Innovative ‘Open Data’ #transport Applications Take Center Stage in Athens Hackathon Event
Twenty-five groups consisting of 130 developers took part in the Greek capital’s first Hackathon #transportevent, held July 18-19 at the Athens Technopolis, and focused on the design and development of applications through open data that promote entrepreneurship and improve services for the public.
The developers who took part in the event were young entrepreneurs, programmers, analysts, engineers, designers, business consultants, professionals and students.
During the two-day event and in less than 30 hours, the developers createdapplications through open data that focused on transport and the improvement of services with participatory processes. Twenty mentors were present at the event to offer support and advise to all groups during their efforts.
The Greek law on open data (4305/2014) has been in force for over a year and the Hackathon aimed to encourage the private and public sector to make their open data available for use and innovation.
The Athens Urban Transport Organisation (OASA) provided open data to assist developers in their efforts to create applications for transport.
Also present at the Hackathon were 25 companies and 40 government officials who supported the event either through sponsorship or by “opening” their data on culture, tourism, environment and public administration to be used for innovative open source programs. Greek Travel Pages (GTP) was among the supporters of the event as well as the first private company that provided open data to the Hackathon.
The two-day festival wrapped up with the selection of the six groups that came up with the most innovative applications for transport. The groups were awarded with prizes, that included gifts of cash, counseling services from the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center of the Athens University of Economics, prepaid VISA cards and tablets.
The groups with the best applications are the following: Ex Machina, 10Coders, definiens, ConTRANSS, kawai-developers and Transit Rush.
All applications are available for use by the private and public sectors and can be found at the following link https://github.com/crowdhackathon-transport.
#transport was the first Hackathon of the “Crowdhackathon Innovating with Opendata” series, which focused on the use of open data in the private and public sectors. Each Crowdhackathon will specialize in a particular area of the economy and society. More information can be found athttp://crowdhackathon.com/.
The Hachathon #transport event was organized by the Athens Urban Transport Organisation (OASA), Crowdpolicy Innovative Company and InnovAthens, the Athens’ Municipality Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub and held under the auspices of the Transport and Networks Division of the Greek Ministry of Economy, Infrastructure, Shipping & Tourism.
Source: gtp headlines
SYSTEMS SUNLIGHT S.A.: New Corporate Identity and Website
With a new corporate identity and website, SYSTEMS SUNLIGHT S.A., a company of the Olympia Group, headed by Panos Germanos, further strengthens its presence in the Greek and international business scene.
The new corporate identity reflects the company’s strategic commitment to the R&D, production andmarketing of batteries and high quality energy storage systems, responding to the constantly increasing demands and needs of its customers. SUNLIGHT is continually investing in its growth, adapting to the new reality, while setting clear strategic priorities, such as focusing on industrial batteries, with the respective sales making up 91% of its turnover in 2014 (compared to 72% in 2010).
In the context of the new corporate identity, SUNLIGHT has redesigned its logo, accompanying it with the communication tagline “Reliable Battery Solutions”, which fully reflects its vision to be the preferred choice for its Customers in the field of battery solutions, acting with integrity and generating value throughout its entire business ecosystem.
The landmark in the new corporate identity of SUNLIGHT is its new website (http://www.systems-sunlight.com), which is a vital communication channel with its customers and partners around the globe. The new website focuses on the main pillars of its operation, namely:
- Motive Power Batteries (for forklifts),
- Reserve Power Batteries (for telecommunications, renewable energy, UPS etc),
- Advanced Technology Batteries (submarine, torpedo etc), as well as
- Consumer Batteries (TOSHIBA & Private Label).
The user friendly design offers easy and quick browsing/navigation based on the product, the battery technology or the application/sector of activity (e.g. logistics, telecommunications, UPS, renewable energy, utilities, defense etc). Furthermore, the corporate blog offers information and articles on the global battery market, and also offers the user the ability to access the company’s social media (Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter,Google Plus, Youtube etc)! SUNLIGHT’S valuable partner in redesigning the corporate website was Crowdpolicy.
Looking for Inspiration? Five Noteworthy Innovations in Public Participation
Challenges to Democracy. From http://www.challengestodemocracy.us
This column profiles five recent entries in Participedia, an open global knowledge community for researchers and practitioners in the field of democratic innovation and public engagement. For more ideas, read our review of Participedia’s top innovations of 2013. Even better, visit Participedia to join the conversation and explore over 400 experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance.
