Open data

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_data

Open data map

Linked open data cloud in August 2014

Clear labelling of the licensing terms is a key component of open data, and icons like the one pictured here are being used for that purpose.

Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data is licensed under an open license.

The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-source)" movements such as open-source software, open-source hardware, open content, open specifications, open education, open educational resources, open government, open knowledge, open access, open science, and the open web. The growth of the open data movement is paralleled by a rise in intellectual property rights. The philosophy behind open data has been long established (for example in the Mertonian tradition of science), but the term "open data" itself is recent, gaining popularity with the rise of the Internet and World Wide Web and, especially, with the launch of open-data government initiatives Data.gov, Data.gov.uk and Data.gov.in.

Open data can be linked data - referred to as linked open data.

One of the most important forms of open data is open government data (OGD), which is a form of open data created by ruling government institutions. Open government data's importance is born from it being a part of citizens' everyday lives, down to the most routine/mundane tasks that are seemingly far removed from government.

The abbreviation FAIR/O data is sometimes used to indicate that the dataset or database in question complies with the principles of FAIR data and carries an explicit data‑capable open license.

Overview

The concept of open data is not new, but a formalized definition is relatively new. Open data as a phenomenon denotes that governmental data should be available to anyone with a possibility of redistribution in any form without any copyright restriction. One more definition is the Open Definition which can be summarized as "a piece of data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike." Other definitions, including the Open Data Institute's "open data is data that anyone can access, use or share," have an accessible short version of the definition but refer to the formal definition. Open data may include non-textual material such as maps, genomes, connectomes, chemical compounds, mathematical and scientific formulae, medical data, and practice, bioscience and biodiversity.

A major barrier to the open data movement is the commercial value of data. Access to, or re-use of, data is often controlled by public or private organizations. Control may be through access restrictions, licenses, copyright, patents and charges for access or re-use. Advocates of open data argue that these restrictions detract from the common good and that data should be available without restrictions or fees.

Creators of data do not consider the need to state the conditions of ownership, licensing and re-use; instead presuming that not asserting copyright enters the data into the public domain. For example, many scientists do not consider the data published with their work to be theirs to control and consider the act of publication in a journal to be an implicit release of data into the commons. The lack of a license makes it difficult to determine the status of a data set and may restrict the use of data offered in an "Open" spirit. Because of this uncertainty it is possible for public or private organizations to aggregate said data, claim that it is protected by copyright, and then resell it.

Major sources

The State of Open Data, a 2019 book from African Minds

Open data can come from any source. This section lists some of the fields that publish (or at least discuss publishing) a large amount of open data.

In science

Main article: Open scientific data

The concept of open access to scientific data was established with the formation of the World Data Center system, in preparation for the International Geophysical Year of 1957–1958. The International Council of Scientific Unions (now the International Council for Science) oversees several World Data Centres with the mission to minimize the risk of data loss and to maximize data accessibility.

While the open-science-data movement long predates the Internet, the availability of fast, readily available networking has significantly changed the context of Open science data, as publishing or obtaining data has become much less expensive and time-consuming.

The Human Genome Project was a major initiative that exemplified the power of open data. It was built upon the so-called Bermuda Principles, stipulating that: "All human genomic sequence information … should be freely available and in the public domain in order to encourage research and development and to maximize its benefit to society". More recent initiatives such as the Structural Genomics Consortium have illustrated that the open data approach can be used productively within the context of industrial R&D.

In 2004, the Science Ministers of all nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which includes most developed countries of the world, signed a declaration which states that all publicly funded archive data should be made publicly available. Following a request and an intense discussion with data-producing institutions in member states, the OECD published in 2007 the OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding as a soft-law recommendation.

Examples of open data in science:

• data.uni-muenster.de – Open data about scientific artifacts from the University of Muenster, Germany. Launched in 2011.
• Dataverse Network Project – archival repository software promoting data sharing, persistent data citation, and reproducible research.
• linkedscience.org/data – Open scientific datasets encoded as Linked Data. Launched in 2011, ended 2018.
• systemanaturae.org – Open scientific datasets related to wildlife classified by animal species. Launched in 2015.

In government

See also: Open government and PSI Directive

There are a range of different arguments for government open data. Some advocates say that making government information available to the public as machine readable open data can facilitate government transparency, accountability and public participation. "Open data can be a powerful force for public accountability—it can make existing information easier to analyze, process, and combine than ever before, allowing a new level of public scrutiny." Governments that enable public viewing of data can help citizens engage within the governmental sectors and "add value to that data." Open data experts have nuanced the impact that opening government data may have on government transparency and accountability. In a widely cited paper, scholars David Robinson and Harlan Yu contend that governments may project a veneer of transparency by publishing machine-readable data that does not actually make government more transparent or accountable. Drawing from earlier studies on transparency and anticorruption, World Bank political scientist Tiago C. Peixoto extended Yu and Robinson's argument by highlighting a minimal chain of events necessary for open data to lead to accountability:

1. relevant data is disclosed;
2. the data is widely disseminated and understood by the public;
3. the public reacts to the content of the data; and
4. public officials either respond to the public's reaction or are sanctioned by the public through institutional means.

Some make the case that opening up official information can support technological innovation and economic growth by enabling third parties to develop new kinds of digital applications and services.

Several national governments have created websites to distribute a portion of the data they collect. It is a concept for a collaborative project in the municipal Government to create and organize culture for Open Data or Open government data.

Additionally, other levels of government have established open data websites. There are many government entities pursuing Open Data in Canada. Data.gov lists the sites of a total of 40 US states and 46 US cities and counties with websites to provide open data, e.g., the state of Maryland, the state of California, US and New York City.

At the international level, the United Nations has an open data website that publishes statistical data from member states and UN agencies, and the World Bank published a range of statistical data relating to developing countries. The European Commission has created two portals for the European Union: the EU Open Data Portal which gives access to open data from the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies and the European Data Portal that provides datasets from local, regional and national public bodies across Europe. The two portals were consolidated to data.europa.eu on April 21, 2021.

Italy is the first country to release standard processes and guidelines under a Creative Commons license for spread usage in the Public Administration. The open model is called the Open Data Management Cycle and was adopted in several regions such as Veneto and Umbria. Main cities like Reggio Calabria and Genova have also adopted this model.

