Details of the Citizen Dan Initiative

Citizen Dan is an open source appliance to leverage relevant local data for any locality and its citizenry.

It is a turnkey environment for collecting and measuring and tracking and reporting indicators of local well being. It is a data appliance and network (DAN), specifically oriented around community indicator systems.

Citizen Dan is under development with support from a number of innovative cities. It is generally modified, branded and themed for local use and identify (thus, the screen shots below may look quite different for a specific installation). Citizen Dan is the first exemplar instance of Structured Dynamics' open semantic framework (OSF), a generalized framework for deploying semantic platforms for specific domains. 

Overview

Citizen Dan is an open source system for aggregating different indicator data concerning local, community well-being. Information sources may include the Web, real-time feeds, government datasets, municipal government information systems, or crowdsourced data.

Information can range from standard structured data to local narratives, including from minutes and reports, contributed stories, blogs or news outlets. The 'raw' input data can come in essentially any format, which is then converted to a standard form with consistent semantics.

The resulting storehouse of community input becomes linked data that can be:

• Dynamically navigated, filtered, sliced and diced, interacted with, or browsed
• Displayed in comparative "dashboard" views
• Mapped by neighborhood or expressed as timelines, or
• Visualized as charts or graphs.

Text and narratives and the concepts and entities they describe are integrally linked into the system via information extraction and tagging. All ingested information, whether structured or text sources, with their semantics, can be exported in multiple formats. A standard organizing schema, also open source and extensible or modifiable by all users, is provided via the optional MUNI ontology (with vocabulary details in development here), being developed expressly for Citizen Dan and its community indicator system purposes.

Benefits

An era of citizen engagement is unfolding at the local level, fueled by Web technologies and growing comfort with crowdsourcing and social networks. Meanwhile, local government constraints and pressures for transparency are unleashing locked-up data. These forces will create new opportunities for data literacy by the public, that will itself bring new understanding and improvements in governance and budgeting.

By aggregating quantitative statistical datasets (economic, environmental, cultural, social indicators) with qualitative content (documents, stories and narratives), the resultant value:

It is possible to obtain local Census data from some other sites, but they lack useful filtering, community or publishing aspects. Data sharing is in DataSF and DataMine (NYC), but they lack collaboration, community networks and comparisons, or powerful data visualization or mapping.

Citizen Dan is a turnkey platform for any size community to create, publish, search, browse, slice-and-dice, visualize or compare indicators of community well-being. Its use makes the Web more locally focused. With it, researchers, watchdog groups, reporters, local officials and interested citizens can now discover hard data for ‘new news’ or may fact-check mainstream media.

With Citizen Dan, anyone with Web access can now get, slice, and dice information about how their community is doing and how it compares to other communities. We have learned from Web 2.0 and user-generated content that once exposed, useful information can be taken and analyzed in valuable and unanticipated ways.

Citizen Dan reflects the core principles described in the recent Deloitte report, "Unlocking Government":

• Data should be easily accessible online, with open access and easy to find
• Data needs to be offered in accessible formats; users should be able to export the raw data in formats of their own choosing
• Frameworks should support collaboration between government agencies and with local citizenry, importantly including the ability to combine data from multiple sources in unique and novel ways
• Governments should be open to the public in what they are doing and why, while seeking active engagement and participation.

Citizen Dan also provides a mechanism via 'crowdsourcing' to address what Andrea DiMaio of Gartner calls the "asymmetry" of information management in governments. Citizens can now contribute data to the community, enabling a bi-directional flow between government and the citizenry about how and what to measure about well-being in the local community.

Citizen Dan improves the ways information is delivered to communities and provides the framework for sifting through it to extract meaning.

Data and Indicators

We intuitively understand that an informed citizenry is a healthy polity. At the global level and in 250 languages, we see how Wikipedia, matched with the Internet and inexpensive laptops, is bringing unforeseen information and enrichment to all. Across the board, we are seeing the democratization of information.

But very little of this revolution has percolated to the local level.

Government public data in electronic tabular form or as published listings or tables in local newspapers has been available for some time. While meeting strict ‘disclosure’ requirements, this information has neither been readily analyzable nor actionable.