By Tomás Insua and Michael MacKenzie
Participedia is an effort that hopes to become a key resource for scholars, activists, policy makers and citizens who are interested in new democratic practices and institutions. And it is always worth looking back to some of the most interesting cases recently added to Participedia for some inspiration. This selection from the frontlines of participatory innovation reflects both the diverse nature and the global span of Participedia.
1) Argentina – DEMOS
The purpose of the DEMOS project was to enable civic participation in the debate about high-profile law proposals in the Buenos Aires Legislature in Argentina, using the DemocracyOS software of the Democracia en Red foundation. The web app used was demos.legislatura.gov.ar and the initiative was open to civic participation for 35 days in November and December 2014.
In the project’s first phase, citizens were invited to rank their interests about 16 bills that had been introduced in the legislature, corresponding to 12 political parties. The goal was for citizens to chose which were the 3 most important bills that should be debated online. And in the second phase, the top 3 bills were submitted for online discussion, both at an overall level and broken down into the sections of each bill. Over 13,000 citizens visited the app and almost half of them signed up to participate. The online debate phase produced several interesting outcomes: there was one bill (about nurses’ working conditions) which received overwhelming support mostly because of the mobilization of activists from the party sponsoring that bill, and there was another very controversial bill (about informal parking guards) that led to high levels of polarization and disagreement among participants.
The DEMOS pilot was an unprecedented participatory initiative in Argentina’s history using online tools, and was relatively successful in terms of citizen turnout. The project was very innovative in enabling civic engagement in real-world bills that are important to the day-to-day life of citizens. One of the most interesting characteristics of DEMOS was that it was a success story of partnership with a government institution and with politicians from the whole political spectrum.
Read more about DEMOS in Participedia.
2) Australia – Tasmanian Deliberative Democracy on Biobanks
Biobanks, which store and catalog human tissue specimens (such as purified DNA, saliva, blood, and plasma) using genetic markers and other traits such as age, gender, blood type, and ethnicity, have come to play an increasingly important role in biomedical research. As biobanks have become more common, critical bioethical questions of privacy, ownership, and commercialization have also surfaced. A number of deliberative events have been conducted to address these questions, with the goal of enhancing communication between the research community, regulators, stakeholders, and the public.
One such process was recently conducted in Tasmania. This event brought 25 participants together to deliberate. It led by faculty at the University of British Columbia and the Menzies Research Institute Tasmania. While the selection process was random, quotas were used to ensure that relevant demographic groups were adequately represented in the process. Participants learned about the issues in various ways. They were provided with an information booklet, they had access to a private portal on the project’s website, and during the first days of the process, they listened to presentations by experts and asked questions.
Deliberation over a period of two weekends in April 2013, with a 12-day break of dialogue and information in between, led to 17 conclusions on eight topics. The participants showed strong support for the continued existence of biobanks in general, and a Tasmanian biobank in particular. Throughout the deliberations, participants became part of the policy-making process as opposed to mere observers of decisions made elsewhere, and this helped create a strong sense of personal involvement and commitment to the process among participants. The use of random processes to select participants helped ensure that the process included those who might not be involved in more traditional consultation processes, and this, in turn, helped ensure that a diverse range of viewpoints and opinions were expressed.
Read more about Tasmanian Biobanks Deliberative Democracy in Participedia.
3) United States – Boston’s Youth Participatory Budgeting
In 2014 the City of Boston launched “Youth Lead the Change,” the first participatory budgeting process in the US focused exclusively on youth. Its goals included civic education and engagement, and the inclusion of youth voices that are typically excluded from politics in the City’s capital planning process. Participants were primarily from Boston public high schools, and participation rates were high among young people of color from low-income neighborhoods.
The process, which was implemented by the Participatory Budgeting Project organization, had several key stages. First, a Steering Committee made up of youth organizations was established, and this Committee created a rulebook to guide the process. Second, youth assemblies were held in neighborhoods throughout Boston to generate ideas and identify priorities. This stage of the process generated 473 ideas and funding proposals, which were then divided into six categories by organizers. Third, a core group of young people was engaged as Change Agents to turn the ideas identified in the youth assemblies into specific investment proposals. They engaged in a dialogue with City officials who helped determined whether or not the ideas were eligible and feasible. The City also provided cost estimates for individual proposals.