In October 2015, the Open Government Partnership launched the International Open Data Charter, a set of principles and best practices for the release of governmental open data formally adopted by seventeen governments of countries, states and cities during the OGP Global Summit in Mexico.

In July 2024, the OECD adopted Creative Commons CC-BY-4.0 licensing for its published data and reports.

In non-profit organizations

Many non-profit organizations offer open access to their data, as long it does not undermine their users', members' or third party's privacy rights. In comparison to for-profit corporations, they do not seek to monetize their data. OpenNWT launched a website offering open data of elections. CIAT offers open data to anybody who is willing to conduct big data analytics in order to enhance the benefit of international agricultural research. DBLP, which is owned by a non-profit organization Dagstuhl, offers its database of scientific publications from computer science as open data.

Hospitality exchange services, including Bewelcome, Warm Showers, and CouchSurfing (before it became for-profit) have offered scientists access to their anonymized data for analysis, public research, and publication.

Policies and strategies

At a small level, a business or research organization's policies and strategies towards open data will vary, sometimes greatly. One common strategy employed is the use of a data commons. A data commons is an interoperable software and hardware platform that aggregates (or collocates) data, data infrastructure, and data-producing and data-managing applications in order to better allow a community of users to manage, analyze, and share their data with others over both short- and long-term timelines. Ideally, this interoperable cyberinfrastructure should be robust enough "to facilitate transitions between stages in the life cycle of a collection" of data and information resources while still being driven by common data models and workspace tools enabling and supporting robust data analysis. The policies and strategies underlying a data commons will ideally involve numerous stakeholders, including the data commons service provider, data contributors, and data users.

Grossman et al suggests six major considerations for a data commons strategy that better enables open data in businesses and research organizations. Such a strategy should address the need for:

• permanent, persistent digital IDs, which enable access controls for datasets;
• permanent, discoverable metadata associated with each digital ID;
• application programming interface (API)-based access, tied to an authentication and authorization service;
• data portability;
• data "peering," without access, egress, and ingress charges; and
• a rationed approach to users computing data over the data commons.

Beyond individual businesses and research centers, and at a more macro level, countries like Germany have launched their own official nationwide open data strategies, detailing how data management systems and data commons should be developed, used, and maintained for the greater public good.

Arguments for and against

Opening government data is only a waypoint on the road to improving education, improving government, and building tools to solve other real-world problems. While many arguments have been made categorically, the following discussion of arguments for and against open data highlights that these arguments often depend highly on the type of data and its potential uses.

Arguments made on behalf of open data include the following:

• "Data belongs to the human race". Typical examples are genomes, data on organisms, medical science, environmental data following the Aarhus Convention.
• Public money was used to fund the work, and so it should be universally available.
• It was created by or at a government institution (this is common in US National Laboratories and government agencies).
• Facts cannot legally be copyrighted.
• Sponsors of research do not get full value unless the resulting data are freely available.
• Restrictions on data re-use create an anticommons.
• Data are required for the smooth process of running communal human activities and are an important enabler of socio-economic development (health care, education, economic productivity, etc.).
• In scientific research, the rate of discovery is accelerated by better access to data.
• Making data open helps combat "data rot" and ensure that scientific research data are preserved over time.
• Statistical literacy benefits from open data. Instructors can use locally relevant data sets to teach statistical concepts to their students.
• Allowing open data in the scientific community is essential for increasing the rate of discoveries and recognizing significant patterns.

It is generally held that factual data cannot be copyrighted. Publishers frequently add copyright statements (often forbidding re-use) to scientific data accompanying publications. It may be unclear whether the factual data embedded in full text are part of the copyright.

While the human abstraction of facts from paper publications is normally accepted as legal there is often an implied restriction on the machine extraction by robots.

Unlike open access, where groups of publishers have stated their concerns, open data is normally challenged by individual institutions. Their arguments have been discussed less in public discourse and there are fewer quotes to rely on at this time.

Arguments against making all data available as open data include the following:

• Government funding may not be used to duplicate or challenge the activities of the private sector (e.g. PubChem).
• Governments have to be accountable for the efficient use of taxpayer's money: If public funds are used to aggregate the data and if the data will bring commercial (private) benefits to only a small number of users, the users should reimburse governments for the cost of providing the data.
• Open data may lead to exploitation of, and rapid publication of results based on, data pertaining to developing countries by rich and well-equipped research institutes, without any further involvement and/or benefit to local communities (helicopter research); similarly, to the historical open access to tropical forests that has led to the misappropriation ("Global Pillage") of plant genetic resources from developing countries.
• The revenue earned by publishing data can be used to cover the costs of generating and/or disseminating the data, so that the dissemination can continue indefinitely.
• The revenue earned by publishing data permits non-profit organizations to fund other activities (e.g. learned society publishing supports the society).
• The government gives specific legitimacy for certain organizations to recover costs (NIST in US, Ordnance Survey in UK).
• Privacy concerns may require that access to data is limited to specific users or to sub-sets of the data.
• Collecting, 'cleaning', managing and disseminating data are typically labour- and/or cost-intensive processes – whoever provides these services should receive fair remuneration for providing those services.
• Sponsors do not get full value unless their data is used appropriately – sometimes this requires quality management, dissemination and branding efforts that can best be achieved by charging fees to users.
• Often, targeted end-users cannot use the data without additional processing (analysis, apps etc.) – if anyone has access to the data, none may have an incentive to invest in the processing required to make data useful (typical examples include biological, medical, and environmental data).
• There is no control to the secondary use (aggregation) of open data.

The paper entitled "Optimization of Soft Mobility Localization with Sustainable Policies and Open Data" argues that open data is a valuable tool for improving the sustainability and equity of soft mobility in cities. The author argues that open data can be used to identify the needs of different areas of a city, develop algorithms that are fair and equitable, and justify the installation of soft mobility resources.

Relation to other open activities

The goals of the Open Data movement are similar to those of other "Open" movements.

