Also see the Ballmer Tee.

A third recommendation

An important value of public sector information is the increased transparency in government decision making. A European Union directive only affects member states and not EU institutions. We are therefore at risk of missing out on increased transparency in EU institutions that the PSI directive may bring to governments in the member states. Also, government transparency is often considered to be a contributing factor in reducing corruption.

Therefore, it would be great if there was a plan, similar to the PSI directive, that made sure that EU institutions also started providing machine readable data in order to increase transparency and reduce the risk of corruption.

Currently, it seems to be up to each institution to do what they want. Maybe that is why the Publications Office of the European Union decided to charge  10,000 EUR for access to electronic versions of the EUR-Lex database (that contains the directives and other legal acts). This move makes it difficult for new actors in the legal information industry to include EU data in their products which leads to reduced competition.

Use of social media tools in the public sector is in its infancy in Sweden. In a study conducted by the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce in 2009 (PDF) , around 12% of agencies reported that they were using social media channels in their communication. In another study by the Swedish Public Relations Association 75% of PR managers were evaluating the use of social media but only 5% had involved social media in the communication strategy. Many agencies are trying out new tools to see how they fit in their communication strategy. Most are using them as a news feed (one-way communication) and do not reply to questions. The number of followers varies greatly. Some examples:

Some agencies have also started using Facebook. The National Heritage Board (Riksantikvarieämbetet) on Facebook has close to 1200 fans. They have also used Flickr to increase access to parts of their archives. Currently the images are low-res only but that may change in the future.

Municipalities on Twitter

Many municipalities have started using Twitter to push information to citizens. Most are using it as a one-way communication channel, but some are engaging in dialogue. The number of municipalities on twitter is increasing almost on a daily basis. In my list of swedish municipalities on twitter there are currently 71 (out of 290). Many of them are not publishing any tweets and may only have registered the account to get a proper twitter handle.

In he following visualization you get an overview of how the municipalities compare with regards to number of tweets, followers and “early adopter”-status (“Age” as in number of days on twitter). Uppsala (north of Stockholm) has over 500 followers and published 941 tweets in their 367 days on Twitter. See here for a larger chart.

Observations

Some organizations are following citizens on Twitter and may not have realized that people may feel uncomfortable having an agency following them.

There are also some fake agencies on twitter. Swedish national authority for signals intelligence, FRA, has a twitter feed (with the correct logo), but looking at the tweets it is likely a fake. How should agencies relate to this? The police has several twitter feeds it seems. But they are not managed by the agency itself. How can citizens trust the information in these channels when it is difficult to see if they are managed by the agency or some personal initiative?

Recommendations from the government

On March 23 the government published a proposal saying (my translation):

Social media tools create new possibilites for communication with citizens and businesses. The E-government delegation will create guidelines for the public sector use of social media tools.

This means that we will likely see more agencies trying out social media channels in the future.

Do you have more information? Please comment!

I will be working with IT standardisation issues and the next revision of guidelines for public websites.

Visa DHL delivery på en större karta

Like most people living in Stockholm (and other cities I guess) I live in an apartment building to which you have no access. Also, like most people, I work during the day. Nothing special, just normal office hours, about the same hours when your drivers drive around the city trying to deliver stuff to the empty homes of people who are at work.

Knowing that you will fail to enter the building where I live (it doesn’t really matter since I’m not at home anyway), I have tried to contact you to see if I can do a part of your work by going to your terminal myself to pick up my package.

For some unknown reason you can’t refrain from trying to deliver it my empty home. Maybe it is in he nature of logistics people inherited in genes from loyal post office workers of the good old days?

Anyway, this means I have to wait for you to fail delivery and take the package back to your terminal and then send me a message (through regular mail) that you failed. A process that takes several days.

When I walk home from work I pass a 7-eleven with a sign that says “DHL Servicepoint”. It is bright and yellow and only about 150 yards from my home (I can almost see it if I lean out through my living room window). Intrigued by the words “service” and “point” I inquired, though your eminent call center, if it was possible to have the package delivered there instead? I was hoping I could save both you and me some work (and time). For unknown reasons you are not allowed to deliver my package to your own servicepoint. Words fail me.

My second suggestion was to change the address so that you may deliver it to my workplace instead. It is a bit of a gamble since I am in meetings throughout the day and may not be around at the exact random time your delivery guy tends to show up. This was possible, your friendly call center employee told me, but we have to try to deliver the package to your empty home first.

How hard can it be? I had a crazy idea. What if logistics was all about making use of information to optimize flows of goods?

Visa DHL delivery på en större karta

… [a] research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.”

Stanford study: Cognitive control in media multitaskers:

Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set.

