#Repost: A new approach to improve our society by Civic Tech and Open Data
This story is a repost of an original piece by Kazuki Jinnouchi in Code for Japan’s publication. You can view, comment and give praise for the original article here.
About Code for Japan
Code for Japan is a non-profit organization, for supporting local community building and the citizens solving the problems of the city by mainly ICT (information and communication technology).
Across the prefectures in Japan, more and more citizen based local communities are acting to resolve their social issues around their cities with taking advantage of the ICT (Civic Tech). These communities and organizations are making stronger relationship with each other so that they share knowledge and information among them.
In addition to that, Recently these local communities tend to proceeding cooperation with central government and local governments by ICT and data under the laws. Why?
Japanese central government had announced the open data strategy in electronic government in 2012. Then, in 2017 the basic law regarding promotion of public-private data utilization between public-private sector came into effect.
But the use of ICT in local government is less than expected because under the decreasing number of workforce in Japan caused shortage of dedicated staff in ICT development and management, difficulty to grasp the fine needs of citizens, the constraints of the budget and so on. Therefore, Civic Tech which is based on an activity of the private sector has been attracting government’s attention.
In this article, we would introduce some sample of collaboration among local communities and government in Japan, Code for Japan with utilizing ICT and various data for the solution of regional issues and building society.
Step to reborn disastered city with mapping party
The “mapping party” is a colleague conducting workshop in order to record many kinds of information on cities using the online tool and digital maps such as OpenStreetMap (OSM) and LocalWiki, WikpediaTown.
Participants in the workshop actually walk the streets based on a variety of themes, such as interesting sights and store information, evacuation routes in the event of a disaster, barrier-free information, and record the information of the city.
We are pleased to introduce a mapping party was held in Namie town, Fukushima Prefecture in June 2017. Namie town was affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Due to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, 20,000 people resident in the town have been forced to all evacuation.
However, even now that about seven years after the disaster has passed, the map around the town Namie has been left before the disaster situation. Such as a road supposed to be impassable or a shopping center that has stopped the business also exist on the map. On the other hand, information of facilities that could be new shops and restarting sales is not reflected in the map. Code for Japan, held a mapping party in cooperation with Namie in order to create a map you need to make city again in the future.
We shot the real image of the ground around the town using a drone before starting the event by mapping party ,which was to be able to use as a base of mapping.
Cf. https://medium.com/code-for-japan/namiemapping201706-b93452a59208
Community participation development application “Namie newspaper”
In Namie town, we have developed an app for the dissemination and exchanges of information among towns people who have been evacuated across the country. 20,000 people are also living in different environment so that they are facing different type of issues in daily life. But the elderly, relatively more than the younger in the town, feels difficulty in using devices such as tablets and smartphones.
Then in Namie, we had chosen the way of the development process with town people participation along with the code for Japan and software developer. This process consists of steps such as user hearing, ideathon, hackathon, and user testing.
Eventually we managed to make the app “Namie newspaper”, which transmits and display information about the town every evening and users can upload photos which they had taken with comments on it. The function uploading photos with comments are highly popular among user in the town.
Superimposing various data on the web application map “Hinata GIS”
Local government in Miyazaki prefecture, Kyushu south east area in Japan, has developed a web application “Hinata GIS”, geographic information system to visualize the regional features and issues by superimposing a variety of data, such as open data and various statistical data freely on the map.
Hinata GIS : https://hgis.pref.miyazaki.lg.jp/hinata/
This web application was awarded grand prize by the contest held by Japanese cabinet office on March 2017.
The reasons why this application succeeded in attracting attention are both its excellent functionality visualizing widely in dual screen and rich 3D data and open system which is available freely for whoever want to use.
When an heavy rain disaster occurred in northern Kyushu on July 2017, other neighboring municipalities, such as Asakura city, Fukuoka prefecture, has used Hinata GIS with importing their own data.
The Hinata GIS user’s voices and knowledge are feedbacked to developer in Miyazaki prefecture so that Hinata GIS implies possibility regarding new government software development collaboration among municipality and Public/Private sector beyond the borders.
Geographical Survey Institute map_ aerial photographs (Left: before the heavy rain disaster in Kyushu, 2017, Right: photographs after the landslide)
5374.jp to search information on garbage collection in your residents area
“5374.jp” (called ‘Gomi-Nashi.jp’ meaning ‘no garbage’ in Japanese) is web application developed by Code for Kanazawa, one of the Civic Tech organizations, based in Kanazawa, Ishikawa prefecture.
5374.jp will show how to and when to properly throw away garbage to help newcomer household to easily search proper information based on data (often not open data, printed on paper or uploaded PDF) released by local government if you select the area you live and day of week.
Even in different municipalities rule of garbage collection has been subdivided, so people who have just been moved may worries about pattern of trash.
5374.jp uses open data regarding garbage from each local government. In addition, it is open source software which been used in more than 100 municipalities in Japan. These local governments almost have noticed the importance of open data through 5374.jp.
Civic tech communities both in Kobe city and in Kawasaki city improved open source code of 5374.jp for multilingualization for foreigners and made further improvements.
Normally when you develop this kind of service in each project teams of municipality in Japan, you will need the development costs of millions of yen (thousands of dollars) for each municipality.
Therefore, thanks for 5374.jp, we were able to achieve both government service improvement and budget cuts for the citizens.
Informatization of local bus system
Code for Japan offer temporary staffing service, called Local Field Lab (we called Corporate fellowship program before renewal of service). A business expert who will be assigned to local government agency during about 3 months from his/her company would work to solve issues in local society with local citizen’s groups, civic tech members and government office staff in the municipal.
For example, we will introduce the solution for informatization of a local bus system in Sabae city, Fukui prefecture in fiscal year 2016. This program was set as a recruiting theme, “promotion of public transportation with utilizing open data”.
In Sabae city, what two fellows who were sent as a private personnel focused on was the aggregation of number of bus passengers. Before the solution has been generated, number of passengers was checked by bus driver with his eye and recorded in handwritten .
Finally two fellows have made a experiments with prototype of the sensor measurement and proposed a system that uses an electronic counter. In this method, when the bus driver presses the button of the electronic counter, the number of the passengers are automatically recorded on the cloud storage service. Data regarding the number of passenger will be published to be more efficient in developing applications than conventional way.
Local government and IT software company, jig.jp,inc. in Sabae City and Sakura Internet,inc. have been full-scale operation of a “making a number of bus passengers real-time open data system” with using the electric counter system since April 2017.
To aggregate the data such as the number of passengers at each bus stop would be utilized for improvement of finding efficient bus routes and better service by the bus company so that it would be more convenient for passengers, mainly residents in this area to move more easily wherever they want. This idea will be helpful to solve the same issue in other local areas, too.
A number of bus passengers has continuing to decline since its peak at 1970’s in Japan. Source: Ministry of Land infrastructure and Transport General policy Bureau, “Land Transportation statistics Handbook”
Conclusion
ICT including IoT is closely and deeply related to a variety of social infrastructure. However, administrative tries corresponding to the close to the edge technology as fast as possible, there is a limit to build government service for citizen alone in the view of lack of time, budget, human resource, and so on.
We, citizen, have to change the way to solve our social problem so that public sector is supposed to collaborate private sector including corporation and citizen. Repeated trial and error is necessary to overcome new challenge. Do not be afraid to fail. The more we repeated trying it, the better our society would be improved.
Code for Japan is one of the Code for All network and gave permission to repost their work. Check out their website here or their blog here to find out more about what they do.