• Open access is concerned with making scholarly publications freely available on the internet. In some cases, these articles include open datasets as well.
• Open specifications are documents describing file types or protocols, where the documents are openly licensed. These specifications are primarily meant to improve different software handling the same file types or protocols, but monopolists forced by law into open specifications might make it more difficult.
• Open content is concerned with making resources aimed at a human audience (such as prose, photos, or videos) freely available.
• Open knowledge. Open Knowledge International argues for openness in a range of issues including, but not limited to, those of open data. It covers (a) scientific, historical, geographic or otherwise (b) Content such as music, films, books (c) Government and other administrative information. Open data is included within the scope of the Open Knowledge Definition, which is alluded to in Science Commons' Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data.
• Open notebook science refers to the application of the Open Data concept to as much of the scientific process as possible, including failed experiments and raw experimental data.
• Open-source software is concerned with the open-source licenses under which computer programs can be distributed and is not normally concerned primarily with data.
• Open educational resources are freely accessible, openly licensed documents and media that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.
• Open research/open science/open science data (linked open science) means an approach to open and interconnect scientific assets like data, methods and tools with linked data techniques to enable transparent, reproducible and interdisciplinary research.
• Open-GLAM (Galleries, Library, Archives, and Museums) is an initiative and network that supports exchange and collaboration between cultural institutions that support open access to their digitalized collections. The GLAM-Wiki Initiative helps cultural institutions share their openly licensed resources with the world through collaborative projects with experienced Wikipedia editors. Open Heritage Data is associated with Open GLAM, as openly licensed data in the heritage sector is now frequently used in research, publishing, and programming, particularly in the Digital Humanities.

Open Data as commons

Ideas and definitions

Formally both the definition of Open Data and commons revolve around the concept of shared resources with a low barrier to access. Substantially, digital commons include Open Data in that it includes resources maintained online, such as data. Overall, looking at operational principles of Open Data one could see the overlap between Open Data and (digital) commons in practice. Principles of Open Data are sometimes distinct depending on the type of data under scrutiny. Nonetheless, they are somewhat overlapping and their key rationale is the lack of barriers to the re-use of data(sets). Regardless of their origin, principles across types of Open Data hint at the key elements of the definition of commons. These are, for instance, accessibility, re-use, findability, non-proprietarily. Additionally, although to a lower extent, threats and opportunities associated with both Open Data and commons are similar. Synthesizing, they revolve around (risks and) benefits associated with (uncontrolled) use of common resources by a large variety of actors.

The System

Both commons and Open Data can be defined by the features of the resources that fit under these concepts, but they can be defined by the characteristics of the systems their advocates push for. Governance is a focus for both Open Data and commons scholars. The key elements that outline commons and Open Data peculiarities are the differences (and maybe opposition) to the dominant market logics as shaped by capitalism. Perhaps it is this feature that emerges in the recent surge of the concept of commons as related to a more social look at digital technologies in the specific forms of digital and, especially, data commons.

Real-life case

Application of open data for societal good has been demonstrated in academic research works. The paper "Optimization of Soft Mobility Localization with Sustainable Policies and Open Data" uses open data in two ways. First, it uses open data to identify the needs of different areas of a city. For example, it might use data on population density, traffic congestion, and air quality to determine where soft mobility resources, such as bike racks and charging stations for electric vehicles, are most needed. Second, it uses open data to develop algorithms that are fair and equitable. For example, it might use data on the demographics of a city to ensure that soft mobility resources are distributed in a way that is accessible to everyone, regardless of age, disability, or gender. The paper also discusses the challenges of using open data for soft mobility optimization. One challenge is that open data is often incomplete or inaccurate. Another challenge is that it can be difficult to integrate open data from different sources. Despite these challenges, the paper argues that open data is a valuable tool for improving the sustainability and equity of soft mobility in cities.

An exemplification of how the relationship between Open Data and commons and how their governance can potentially disrupt the market logic otherwise dominating big data is a project conducted by Human Ecosystem Relazioni in Bologna (Italy). See: https://www.he-r.it/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/HUB-report-impaginato_v1_small.pdf.

This project aimed at extrapolating and identifying online social relations surrounding “collaboration” in Bologna. Data was collected from social networks and online platforms for citizens collaboration. Eventually data was analyzed for the content, meaning, location, timeframe, and other variables. Overall, online social relations for collaboration were analyzed based on network theory. The resulting dataset have been made available online as Open Data (aggregated and anonymized); nonetheless, individuals can reclaim all their data. This has been done with the idea of making data into a commons. This project exemplifies the relationship between Open Data and commons, and how they can disrupt the market logic driving big data use in two ways. First, it shows how such projects, following the rationale of Open Data somewhat can trigger the creation of effective data commons. The project itself was offering different types of support to social network platform users to have contents removed. Second, opening data regarding online social networks interactions has the potential to significantly reduce the monopolistic power of social network platforms on those data.

Funders' mandates

Several funding bodies that mandate Open Access also mandate Open Data. A good expression of requirements (truncated in places) is given by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR):

• to deposit bioinformatics, atomic and molecular coordinate data, and experimental data into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results.
• to retain original data sets for at least five years after the grant. This applies to all data, whether published or not.

Other bodies promoting the deposition of data and full text include the Wellcome Trust. An academic paper published in 2013 advocated that Horizon 2020 (the science funding mechanism of the EU) should mandate that funded projects hand in their databases as "deliverables" at the end of the project so that they can be checked for third-party usability and then shared.

Constitutional economics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics

Constitutional economics is a research program in economics and constitutionalism that has been described as explaining the choice "of alternative sets of legal-institutional-constitutional rules that constrain the choices and activities of economic and political agents". This extends beyond the definition of "the economic analysis of constitutional law" and is distinct from explaining the choices of economic and political agents within those rules, a subject of orthodox economics. Instead, constitutional economics takes into account the impacts of political economic decisions as opposed to limiting its analysis to economic relationships as functions of the dynamics of distribution of marketable goods and services.

Constitutional economics was pioneered by the work of James M. Buchanan. He argued that "The political economist who seeks to offer normative advice, must, of necessity, concentrate on the process or structure within which political decisions are observed to be made. Existing constitutions, or structures or rules, are the subject of critical scrutiny."

Constitutional economics has been characterized as a practical approach to apply the tools of economics to constitutional matters. For example, a major concern of every nation is the proper allocation of available national economic and financial resources. The legal solution to this problem falls within the scope of constitutional economics. Another example is to study the "compatibility of effective economic decisions with the existing constitutional framework and the limitations or the favorable conditions created by that framework".

Origins

Constitutional economics was popularized by James M. Buchanan, for which he received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (pictured here in September 2010).