Meet the Life Hackers – New York Times Magazine (10/16/05) (based on research by Gloria Mark, University of California)

Research shows that 40 percent of the time, workers ramble along a different tangent when an interruption ends because their short-term memory has been disrupted.

Ho do you manage your interruptions?

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

…and this is why I have launched opengov.se – an initiative to bring swedish public sector data online in open formats. Initially the website contains a catalog of public data sources and information about licensing and formats used.

You can help out by suggesting datasets form the swedish public sector.

class Organization(models.Model):
    name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    url = models.URLField(verify_exists=False)
    orgtype = models.ForeignKey(OrgType)

The same model class in Rails typically looks like this:

class Organization < ActiveRecord::Base
    belongs_to :OrgType
end

…and in Grails it is more specific like Django:

class Organization {
  String name
  String url
  static belongsTo = OrgType
  OrgType orgtype
}

It took me a while to remember that in Rails, parts of the model design is actually stored in the database schema instead of in the Ruby code. Peculiar don’t you think, given that everything else in a Rails app is nicely declared in Ruby code? There are of course benefits to both approaches, but I have started adding comments in the Rails model classes to be able to remember what properties they have without peeking in the Db. Typically I have a number of half-baked projects on my laptop and from time to time I forget what they do and these comments help me remember.

Check out more examples here:

• Django models
• Rails models
• Grails models

Problem 1

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23. Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Brute force version below.

n = 1
sum = 0
while(n < 1000,
      if(n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0, sum += n)
      n++
)
sum println

Or, as a one-liner after a suggestion from Ola:

(1..999) select(n, n % 3 == 0 or n % 5 == 0) fold(+) println

Problem 2

Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, … Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

sum = 0
fibs = [0, 1]
current_fib = 0
while(current_fib < 4000000,
    current_fib = fibs[0] + fibs[1]
    if(current_fib % 2 == 0, sum += current_fib)
    fibs[0] = fibs[1]
    fibs[1] = current_fib
)
sum println

Problem 3

The prime factors of 13195 are 5, 7, 13 and 29. What is the largest prime factor of the number 600851475143?

Using brute force for this one. Faster and more elegant would have been the Rho algorithm.

start = 600851475143
num = start
factor = 2

while(factor * factor <= num,
    if(num % factor == 0,
        factor println
        num = num / factor,
        factor++
    )
)

if(num != 1, num println)

Problem 5

2520 is the smallest number that can be divided by each of the numbers  from 1 to 10 without any remainder. What is the smallest number that is evenly divisible by all of the numbers from 1 to 20?

First, as the numbers 1 to 10 are factors in the numbers 11 to 20 we only need to check divisibility for the the latter. Starting of by setting up methods for greatest common divisor and least common multiple. Brute forcing this by looping over an incremented number will not work in the current version of Ioke (takes a couple of hours). Brute forcing it in Ruby took a couple of seconds.

gcd = method(a, b,
    if(b == 0, a,
        gcd(b, a % b)
    )
)

lcm = method(a, b,
    (a / gcd(a, b)) * b
)

(11..20) inject(number, n, lcm(number, n)) println

Problem 18

Find the maximum total from top to bottom of the triangle below. This solution also works for problem 67 (a much bigger triangle).

By moving from bottom to top, calculating each cell’s maximum sum and replacing the value with it we’ll end up with the total in the first cell in the triangle.

triangle = [
[75],
[95, 64],
[17, 47, 82],
[18, 35, 87, 10],
[20, 04, 82, 47, 65],
[19, 01, 23, 75, 03, 34],
[88, 02, 77, 73, 07, 63, 67],
[99, 65, 04, 28, 06, 16, 70, 92],
[41, 41, 26, 56, 83, 40, 80, 70, 33],
[41, 48, 72, 33, 47, 32, 37, 16, 94, 29],
[53, 71, 44, 65, 25, 43, 91, 52, 97, 51, 14],
[70, 11, 33, 28, 77, 73, 17, 78, 39, 68, 17, 57],
[91, 71, 52, 38, 17, 14, 91, 43, 58, 50, 27, 29, 48],
[63, 66, 04, 68, 89, 53, 67, 30, 73, 16, 69, 87, 40, 31],
[04, 62, 98, 27, 23, 09, 70, 98, 73, 93, 38, 53, 60, 04, 23],
]

;; We replace cells from the bottom up by finding the max sum for each
;; position in the triangle.

current_row = triangle length - 2

while(current_row > -1,
    pos = 0
    while(pos < triangle[current_row] length,
        triangle[current_row][pos] = triangle[current_row][pos] + \
        ([triangle[current_row + 1][pos], triangle[current_row + 1][pos + 1]] sort)[1]
        pos++
    )

    current_row = current_row - 1
)

triangle[0][0] println