The Change Agents made collective decisions deliberatively using a decision matrix that considered various factors including feasibility, impact, and need. Ultimately, 14 proposals were identified as priorities. At the end of the process, the Change Agents held a vote to determine which 7 priorities would be funded through the 1 million dollar youth budget.
Read more about Boston’s Youth Participatory Budgeting in Participedia.
4) Greece – Vouliwatch
Vouliwatch was launched on March 16, 2014 and went viral on the same day on Greek social media. As of January 2015, the project had 44.470 unique visitors. So far, 1048 participants have submitted 409 questions to their representatives and the site has generated 25 crowdsourced policy ideas. Importantly, representatives have also embraced the project. They have, thus far, provided 50 official answers to questions raised by citizens.
The web application has five main functions: 1) it provides individuals with an opportunity to ask their representatives questions; 2) it functions as a source of crowdsourcing; 3) it helps citizens monitor the voting behaviors of representatives; 4) it provides users with a direct newsfeed of Parliamentary events; and 5) it provides an online debate forum that is, in effect, a “live” political chat lab. Two additional features were introduced for the 2015 general election: 1) a “Policy “Monitor” function that allows voters to compare and evaluate party platforms; and 2) a “Candidate Watch” function which makes it possible for citizens to interact directly with candidates.
Despite widespread public skepticism of political institutions in Greece, the reticence of Greek politicians to engage their publics, and the divide between those with easy access to the internet and those without, Vouliwatch has managed to establish itself as a credible, non-partisan and independent source of information that extends beyond the limits of traditional online organizing efforts. In addition to partnering with numerous civil society organizations to promote open government (both locally and abroad), Vouliwatch has also sought close cooperation the Greek Parliament’s administrative system and the Ministry of Reform and e-Government in particular. Organizers and proponents of the site have been asked to join the Forum of the Open Government Partnership, which will assess opportunities for institutional reform in Greece.
Read more about VouliWatch in Participedia.
5) Tunisia – Civic Participation in the Constitution Drafting
Tunisia’s democratic transition was one of the more successful revolutions associated with the 2011 Arab Spring. Tunisia has a new constitution that was developed through an extensive, representative, and participatory process. The participatory components of the process were supported, in part, by the expertise of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
As part of this effort, the UNDP sponsored and organized a dialogue between elected officials, individual citizens, and civil society organizations in Tunisia’s 24 governorates. In total, 80 members of the National Constituent Assembly were involved in the process. They were trained in the art of drafting legislative and constitutional clauses, and they were introduced to different public consultations techniques and procedures. In turn, more than 5,000 individuals and 300 civil society organizations participated in the dialogue. The fact that public officials were meaningfully engaged (and committed) to the process helped ensure that the contributions of citizens and their organizations were taken into account during the drafting of the new constitution.
The UNDP process also aimed to include two groups who are typically underrepresented in Tunisian politics: 1) young people; and 2) women. The Ministry of Higher Education worked with universities to encourage students to participate in the process, and a total of 320 students made contributions to the dialogue. The process might have been made even more representative if young people outside the university system were encouraged to participate as well. The representation of women was encouraged by a parallel UNDP program, which trained 4,200 women and sensitized them on democratic processes, with a focus on the constitutional process. This effort to include women is notable given the region’s track-record on women’s rights.
Read more about Tunisia’s Constitution Drafting in Participedia.
We look forward to another year of great new ideas and insights from these and other innovations in public participation in 2015. If you have an idea you would like to share, contact us or add it to the comments below!
Also note that the Ash Center will soon announce the finalists for its special Innovations in American Government Award recognizing government-led innovations that best demonstrate enhanced public engagement and participation. A key feature of the Ash Center’s Challenges to Democracy public dialogue series, the winner of the Roy and Lila Ash Innovations Award for Public Engagement in Government will receive a $100,000 grant to support replication and dissemination activities.
Tomás Insua is a Master in Public Administration candidate at Harvard Kennedy School and a research assistant at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Michael MacKenzie holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. Currently, he is a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center.