The term "constitutional economics" was coined in 1982 by the U.S. economist Richard McKenzie to designate the main topic of discussion at a conference held in Washington D.C. Later, McKenzie's neologism was adopted by another American economist, James Buchanan, as a name for a new academic sub-discipline. It was Buchanan's work on this sub-discipline that brought him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his "development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making" in 1986.

Constitutional economics draws substantial inspiration from the reformist attitude which is characteristic of Adam Smith's vision, and that Buchanan's concept can be considered the modern-day counterpart to what Smith called "the science of legislation."

Positive constitutional economics

Within positive constitutional economics, the tools or methods are unique from normal economic tools because of the cross-disciplinary nature of the program. The main tool of positive constitutional economics is "comparative institutional analysis", with four main elements:

1. The first element examines how certain constitutional rules arose and what factors caused the rules to be developed as a result of aggregated individual inputs.
2. The second element looks at how rules are distinguishable between individual and collective factors, though Voigt acknowledges this research method is rarely used.
3. The third element is the possibilities of further constitutional (or rules) change. Any proposed change to constitutional constraints, or rules of constraints, are subject to economic scrutiny for their effects on efficiency and equity.
4. The fourth element of positive constitutional economics examines the economic effects of developed or modified change to rules.

Normative constitutional economics

Normative constitutional economics focuses on legitimizing the state and its actions as the best means of maximum efficiency and utility, judging conditions or rules that are efficient, and discerning and studying the political systems to maximize efficiency, where the outcome of collective choices are considered "fair", "just", or "efficient".

Both Buchanan and Stefan Voigt argue the foundational assumption of normative constitutional economics is that no single individual's goals or values can supersede the value of another's. Therefore, a universal, absolute social norm or goal is impossible. Buchanan viewed politics as a form of exchange, such as when individuals agree to exchange goods. He believed that if people are acting rationally in their own perceived self-interest, and if the decision is voluntary and informed, any such agreement is "efficient" and therefore normatively ought to occur.

Methodological individualism leads Buchanan to the normative claim that a political theory very similar to that of John Rawls in his seminal 1971 work, A Theory of Justice, would best realize individuals' unique goals. Complete with a veil of ignorance and a priori decisions of social goals, Buchanan says political economy does not have a social engineer or moral purpose but only assists individuals in their search for rules that best serve their individual purposes. For Buchanan, the "good" society is one that furthers the interests of individuals, not some independent moral or teleological end.

James Buchanan's views on the ethics of constitutional citizenship

According to Buchanan, political efficiency, like market efficiency, occurs when all individuals in the community agree to the political structures. Buchanan's argument is similar to a social contract view of government, where individuals agree to place constraints on themselves in exchange for anticipated benefits, Buchanan argued that just as a market transaction occurs through voluntary, mutually beneficial exchange, so with political "exchanges" of rights and authority.

Buchanan believed that the ethic of constitutionalism is a key for constitutional order and "may be called the idealized Kantian world" where the individual "who is making the ordering, along with substantially all of his fellows, adopts the moral law as a general rule for behaviour".

Buchanan introduced the cross-disciplinary concepts of "constitutional citizenship" and "constitutional anarchy". According to Buchanan, "constitutional anarchy" is a modern policy that may be best described as actions undertaken without understanding or taking into account the rules that define the constitutional order. This policy is justified by references to strategic tasks formulated on the basis of competing interests regardless of their subsequent impact on political structure. At the same time Buchanan introduces the concept of "constitutional citizenship", which he designates as compliance of citizens with their constitutional rights and obligations that should be considered as a constituent part of the constitutional policy.

Buchanan wrote that "the ethics of constitutional citizenship is not directly comparable to ethical behavior in interaction with other persons within the constraints imposed by the rules of an existing regime. An individual may be fully responsible, in the standard ethical sense, and yet fail to meet the ethical requirement of constitutional citizenship." Buchanan considered the term "constitutionality" in the broad sense and applied it to families, firms and public institutions, but, first of all, to the state.

Crucial to understanding Buchanan's system of thought is the distinction he made between politics and policy. According to Buchanan, politics is about the rules of the game, where policy is focused on strategies that players adopt within a given set of rules. "Questions about what are good rules of the game are in the domain of social philosophy, whereas questions about the strategies that players will adopt given those rules is the domain of economics, and it is the play between the rules (social philosophy) and the strategies (economics) that constitutes what Buchanan refers to as constitutional political economy".

Hayek

Buchanan is not the only contributor to normative constitutional economics. Economist Friedrich Hayek also wrote extensively on the topic of constitutional economics, even if he did not name constitutional economics specifically. Hayek defends a representative constitutional democracy as the best structure of government. Hayek's main project was the vindication of freedom and establishing criteria for a regime of freedom.

Hayek was worried by the kind of state that Buchanan/Rawls deemed normative. Hayek thought it necessary for a return to the traditional views of government, human nature, political philosophy, and economics. He believed the Buchanan/Rawls state had the almost inevitable propensity to totalitarianism as the state seeks to maximize individual utility.

Economic analysis of the US Constitution

The generally accepted birth of constitutional economic analysis of US Constitution was Charles Austin Beard's landmark 1913 book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. While most scholars today reject Beard's overall thesis, he initiated a new method of economic and political thought that would evolve into contemporary constitutional economics analysis. Beard's main thesis was that the U.S. Constitution "was essentially an economic document based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities."

Writing in 1987 for the Yale Law School, Jonathan Macey synthesizes the history of constitutional economic analysis applied to the US Constitution. Macey offers a different analysis of the US Constitution and responds critically to Beard's view of the Constitution.

As Macey understood Beard a famous and crucial part of the Constitution, separation of powers, was actually a means of allowing hegemony of resources in the hands of the rich few. Macey could not disagree more; he argues that the Constitution and separation of powers were created to hinder aggregate political and economic power. He points to Federalist No. 10, James Madison's argument of the necessity of factions due to what he saw as truths of human nature.

Separation of powers

Macey demonstrates how constitutional economics can be applied to constitutions. Rather than looking at the political or philosophic intentions of the founders, Macey viewed the constitution through economic eyes, considering the incentives, choices, allocations, and other economics factors within the political rules of a constitution. Traditionally, the creation of factions has been interpreted as a political move to separate power and prevent hegemony of the state. Macey agrees but adds a caveat. He maintains a real economic incentive to factions existed which compelled the Founders to separate government.

