Hi I’m Nick,
Ramy Kim told me about this group and I got excited. I live in Portland, Maine, USA, but went to grad school in London and lived in Japan.
I’m a captain of Code for Maine, a code for america civic innovation group. In maine we’ve been focused on what civic tech and innovation looks like in more rural areas. rather than digital services we’ve been more focused on open transit, urbanism, and design projects.
I got interested in social science and cities when I was living in tokyo, and befriended the URBZ collective which is based in mumbai but works around the world researching “homegrown” / migratory / circulatory urbanism.
some events that I’m excited about going to are the platform coop conference next week in NYC, and the next Code For America summit, having just attended the “brigade congress” in Philadelphia which is where I met Ramy.
For hobbies, I dabble in community radio, digital art and games, and long midnight walks through cities. my “big idea” is to start an action research summer camp / institute for experimental civic innovation and urbanism on an island somewhere (probably in maine)… let me know if that idea interests you…
A warm welcome to Edgeryders, @NickKauf. Glad to know you in real life, and excited to have your contributions here on the platform. @alberto: Nick’s another Code for America brigade person you can talk about open gov woes with!
Welcome, @NickKauf! I was explaining to Ramy here that we in Spaghetti Open Data look up to the CfA model, but so far have not managed to create the conditions for it to work in the Italian context.
I like to hack data when I get the chance. For example (and I have not mentioned this to you, @ramykim), earlier in the year I lead a small group at the SOD gathering playing with data on EU research funding, of which we mounted a network analysis. The neatest result was a fairly marked network assortativity: universities and research organisation prefer to make alliances with other universities and other research organisations, respectively (result explained here; explanation of activity types here). This kind of result is hard to see unless you actually build the network and process it with some math, and to the best of my knowledge no one had seen it before – which is kind of weird when you think that building collaboration ties between universities and private companies is a major objective of putting 100 billion EUR on the table every seven years. If you like this sort of stuff, the whole wiki is kind of neat.
Good to meet you @NickKauf, and welcome on board. I’m Noemi, one of the people on edgeryders who’ve been around for years now - with @johncoate@natalia_skoczylas and others we were saying after the festival two weeks ago that we’d love to be more present in the States in the next year, even though now we’re each on different continents!
So yes, interested in your big idea, especially if its application has to do with hands on work.
Hi Nick. Interesting that you mention community radio. From 2008-2015 I managed a community radio station in rural Northern California (KZYX). After years of working in online communities I wanted to spend some time living and working with a more local community. And I wanted to see how modern network technology can better serve rural areas. I was able to set them up with some interesting tools for time-shifted listening, though most of the time I had to get the place out of debt, which I did…for a time anyway. Public radio is a tough game.
I am someone who enjoys both rural and urban life. I live on a couple of acres 2 miles from the Pacific Ocean near Mendocino CA but have also lived in NYC, DC, LA and SF. Spent plenty of time in the suburbs too.
Are there similar network analyses pertaining to public-private partnerships in government? Perhaps specifically, civic technology? That too, would be interesting to see.
Not that I know of. This kind of thing is not terribly sophisticated once you buy into the network analysis idea. But you do need the data, and they need to be network data. If you want to look at something as a network, you have to decide what a link represents. In this case a link represents “participated in at least two Horizon 2020 projects with”. I could do that because EU research funds consortia of orgs, not individual orgs, and because the Commission releases the data on consortia as open data.
So: do we have a dataset about public-private partnerships? Are they network data? If we do, I or (hopefully) a better data scientist than myself can dig in and maybe get results. If not… not
Thanks for the replies everyone, gratified to see some similarities in experience, and some of the same contradictions I am living as a socalled multipotentialite drawn to big cities and remote places, high tech and low tech. eager to get more involved with y’all and hopefully we’ll have a civic island beta test ready by the end of next summer to invite you to!