Accountability in Greece Should Not Stop at Elections
By Stefanos Loukopoulos, Executive director at Vouliwatch – [email protected]
Greeks woke up to a vastly altered political landscape this morning following Sunday’s national elections, which swept the anti-austerity Syriza party into power. It’s the first time an anti-austerity party has taken power and upends the two-party establishment that has dominated Greek politics for decades.
This was Greece’s second national election in two years, held amid sky-high unemployment, stagnant wages, and an exodus of young people seeking better opportunities abroad. The crisis has left Greeks skeptical of their political institutions, a disillusionment that’s giving rise to right-wing extremist parties like Golden Dawn, which took third place in the elections.
The electorate’s growing sense of alienation from the democratic process is palpable. Nearly 40 percent of voters abstained despite the high stakes of the elections. Winning back these people’s trust, and re-establishing the bond between citizens and their representatives, is a critical yet often overlooked element of Greece’s recovery.
Vouliwatch (“vouli” is the word for parliament in Greek) was created a little less than a year ago for that very reason. The website features profiles of all the Greek members of parliament (MPs), monitors their voting behaviors, explains the political process and Greek constitution in simple terms, and most importantly, offers citizens the opportunity to ask direct questions to MPs, which are then uploaded to the politician’s profile. Each MP can then answer their constituents’ questions on the site. The platform also gives users the chance to influence political debate and highlight issues that they believe are not being discussed widely enough.
Through Vouliwatch, citizens can also share their ideas and experiences and make direct proposals for parliamentary action. The community can then comment on and rate those proposals. A Google Maps application depicts all the submitted data and allows users to filter it by issue. Every two months, all this submitted data is summarized in a report and sent to Greece’s MPs by our team. Vouliwatch then publishes and promotes any resulting parliamentary reaction.
Following the announcement of the snap elections, we at Vouliwatch created some additional election tools to help inform Greek voters. For instance, Policy Monitor allows the user to compare the various party positions on specific issues, such as education, the economy, or human rights. The second application is Candidate Watch, in which candidates add their profiles to our database by answering a set of questions designed by the Vouliwatch team.
At Vouliwatch, we believe that the true value of democracy lies in an open dialogue between citizens and those they elect. Voting in national elections is not enough to create and maintain a relationship of trust and a culture of accountability. If politicians are to be held accountable for their promises and actions, ordinary people must actively take part in the political process. Likewise, the political establishment must take steps to allow and to encourage wider participation, as well as to increase the transparency of the political and legislative processes.
Vouliwatch stands for more accountability, transparency, and bottom-up participation. Our team is committed to advancing these values as a solid step towards a better tomorrow for Greece.
Crowdpolicy is Vouliwatch’s innovation & technology consultant.
Source: Open Society Foundations 26.1.2015
Circular economy and technology
Antonis Mavropoulos – http://mavropoulos.blogspot.gr
Circular economy and technology from Antonis Mavropoulos Blog
This is the third post regarding circular economy. In my first one (see here) I argued that before discussing the details we have to deal with the concept of circular economy and I put some conceptual questions. In my second one (see here) I discussed circular economy and economic growth and my conclusion was that circular economy can’t resolve (or it can only partially resolve) the conflict between environmental impacts and economic activity, even if it is 100% adopted worldwide because there are planetary, natural limits to growth. I finished this post writing that “Circular economy approaches are helpful and useful, but they are limited (and at the same time stimulated) by limits to growth.”
In this third post, I will deal with the relation between circular economy and technology development, or to put it in another way to study the dynamics between technology development and resource management.
We all know that any naturally or physically growing system can be understood in terms of stocks, flows and feedback. Stocks are accumulations of things that change over time through the interaction between inflows and outflows. Feedback occurs when changes in the size or composition of a stock affect the rates of inflows and/or outflows (feedback maybe positive or negative). As it has been proven, in a bounded natural environment, the balance between inflows and outflows is determined by different principles for renewable and non-renewable resources (for more see G. Turner “A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality”, Global Environmental Change 18 (2008) 397– 411 here).
Consider non-renewable resources like oil, rare metals, phosphorus etc. I think that if we use the example of oil, we can better understand the role of technology from a systemic point of view, exactly as it has been discussed by Donella Meadows at her masterpiece “Thinking in Systems – a Primer” (for more see here).