Macey argued that if government is not separated into distinct powers, the possibility of extensive rent-seeking threatens the efficiency of the government due to self-interested groups or individuals lobbying to political powers for their goals. In Macey's interpretation of Madison, the separation of powers channels lobbyists into the competitive, more efficient market by raising transaction costs so much that private market means are less expensive than appealing to the various separate powers of government. Macey then quantifies legislation on a standard supply-demand curve, where the demand is the interest groups' desire for laws and the supply is the legislation's provision. He argues that separation of powers shifts the supply curve left, raising the price and decreasing the quantity of legislation.

Legal approach

Judge Richard Posner emphasized the importance of a constitution for economic development. He examines the interrelationship between a constitution and the economic growth. Posner approaches constitutional analysis mainly from the perspective of judges, who constitute a critical force for interpretation and implementation of a constitution, thus—de facto in common law countries—creating the body of constitutional law. He emphasizes the importance of constitutional provisions "in setting broader outer bounds to the exercise of judicial discretion". Thus, a judge, when trying a case, is guided firstly by the spirit and letter of the constitution. The role of economics in this process is to help "identify the consequences of alternative interpretations" of the constitution.

He then explains that "economics may provide insight into questions that bear on the proper legal interpretation". In the end, as Posner emphasizes, "the limits of an economic approach to deciding constitutional cases [are] set by the Constitution". In addition, he argues that "effective protection of basic economic rights promotes economic growth".

Concurrently with the rise of academic research in the field of constitutional economics in the US in the 1980s, the Supreme Court of India for almost a decade had been encouraging public interest litigation on behalf of the poor and oppressed by using a very broad interpretation of several articles of the Indian Constitution. The former Chief Justice of Indonesian Constitutional Court, Jimly Asshiddiqie, also published his book "Konstitusi Ekonomi" (2010) in promoting the idea of Economic Constitution. This is a vivid example of a de facto practical application of the methodology of constitutional economics.

The President of the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation, Valery Zorkin, made a special reference to the educational role of constitutional economics: "In Russia, the addition of such new academic disciplines as constitutional economics to the curricula of university law and economics departments becomes critically important."

Russian school

The Russian school of constitutional economics was created in the early twenty-first century with the idea that constitutional economics allows for a combined economic and constitutional analysis in the legislative (especially budgetary) process, thus helping to overcome arbitrariness in the economic and financial decision-making. For instance, when military expenses (and the like) dwarf the budget spending on education and culture. Constitutional economics studies such issues as the proper national wealth distribution. This also includes the government spending on the judiciary, which in many transitional and developing countries is completely controlled by the executive.

The latter undermines the principle of checks and balances, instrumental in the separation of powers, as this creates a critical financial dependence of the judiciary. It is important to distinguish between the two methods of corruption of the judiciary: the state corruption (through budget planning and various privileges being the most dangerous), and the private corruption. The former makes it almost impossible for any business to facilitate the optimal growth and development of national market economy. In the English language, the word "constitution" possesses a whole number of meanings, encompassing not only national constitutions as such but also charters of corporations, unwritten rules of various clubs, informal groups, etc.

The Russian model of constitutional economics, originally intended for transitional and developing countries, focuses entirely on the concept of constitution of a state. This model of the constitutional economics is based on the understanding that it is necessary to narrow the gap between practical enforcement of the economic, social, and political rights granted by the constitution and the annual (or midterm) economic policy, budget legislation and administrative policies conducted by the government. In 2006, the Russian Academy of Sciences officially recognized constitutional economics as a separate academic sub-discipline.

Criticism

Walter Block and Thomas DiLorenzo criticize the possibility of constitutional economics as a science. They maintain that politics cannot be equated with the market and therefore, as a study, it cannot exist. They maintain that unlike the market, consent is not the foundation of politics, and that politics is driven by violent, historically bellicose, coercion. Therefore, they believe that the constitutional economic method only clouds the discussion of public choice and political economy. Buchanan, Voigt, Macey, and even Beard all implicitly assume that politics is the exchange of political "goods", a strong social contract view.

But for Block and DiLorenzo, politics is one powerful group coercing free rides from a weaker group. From the Roman Empire to the present, they trace how the state always comes from conquest and exploitation, never consent. The Calculus of Consent, a foundational text for constitutional economics, bears much of their attack. If they are correct that no state has been or can be voluntary and that voluntary government is inherently contradictory, constitutional economics as a discipline cannot exist.

William Campbell explains the weakness of constitutional economics in its assumption that the goal of a regime must be efficiency, individual liberty, and libertarian rights, not morality or super-individual good.

Smart city

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city

Possible scenario of smart and sustainable mobility

A smart city is an urban area that uses digital technology to collect data and to operate/provide services. Data can be collected from citizens, devices, buildings, cameras. Applications include traffic and transportation systems, power plants, utilities, urban forestry, water supply networks, waste disposal, criminal investigations, information systems, schools, libraries, hospitals, and other community services. The foundation of a smart city is built on the integration of people, technology, and processes, which connect and interact across sectors such as healthcare, transportation, education, and infrastructure, etc. Smart cities are characterized by the ways in which their local governments monitor, analyze, plan, and govern the city. In a smart city, the sharing of data extends to businesses, citizens and other third parties who can derive benefit from using that data. The three largest sources of spending associated with smart cities as of 2022 were visual surveillance, public transit, and outdoor lighting.

Smart cities integrate information and communication technology (ICT), and devices connected to the Internet of things (IOT) network to optimize city services and connect to citizens. ICT can be used to enhance quality, performance, and interactivity of urban services, to reduce costs and resource consumption and to increase contact between citizens and government. Smart city applications manage urban flows and allow for real-time responses. A smart city may be more prepared to respond to challenges than one with a conventional "transactional" relationship with its citizens. Yet, the term is open to many interpretations. Many cities have already adopted some sort of smart city technology.

Smart city initiatives have been criticized as driven by corporations, poorly adapted to residents' needs, as largely unsuccessful, and as a move toward totalitarian surveillance.

Background

Historically, cities functioned as centers of innovation, and the advent of the digital era presented opportunities and challenges to apply technology to create urban environments that are more efficient, sustainable, and livable.^{[23][24][25][26][how?][27]}

The shift to smart cities necessitates a comprehensive restructuring of city management and operations, leading citizen participation, and methods of public service delivery.

