here at Radar and Heidi Moore compared to Wall Street’s hubris.

Today, Guy Adams published two more columns. The first shared his correspondence with Twitter, including a copy of a written statement from an NBC spokesman called Christopher McCloskey that indicated that NBC’s social media department was alerted to Adams’ tweet by Twitter.

The second column, which followed the @GuyAdams account being reinstated, indicated that NBC had withdrawn their original complaint. Adams tweeted the statement: “we have just received an update from the complainant retracting their original request. Therefore your account has been unsuspended.”

Since the account is back up, is the case over? A tempest in a Twitter teapot? Well, not so much. I see at least four different important issues here related to electronic privacy, Twitter’s terms of service, censorship and how many people think about social media and the Web.

Read more…

Mobile participatory budgeting helps raise tax revenues in Congo

The World Bank found the ROI in open government through civic participation and mobile phones.

In a world awash in data, connected by social networks and focused on the next big thing, stories about genuine innovation get buried behind the newest shiny app or global development initiative. For billions of people around the world, the reality is that inequality in resources, access to education or clean water, or functional local government remain serious concerns.

South Kivu, located near the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has been devastated by the wars that have ravaged the region over the past decade.

Despite that grim context, a pilot program has born unexpected fruit. Mobile technology, civic participation, smarter governance and systems thinking combined to not only give citizens more of a voice in their government but have increased tax revenues as well. Sometimes, positive change happens where one might reasonably least expect it. The video below tells the story. After the jump, World Bank experts talk about story behind the story.

“Beyond creating a more inclusive environment, the beauty of the project in South Kivu is that citizen participation translates into demonstrated and measurable results on mobilizing more public funds for services for the poor,” said Boris Weber, team leader for ICT4Gov at the World Bank Institute for Open Government

, in an interview in Washington. “This makes a strong case when we ask ourselves where the return of investment of open government approaches is.”

Read more…

Esther Dyson on health data, “preemptive healthcare” and the next big thing

Dyson says it's time to focus on maintaining good health, as opposed to healthcare.

If we look ahead to the next decade, it’s worth wondering whether the way we think about health and health care will have shifted. Will health care technology be a panacea? Will it drive even higher costs, creating a broader divide between digital haves and have-nots? Will opening health data empower patients or empower companies?

As ever, there will be good outcomes and bad outcomes, and not just in the medical sense. There’s a great deal of thought around the potential for mobile applications right now, from the FDA’s potential decision to regulate them to a reported high abandonment rate. There are also significant questions about privacy, patient empowerment and meaningful use of electronic health care records.

When I’ve talked to US CTO Todd Park or Dr. Farzad Mostashari they’ve been excited about the prospect for health data to fuel better dashboards and algorithms to give frontline caregivers access to critical information about people they’re looking after, providing critical insight at the point of contact.

Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Secretary for Health and Human Services, said at this year’s Health Datapalooza that venture capital investment in the health care IT area is up 60% since 2009.

Given that context, I was more than a little curious to hear what Esther Dyson (@edyson) is thinking about when she looks at the intersection of health care, data and information technology.

Read more…

Mr. Issa logs on from Washington

The tech entrepreneur turned legislator on open government, data, regulatory reform and his new foundation.

An interview with Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) on open government, personal data ownership, a digital Bill of Rights, Internet freedom, regulation, and more.