So, when a new oilfield is exploited, part of the profits gained is invested in establishing new additional oil wells, something that results to additional oil extraction. This leads to more profits and extra investment in oil wells. This is a typical positive (or reinforcing) feedback and the economics work in such a way that the easiest (and less costly) oil resources are firstly depleted. In any case, there is a time where extraction will become more difficult and costly, so the expected benefits will be lower than the costs involved for oilfield exploitation and this will reduce the investments in new oil wells. This is a typical negative feedback or a balancing one. But this will also make oil scarcer, so its prices will rise and so more money will be available for investments in difficult and costly oilfields. This description outlines how different types of feedback determine the system’s behavior for short or long periods. Studying the history of oil exploitation certainly demonstrates the political, social and economic importance of those feedbacks (for more on this topic I strongly suggest Sonia Shah’s book “Crude: The story of oil”, see here).
 |
| Source: New York Tines here |
Nonetheless, what is the final result? As Meadows has shown and Sonia Shah demonstrated a. the potential lifetime of a newly discovered oil field (under the initial conditions and scale of operations) is substantially reduced as a result of the system dynamics b. oil companies invest for new fields in some of the most impoverished and unstable areas of the world and c. new technological advances (e.g. deep water drilling) are making new, very difficult and costly oil fields available but with substantial environmental and health risks.
In this point, I think it is useful to mention one of the key-conclusions made by the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling in its report “Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Spill and the Future of Offshore Drilling,” Report to the President, January 2011 (for a summary see here).
“Scientific understanding of environmental conditions in sensitive environments in deep Gulf waters, along the region’s coastal habitats, and in areas proposed for more drilling, such as the Arctic, is inadequate. The same is true of the human and natural impacts of oil spills.”
It does seem to me that the concept of natural limits to growth is here again and technology can’t overcome it, no matter how advanced it will be. And the reason for that is that as our technologies become ever more advanced and complex, they try to resolve problems in much more complex and less understood conditions. The consequence of this exponentially increasing complexity is that “complex systems fail in complex ways”, which are not predictable!
From a resource point of view, further more advanced and efficient technologies make new oil fields available (e.g. fracking and its impact in US economy). So this provides more oil and maybe it expands the time where oil will be available, with a certain environmental cost (for details see here). Nevertheless, the big picture is that those technological advances are making the depletion of oil resources faster!
 |
| Source: here |
It is not so difficult to prove that the role of technological advances is similar to renewable resources too; the main difference is that renewable resources like fish population are controlled by the balance between inflows and outflows and not but stock availability (scientifically we say that they are flow limited, while non-renewable are stock limited).
I believe the example of oil highlights the role of technology from a resource point of view. Technology developments can’t overcome limits to growth and at the same time they accelerate the process of depletion of non-renewable resources because stocks are finally limited, despite the temporal system dynamics and pricing. And certainly, as technology complexity grows, environmental and health risks are becoming more and more difficult to be managed.
The term “throughput” is frequently used to describe the flow of energy and matter from ecological resources through the economy and back to ecological sinks. At this point, I will use the phrasing from the article “A systems and thermodynamics perspective on technology in the circular economy” (written by Ramelt & Chrisp, available at Real World Economics Review, issue 68, see here).
“For industrial systems, a low throughput of matter and energy implies a smaller ecological footprint and greater life expectancy and durability of goods and infrastructure; a high throughput implies more depletion of resources that will need to be renewed and more waste that will need to be disposed of (Meadows and Wright 2008). System dynamics and thermodynamics tell us that a tolerable rate of throughput and entropic transformation is ultimately dictated by the natural system, not by economics or engineering.
A possible task for engineering, within limits, would be to maximise the durability of stocks by minimising inflows of low entropy natural resources and by minimising outflows of high entropy waste and emissions. The role that industrial societies have assigned to technology is, however, much more Herculean. We have asked it to simultaneously and boundlessly minimise environmental impacts and maximise economic growth.”.
The direct consequence of this analysis is that as long as we maintain high throughput, as long as we keep high material and energy consumption patterns (as nations, industries and citizens too) we can’t expect technology to manage the existing biophysical limits of the planet, independently of how circular we will make the economy. And the waste generation will keep growing because waste is the product of a high throughput and technologies can only accelerate its generation.
CrowdPolicy © 2014 - 2015