Cities seek to upgrade their infrastructure and service delivery, to promote social inclusion, technological adoption, and economic development.

The transformation into a smart city involves modifications in planning, management, and operational processes. This data can subsequently be analyzed to identify areas for improvement and optimize urban services.

Information and communication technologies

The concept of smart cities emerged from cities' adoption of information and communications technologies.

ICTs present challenges given financial limitations, technical obstacles, and privacy and security concerns. ICTs are also not uniformly accessible across communities, contributing to the digital divide.

Definition

No commonly accepted definition of "smart city" has emerged. Evaluating smart city initiatives becomes difficult without agreement on parameters. It also hampers the ability to compare projects and identify best practices.

Deakin and Al Waer list four factors that contribute to the definition of a smart city:

• Application of a wide range electronic and digital technologies
• Use of ICT in living and working environments
• Use of ICT in government systems
• The territorialisation of practices that brings ICT and people together to enhance innovation and knowledge.

Deakin defines the smart city as one that uses ICT to meet the demands of the market (the citizens of the city), based on community involvement. Studies of smart city projects can be used as an alternative to difficult-to-define broad definitions in order to clarify what smart cities are.

Early definitions

Notable disparities among smart city definitions include the relative focus on economic advantages versus environmental or social benefits and specific technology choices.

Smart city definitions include:

• Caragliu et al. (2011): “A city is smart when investments in human and social capital and traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication infrastructure fuel sustainable economic growth and a high quality of life, with a wise management of natural resources, through participatory governance.”
• Bakici, Almirall, & Wareham (2013): “Smart city as a high-tech intensive and advanced city that connects people, information, and city elements using new technologies in order to create a sustainable, greener city, competitive and innovative commerce, and an increased life quality.”
• Nam and Pardo (2011): “A smart city infuses information into its physical infrastructure to improve conveniences, facilitate mobility, add efficiencies, conserve energy, improve the quality of air and water, identify problems and fix them quickly, recover rapidly from disasters, collect data to make better decisions, deploy resources effectively, and share data to enable collaboration across entities and domains.”

Research

The main issues surrounding smart city research include:

• Absence of intellectual exchange among researchers;
• Researcher inclination to pursue subjective avenues of research in isolation from their peers;
• The resulting division within the scientific community.

Motivations

Population growth

An important motivation for smart cities is projected population growth. The UN forecasts global population to reach 9.6 to 13.2 billion by 2100, with cities absorbing 80% of this growth.

Tragedy of the commons

An important goal of smart city initiatives is to use ICTs to address the tragedy of the commons problem. This phenomenon occurs when individuals acting in their own self-interest deplete a communal resource. For example, while each individual driver in a city saves time and flexibility by driving, the resultant excessive driving of the community causes traffic congestion and environmental issues. This situation is worsened when public transportation services get little attention due to the use of personal vehicles.

History

Philosophical predecessors of smart cities can be found in utopian works such as New Atlantis (1626). Another was Ebenezer Howard's 1898 concept of Garden Cities. These were dense, size-limited cities founded in rural areas by private groups, combining the benefits of the city and the country. Other conceptions include those of Edward Bellamy, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Critics of smart cities draw parallels between the weaknesses of these utopian visions and the weaknesses of smart cities today.

The concept of "smart cities" emerged from global cities' recent adoption of information and communications technologies for urban use, which can be used to improve efficiency, sustainability, and livability in urban environments. Some of the earliest interventions in urban planning include the use of computational statistical analysis by the Community Analysis Bureau in Los Angeles in the late 1960's and the establishment by Singapore of the National Computer Board in 1981.

The smart city concept experienced a major surge around 2005. Tech companies sought to create information systems to enhance operational efficiency for cities.

A global movement emerged advocating smart cities.

IBM launched its Smarter Planet marketing initiative in 2008, which included the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge. In 2010, Cisco Systems, with $25 million from the Clinton Foundation, established its Connected Urban Development program in partnership with San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Seoul. In 2011, a Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona attracted 6000 people from 50 countries. The European Commission in 2012 established the Smart Cities Marketplace, a centralized hub for urban initiatives in the European Union. The 2015 Chancellor’s Budget for the United Kingdom proposed to invest £140 million in smart cities and IoT. Smart city competitions were launched in the 2010s by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the United States Department of Transportation. In 2016, AT&T launched an alliance with Cisco, Deloitte, Ericsson, General Electric, IBM, Intel, and Qualcomm, with municipal partners Atlanta, Georgia; Chicago, Illinois; and Dallas, Texas.

Characteristics

Key characteristics that define innovative urban environments include:

• Connectivity: IoT networks collect and transmit data from sensors throughout the urban environment.
• Data-driven decision making: Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence enable more informed and responsive governance.
• Sustainable infrastructure: Energy-efficient buildings, renewable energy, and intelligent transportation systems.
• Urban Optimization: Reduce resource usage, reduce ecological footprints, and enhance living standards to create more environmentally responsible urban spaces.
• Citizen engagement: Facilitate communication between residents and government, promoting participation in urban planning and decision-making processes.
• Smart mobility: Integrate public transit, bike-sharing, and autonomous vehicles, aim to reduce congestion and improve accessibility, as well as analyzing mobility behavioral patterns of citizens to improve services and optimize the city infrastructure.
• Enhanced public services: Improve the delivery of essential services.

Methods

Information and communications technologies

It has been suggested that a smart city (or other community) uses information technologies to:

1. Make more efficient use of physical infrastructure (roads, built environment and other physical assets) through artificial intelligence and data analytics in order to support a strong and healthy economic, social, cultural development.
2. Engage effectively with local governance by use of open innovation processes and e-participation, improving the collective intelligence of the city's institutions through e-governance, with emphasis placed on citizen participation and co-design.
3. Learn, adapt and innovate and thereby respond more effectively and promptly to changing circumstances by improving the intelligence of the city.

They evolve towards a strong integration of all dimensions of human intelligence, collective intelligence, and also artificial intelligence within the city. According to Mitchell, the intelligence of cities "resides in the increasingly effective combination of digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brain), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence)".