Only in the past decade or so have we seen free, electronic access to national Census data. We still see local data only published in print or not available at all, limiting both awareness but more importantly understanding and analysis. Data locked up in municipal computers or available but not expressed via crowdsourcing is as good as non-existent.

Though many citizens at the local level are not numeric, intuition has to tell us that the absense of empirical, local data hurts our ability to understand, reason and debate our local circumstances. Are we doing better or worse than yesterday? Than in comparison with our peers? Under what measures does this have meaning about community well being?

The purpose of the Citizen Dan initiative is to create an appliance — in the same sense of refrigerators keeping our food from spoiling — by which any citizen can crack open and expose relevant data at the local level. Citizen Dan is about enrichening our local information and keeping our communities healthy.

Citizen Dan will come pre-loaded with available electronic information -- from Census and other sources -- organized at the neighborhood or census tract level. This granularity will aid the data visualization and mapping tools central to the appliance.

Citizen Dan will also include functionality for localities to “crowdsource” their own supplementary data. Data in spreadsheet, flat file, and various common data formats such as XML or JSON may be submitted to the system, and then approved for publication by the administrators of each Citizen Dan installation.

The Citizen Dan Network

Citizen Dan is both an individual appliance for use and deployment at the local level, and the network of all such instances whereby indicators and statistics can be shared across communities. Backing up the entire system will be a central Citizen Dan clearinghouse, which itself is built from the standard appliance. An analogous example for this deployment model is the CrimeReports.com portal.

Each locality and each local instance of Citizen Dan is free to decide what, if any, of its local data it chooses to expose to the network. Then, once exposed, any other locality that is a participant in the Citizen Dan network can access and use other locality data for comparison and statistical purposes. Crowdsourced data may be similarly shared.

The central clearinghouse will keep and maintain statistics and access information across the network, including:

These measures, plus active sites with profiles of each, will be monitored and tracked on the central Citizen Dan portal.

The broader Citizen Dan project will also be an active participant in relevant external initiatives including various Gov 2.0 sites, Community Indicators Consortium, GovLoop, the Sunlight Foundation, and so forth. In addition, we will collate and track individual community efforts (maintained by the central Citizen Dan clearninghouse) and make specific outreach to community data sites (such as DataSF or DataMine at NYC.gov).

Status and How You Can Get It

Citizen Dan is a complete semantic appliance and framework, usable by any community. It is offered as standalone open source or as an easily deployable cloud-computing instance.

If all of this sounds too good to be true, you are partially correct. Citizen Dan has been following an incremental development path, each open source increment leveraging the progress of the deployment before it. However, the next proof-of-concept, soon to be released under sponsorship of a major Canadian city, demonstrates virtually all capabilities described above.

At the time of its first formal release, the baseline:

The Citizen Dan appliance is based on the Drupal content management system, which means any community can easily theme or add to the functionality of the system with any of the available 6500 open source modules that extend the basic Drupal functionality.

This data appliance and network (DAN) is multi-lingual. It is planned to be available initially with support for English, Spanish and French.

The first open source release of the full Citizen Dan baseline system is scheduled by the end of 2010.

Further exciting enhancements are still on the drawing board and awaiting sponsorship.

Please contact us if you are interested in participating or helping to accelerate development.

About Its Developers

Structured Dynamics is the lead developer of Citizen Dan. Structured Dynamics has more than a decade of experience in successful data access and mining, software and venture development, and initiation and management of open source software and ontologies. We have already developed and released as open-source code structWSF and conStruct, the basic foundations to the Citizen Dan appliance. structWSF provides the network and dataset “backbone” to this proposal; conStruct provides the Drupal portal and Web site framework.

Structured Dynamics is also expert in the conversion of virtually any legacy data format into interoperable canonical forms. These are important challenges, which require experience in the semantics of data and mapping from varied forms into useful and common frameworks.

Structured Dynamics’ principals are multi-lingual, with language-neutral architectures and code. The company’s principals are also some of the most prominent bloggers and writers in the semantic Web, and attentive to documentation and communication.