“Everyone wants to know how to make that one thing go viral. Especially bosses. Here’s the answer. So now maybe they will stop asking you.”-Upworthy
“Excellent points about headline writing (takes 25 to find the one that works), shareability (your audience has to click and share, then it’s whether THEIR audience clicks on it), and A/B testing (they talk about what they learned doing it ruthlessly).”-Nat Torkington, O’Reilly Radar
“We’re seeing data companies saying they want volunteer programs for employees and asking to connect on social projects. We’re seeing foundations looking for support from us or other groups for their grantees. We’ve had requests [for DataDives or DataKind chapters] from more than 20 cities and have seen people start to build their own in at least five. It’s going to keep spreading.”-Jake Porway” —
Jake Porway founded DataKind in 2011, initially calling it “Data Without Borders.” Below, Porway presents on the innovative nonprofit’s work at the first Strata London Conference:
Data Do-Gooder - Departments - UCLA Magazine Online
“We estimate that collectively we served and informed 10 times as many individuals by embracing an open strategy. That’s hundreds of thousands of people. And it validates the Bloomberg administration’s commitment to this technology.”-NYC Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot” —
For more context, read about how public open government data feeds become critical infrastructure during natural disasters.
Hurricane Sandy, Open Data and Social Media | Open Government Blog
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Ross: State Department considering more social media-friendly rules, not less -
How the State Department uses social media has been the subject of great interest domestically and abroad. That makes sense: over the past four years, the U.S. State Department has been experimenting with digital diplomacy at the edge of the network. (The use of Twitter by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, received worldwide attention after it engaged the Muslim Brotherhood.)
This December, Domani Spero wrote at Diplopundit that the State Department would be rewriting the rules of engagement on social media, connecting the draft changes to the termination of diplomat Peter Van Buren. The post was picked up by CBS News, which reported that the State Department was considering new rules and a two day delay, and the Washington Post, which connected the new rules to book reviews, as Spero suggested in his post.
A clarification from Alec J. Ross regarding a draft of the State Departments’s new social media policy strongly suggests that media coverage of the proposal isn’t grounded in existing policy.
According to Ross, Secretary of State Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation, the draft policy will actually speed up the process, not add more layers of review.
He made a similar statement to Federal Computer Week and CNN, where Elise Labott covered the online reaction that the Diplopundit post catalyzed, and responded to New York Times columnist Nick Kristof on Twitter:
If the State Dept is really thinking about 2-day vetting of tweets, that’s the dumbest idea ever foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/…
— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) December 10, 2012
In answer to a question I posed on Twitter, Ross clarified via email that the State Department had already been taking up to 30 days to decide how (or whether) to respond on an official social media account.
“Normal review is minutes, not hours, much less days,” he wrote. “Draft rules would decrease allowable time for review from 30 to 2 days, not that we’d start taking two days or subject an increasing percentage to review. It’s a more social media-friendly content publishing rule. At its most basic: 30 to 2 days.”
There will continue to be exceptions for certain issues, which makes considerable sense, given how politically fraught some of the topics the State Department has to address will continue to be.
“Theoretically, we are allowed to take 30 days to review any content of sensitive nature,” he wrote. ”The actual percentage of social media postings that get reviewed is very, very small and related to extremely sensitive content (security-related or politically very consequential) and even then tends to be cleared and edited in minutes or hours, never days.”
[Image Credit: State Department Flickr feed. In the picture, “Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith Mchale, center, participates in the State Department’s first global Twitter Q & A, at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on June 29, 2011.”]
City of Chicago :: Mayor Emanuel Expands Open Data on City Portal with Executive Order -
Today, the City of Chicago expanded its open data efforts with an executive order by Mayor Emanuel.
“An open and transparent administration makes it easier for residents to hold their government accountable, but it also serves as a platform for innovative tools that improve the lives of all residents,” said Mayor Emanuel, in statement on the city website.
“Chicago’s vibrant technology and startup community will leverage this wealth of open, public data to create applications that will improve service delivery and lead to greater quality of service for residents and more public engagement in City government.”
The city released 21 new “high value” datasets today, including real-time traffic data from Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses, environmental data, liquor regulation, and recycling programs.
When asked what made these datasets high value, the Mayor’s Office responded via email.
“The datasets released today aren’t necessarily more critical than the more than 400 others that have been released,” wrote Caroline Weisser, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office.
“They continue the commitment the administration has taken to being a leader in municipal open data. The executive order itself codifies the actions that Brett and John Tolva, the CTO, have taken over the past year and a half to pursue both open data policy and detailed analytics in tandem. Making a firm commitment to continue adding writable data to the dataportal about how the city works provides the raw materials for the City to collaborate and innovate with the developer community, which ultimately helps the City do a better job of serving Chicagoans.”
For more context on opening government, the Chicago way, read our feature from 2011 and more recent coverage of how Brett Goldstein, Chicago’s chief information officer and chief data officer, is using data in the public sector.
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