The physical components of IT systems are crucial to early-stage smart city development. Wired infrastructure is required to support the IoT and wireless technologies central to more interconnected living. A wired city environment provides general access to continually updated digital and physical infrastructure. The latest in telecommunications, robotics, IoT, and various connected technologies can then be deployed to support human capital and productivity.

Forms of intelligence

Bletchley Park is often considered to be the first smart community.

Intelligence in smart cities has been demonstrated in three ways:^{[citation needed]}

1. Orchestration intelligence: Cities establish institutions and community-based problem solving and collaborations, such as in Bletchley Park, where the Nazi Enigma cipher was decoded by a team led by Alan Turing. This has been referred to as the first example of a smart city or an intelligent community.
2. Empowerment intelligence: Cities provide open platforms, experimental facilities and smart city infrastructure in order to cluster innovation in certain districts. These are seen in the Kista Science City in Stockholm and the Cyberport Zone in Hong Kong. Similar facilities have also been established in Melbourne and Kyiv.
3. Instrumentation intelligence: City infrastructure is made smart through real-time data collection, with analysis and predictive modelling across city districts. There is much controversy surrounding this, particularly with regards to surveillance issues in smart cities.

Examples of instrumentation intelligence are those implemented in Amsterdam. This is realized through:

1. A common IP infrastructure that is open to researchers to develop applications.
2. Wireless meters and devices transmit information at the point in time.
3. A number of homes being provided with smart energy meters to become aware of energy consumption and reduce energy usage.
4. Solar power garbage compactors, car recharging stations and energy saving lamps.

Energy usage

Smart cities use data and technology to create efficiencies, improve sustainability, create economic development, and enhance quality of life factors for people living and working in the city. A variety of different datasets may need to be integrated to create a smart energy infrastructure. Employment of smart technologies enables the more efficient application of integrated energy technologies in the city allowing the development of more self-sustaining areas or even positive energy districts that produce more energy than they consume.

A smart city is powered by "smart connections" for various items such as street lighting, smart buildings, distributed energy resources (DER), data analytics, and smart transportation. Amongst these things, energy is paramount; this is why utility companies play a key role in smart cities. Electric companies, working partnership with city officials, technology companies and a number of other institutions, are among the major players that helped accelerate the growth of America's smart cities.

According to David K. Owens, the former executive vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, two key elements that a smart city must have are an integrated communications platform and a "dynamic resilient grid."

Smart grids are an important technology in smart cities. The improved flexibility of the smart grid permits greater penetration of highly variable renewable energy sources such as solar power and wind power.

Energy Data Management Systems (EDMS) can help to save cities energy by recording data and using it to increase efficiency.

Data management

For a smart city to function, it is necessary for it to manage an enormous amount of data collected through the embedded devices and systems in its environment. This is also important for the cities growth and security. Smart cities use a variety of data collection, processing, and disseminating technologies, in conjunction with data security and privacy measures, in attempting to encourage innovation and improve citizens' quality of life. This can relate to topics including utilities, health, transportation, entertainment and government services.

Online collaborative sensor data management platforms are on-line database services that allow sensor owners to register and connect their devices to feed data into an on-line database for storage and allow developers to connect to the database and build their own applications based on that data.

Electronic cards (known as smart cards) are another common component in smart city contexts. These cards possess a unique encrypted identifier that allows the owner to log into a range of government provided services (or e-services) without setting up multiple accounts. The single identifier allows governments to aggregate data about citizens and their preferences to improve the provision of services and to determine common interests of groups. This technology has been implemented in Southampton.

Cognitive technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, can be trained on the data generated by connected city devices to identify patterns. The efficacy and impact of particular policy decisions can be quantified by cognitive systems studying the continuous interactions of humans with their urban surroundings.

Transportation

Bicycle-sharing systems are an important element in smart cities.

Intelligent transportation systems and CCTV systems are also being developed.

Retractable bollards allow to restrict access inside city centers (i.e. to delivery trucks resupplying outlet stores). Opening and closing of such barriers is traditionally done manually, through an electronic pass but can even be done by means of ANPR cameras connected to the bollard system.

Human factors

According to McKinsey, smart city initiatives can have measurable positive impacts on the quality of life of its citizens and visitors. The human framework of a smart city – its economy, knowledge networks, and human support systems – is an important indicator of its success.

For example, arts and culture initiatives are common focus areas in smart city planning. Innovation is associated with intellectual curiosity and creativeness, and various projects have demonstrated that knowledge workers participate in a diverse mix of cultural and artistic activities.

Since mobility is a key area of smart city development, building a capable workforce through education initiatives is necessary. A city's learning capacity includes its education system, including available workforce training and support, and its cultural development and exchange.

Numerous Smart city programs also focus on soft infrastructure development, like increasing access to voluntary organizations and designated safe zones. This focus on social and relational capital means diversity, inclusion, and ubiquitous access to public services is worked in to city planning.

The development of a knowledge economy is also central to Smart city projects. Smart cities seeking to be hubs of economic activity in emerging tech and service sectors stress the value of innovation in city development.

Enabling technologies

Smart cities leverage a number of technologies:

• Mobile devices (such as smartphones and tablets) are a key technology allowing citizens to connect to the smart city services.
• Smart homes and specifically, the technology used in them, contribute data and connection to smart cities as a whole.
• Digital libraries have been established in several cities, and contribute to the dissemination of information within and across cities.

Additional supporting technology and trends include remote work, telehealth, the blockchain, and online banking technology,

A "ubiquitous city"(U-city) is one concept of a smart city that provides access to public services through any connected device, bringing easy accessibility to every infrastructure.

Criticism

See also: Surveillance issues in smart cities

Criticisms of smart cities include:

• Big data collection and analytics raised questions over surveillance in smart cities, particularly over predictive policing.
• Over-emphasis on smart cities means ignoring other domains.
• Urban development is often haphazard. A data-based approach "can deaden and stupefy the people who live in its all-efficient embrace".
• Technological and networked infrastructures have downsides that may offset the benefits.
• The capital mobility that allows business to take advantage of smart cities also allows them to leave for a better offer.
• Urban data collection involves surveillance, which potentially invades individual privacy. Without protections that have frequently failed scanning, identification, location tracking (including time and direction) can empower bad actors.
• Smart city approaches are irrelevant to cities without the means to implement the required technologies, such as in developing countries.
• Persons with disabilities are not always accommodated by smart city technologies.
• Digital technologies can have a significant environmental footprint that may be visited onto other communities.
• "Smart city" can be used as a slogan merely to stimulate land revenue generation.
• Clark claimed that technologies actually adopted tended to be those that deliver digital services directly to residents (e.g., ride-hailing services and online food ordering) or which solve a specific problem of municipal government, rather than enhancing infrastructure.
• Digital technology has the potential to be used in negative as well as positive ways, and its use is inherently political. Smart cities can perpetuate or mitigate inequalities.

