The 7 Smartest Uses of Technology in Government Today

Ahead of our July 30 lunch with Rachel Haot, we’re surveying the best applications of new technology in government across the country. Click here to write Rachel a question or idea, and we’ll pose it to her.

  • ShotSpotter

This Milwaukee-based program relies on microphones in public places to instantly identify a gunshot by its sound signature. One thing this technology helps to prevent is false alarms: sometimes people confuse fireworks or tires going flat with gunfire. But more importantly, it notifies the authorities to actual gunshots, since in the vast majority of cases residents do not report them — even when they clearly identify the noise as such. In Milwaukee, one city that’s found success in ShotSpotter, only 14 percent of residents dialed 911 upon hearing gunshots. This is partly out of fear of retribution, but also a tragedy of the commons problem. ShotSpotter is now live in 75 American cities, including Washington, D.C. and most recently, New York City.

  • NYC OpenData Portal

After Rachel Haot wrote the era-defining Digital Roadmap for NYC in Spring 2011, the city followed up on her instruction to make as much data open to the public as possible. Since then, New York City has published more than a thousand datasets on the usual topics like education, health, transportation and crime. This is an inherently transparent move: more of what the government knows about itself is now available to its citizens. Even better, it’s also proven to be a good first step in government-citizen collaboration. Some amazing visualizations have been derived from the data, including the Breathing City and the Collisions by Time of Day map:

  • Grade.DC

Our nation’s capital is on the vanguard of discerning public opinion through digital interaction. Check out grade.DC.Gov: through it, any Washington, D.C. resident can grade any aspect of the city’s service. Every day, the mayor and his staff receive an analysis of the feedback, so they can focus their efforts on what citizens need most at that moment. They can also geo-target the responses, enabling them reallocate resources by district. In June they averaged an A-. Not bad.

  • Predictive Policing (PredPol)

We know what you’re thinking: Minority Report. Yeah, kind of. This California program uses data to allocate policing resources to areas where criminal acts are more likely to occur. Its advantage lies in its bigger-picture comprehension of crime. Instead of issuing a blanket designation that certain areas are heavily problematic, PredPol analyzes each individual crime against a history of similar transgressions from the past, to calculate an array of probabilities. When the LAPD ran the program against its own internal data processing, PredPol was twice as good at predicting where wrongdoings would occur. Founded by a mathematician from Santa Clara University, the system incorporates some of the techniques that geologists use to predict earthquake aftershocks.

  • Diplopedia

The State Department has this well-named internal wiki where diplomats and their staffers share vital but sensitive information about all kinds of things. The rules and principles are very similar to Wikipedia’s, including the requirement to adopt a neutral point of view, cite professional sources, and defer to others. It’s almost two years old and a model of intra-government collaboration and information sharing.

  • FastFWD

This program is like Code for America, but for infrastructure. Run out of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, FastFWD pairs entrepreneurs with local governments to solve civic engineers’ and public officials’ infrastructure problems. Their goal is to push projects through the pipeline much faster, more affordably and with greater impact. Its first class of entrepreneurs graduated this summer.

  • Smarter Sustainable Dubuque

Dubuque is a town of 58,000 on the eastern border of Iowa. In 2009, it partnered with IBM to install smart water meters — which flag overuse and monitor leaks — in 300 homes. During the program’s first year, participating residents used almost 7 percent less water.
Sources: Digital Transformation: Wiring the Responsive City; WhiteHouse.gov; StateTech Magazine

Does Your American Dream Include Owning a Smart Home? Now You Can Build One Yourself

Back in May, we got pretty excited about the Honda Smart Home, an experimental house that’s currently sitting on the campus of the University of California, Davis that’s so energy efficient that it pumps out more power than it uses. Translation? This means a homeowner could potentially make money off the energy it sold back to the power company.
Naturally, the public (and many of our own readers) wondered how they could get in on this prime piece of green real estate. Well, guess what? Honda has gone and pulled a Tesla (so to speak), opening up its smart home plans for all.
“Honda is publicly posting the building plans, architectural and mechanical drawings, furniture specs and materials associated with the project, including the raw 2D and 3D CAD data,” the carmaker said in a company release to NationSwell. “Our hope is that interested individuals across the world are able to use these plans as a starting point to create their very own sustainable homes.”
MORE: Tricked Out Zero-Energy Homes Aren’t Just for the Rich and Famous
So what’s so amazing about this house? As we mentioned previously, the home draws its power from renewable sources such as solar panels and has geothermal heating and cooling — so wave bye-bye to sky-high air conditioning bills. The Honda home slashes water consumption to a third of most American homes and the amount of CO2 that it releases annually is 11 tons less than conventional homes with cars. And because Honda is behind it all, there’s garage space for a Honda Fit electric vehicle that gets charged from the house’s solar power.
“Many of the people and companies we’ve met with wanted to know how they could incorporate what we’ve demonstrated into their own projects, or build upon what we’ve learned in their own research,” wrote Honda Smart Home project leader Michael Koenig in a blog post. “We want nothing more than to facilitate this effort, so today, we’re releasing a batch of files the get the process rolling.”
Those interested should visit the Honda Smart Home website to download the complete mechanical and architectural drawings.
Looks like the house of tomorrow will come sooner than we expect.
DON’T MISS: Small Spaces, Big Ideas: 7 Tiny Homes With the Power to Transform How We Live

When This Guy Learned That Students Were Dropping Out Over Textbook Costs, He Vowed to Change the System

Before he became a celebrated inventor and surgeon, Dr. Gary Michelson put himself through medical school by working odd jobs — he drove cabs, washed cars and cleaned animal cages at laboratories. So he knew how hard it can be to get through college, and when he learned some kids who couldn’t afford textbooks were dropping out, he devoted himself to doing something about it.
Through his Los Angeles-based organization 20 Million Minds, Michelson is working to make education more accessible. “When I entered this, I thought I had a problem,” he told The Huffington Post. “And what I realized is, I had one leg of an elephant, and it really wouldn’t matter where you grabbed on, the thing is enormous.” Michelson invented a digital textbook system that would reduce students’ $700-on-average textbook costs to a one-time $60 waterproof reader. He also partnered with Dean Florez, the majority leader of the California State Senate, to create the California Open Source Digital Library. The library holds open source textbooks for the most popular college courses, and, combined with Michelson’s digital reader, could save college students $1,600 a year.
The idea, for Forez, is for students and teachers to cater instruction to their needs without excessive costs. “The premise of all our textbooks is that they are open,” Fores told The Huffington Post. “And open meaning from our perspective that, a faculty member or student could repurpose the information, they could reuse it, they could redirect it, and more importantly they can make it their own.”
MORE: Mindfulness Isn’t Just a Hot Trend. It’s Improving Low-Income Schools.

Turning to Open Source for Sweet Solutions to Bee Colony Collapse

The crisis of the declining bee population has been getting some extra attention, and along with the extra awareness has come some clever solutions. It’s an alarming problem, but Open Source Beehives (OSB) has created an opportunity for tech innovators worldwide to lend a hand. The project takes a scientific data-driven approach to finding out why the bees are dying out so quickly, distributing sensor kits to volunteers, and using the sensors on hives to monitor bees’ current environments. They’re sharing the kits for free, and the technical code is open and available online, inviting the public to collaborate on a solution to this global problem. By empowering professional beekeepers and amateur concerned citizens at the same time, OSB is the first organization of its type to look to the masses for a solution.