Initiatives

China

China's smart cities movement began with a pilot program launched in 2012 through its Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. China's National New-Type Urbanization Plan for 2014-2020 included smart cities. It identified six important aspects for developing smart cities:

• information network and broadband
• digitization of planning management
• smart infrastructure
• convenience of public services
• modernizing industrial development
• sophisticated social governance.

As of 2016, approximately 500 smart city projects had launched. In 2021, China took first in all categories of the International AI City Challenge – "by some estimates, China has half of the world’s smart cities".

Commercial companies

Alibaba created City Brain. Its first overseas implementation began in 2018 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Baidu developed Apollo, a self-driving technology. Tencent launched medical technology, such as WeChat Intelligent Healthcare, Tencent Doctorwork, and AI Medical Innovation System (AIMIS).

As of 2024, "Safe City" digital products were marketed abroad by Chinese companies including Dahua Technology, Huawei, ZTE, and Hikvision. Huawei's Safe City Compact Solution focuses on improving safety. In 2018, Serbia announced a Safe City project for Belgrade in conjunction with Huawei, using one thousand cameras with advanced facial recognition and license plate recognition capabilities.

United States

The United States allocated more than $160 million toward smart city initiatives. Challenges include traffic congestion, economic growth, crime, climate change, and public services.

Canada

The "smart communities" movement took shape as a strategy to involve more users in IT. Primary issues included traffic congestion, school overcrowding and air pollution.

Europe

EU members began working on smart city developments and ICT initiatives in the mid 2010s. The Digital Agenda for Europe framework emphasizes harnessing ICTs. The 2014-15 budget of the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program, included approximately 200 million Euros to expedite smart cities.

As of 2024 Estonia had proceeded furthest towards digitizing public services.

Africa

The African Union Commission pledged to utilize ICTs to advance sustainable urban development.

Southeast Asia

ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN) is a collaborative platform to advance smart city efforts across ASEAN by catalysing bankable projects, and securing funding and support from ASEAN's external partners.

India

The Smart Cities Mission is a retrofitting and urban renewal program spearheaded by the Ministry of Urban Development.

United Nations

The New Urban Agenda emphasized the importance of smart city development, establishing a fundamental commitment for the UN's 193 member states.

Implementation

The most common characteristics of a "smart city" are networked infrastructure; emphasis on business-led urban development; social inclusion of various resident groups; and an emphasis on the environment.

Partnerships

Smart city initiatives require collaboration and involvement from government agencies, businesses, community organizations, academia, and citizens. Collaborating with businesses and academia brings technical know-how and research capabilities.

Collaborations with community organizations can improve equity and inclusivity.

Telepsychiatry

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepsychiatry

Telemental health session

Telepsychiatry or telemental health refers to the use of telecommunications technology (mostly videoconferencing and phone calls) to deliver psychiatric care remotely for people with mental health conditions. It is a branch of telemedicine.

Telepsychiatry can be effective in treating people with mental health conditions. In the short-term it can be as acceptable and effective as face-to-face care. Research also suggests comparable therapeutic factors, such as changes in problematic thinking or behaviour. 

It can improve access to mental health services for some but might also represent a barrier for those lacking access to a suitable device, the internet or the necessary digital skills. Factors such as poverty that are associated with lack of internet access are also associated with greater risk of mental health problems, making digital exclusion an important problem of telemental health services.

During the COVID-19 pandemic mental health services were adapted to telemental health in high-income countries. It proved effective and acceptable for use in an emergency situation but there were concerns regarding its long-term implementation.

Definition

Telepsychiatry or telemental health means the use of telecommunications (videoconferencing, voice call, text messages) to provide mental health services from a distance. This can include a wide range of services from different forms of traditional therapy (individual, group, family) to psychiatric evaluations and managing medications. Telemental health is a branch of telemedicine which is the process of using telecommunications technology to deliver medical services.

Effectiveness

Telemental health services can be effective in improving symptoms and quality of life among people with mental health disorders. People who choose to receive services in this way, or for whom it would otherwise be difficult to receive care, tend to view these services positively as it improves their access to mental health care. Compared to face-to-face care, telemental health services delivered via video-call can be as acceptable and effective in the short term as the former, and are sometimes reported to result in lower rates of missed appointments.

Telepsychiatry is most successful when it is provided in a personalised and flexible way. Taking individual preferences into account regarding whether service users wish to receive care remotely, and if so whether by video or phone call results in a more acceptable and effective service. These preferences may change over time and vary from appointment to appointment, so revisiting them regularly is also necessary.

Benefits and limitations

Rural communities, people with physical disabilities may benefit from telemental health, as it reduces the need to travel (which can be difficult or costly in terms of time and money) and arrange and pay for child care. In regions with low population density, online groups can be easier to implement, as achieving minimally required group numbers seems more feasible. 

For individuals with mental health problems which affect their ability and/or willingness to travel and meet clinicians face-to-face, telemental health can be an appropriate solution. It also offers a way to receive care for people reluctant to visit stigmatised places like those offering mental health care. Conversely, telemental health may exacerbate some mental health symptoms, such as paranoia and anxiety, and therefore may not be suitable for everyone.

Digital exclusion is a key concern for the use of telemental health. For already disadvantaged groups the widespread application of an online-first approach could exacerbate health inequalities. For example, mental health service users may lack access to an appropriate device or the internet. This may affect many groups of service users, including homeless people, people in inpatient wards, older adults, individuals with dementia, young children, people living in poverty, refugees, Travellers, among many others. Some people may also not have the ability, knowledge and confidence to use technology to connect online. Service users might also lack private space or find participating in sometimes intimate and distressing discussions from home intrusive. Other barriers include difficulty in establishing and maintaining therapeutic relationships and in conducting high-quality assessments. The user-friendliness of the digital platform is also an important factor in how inclusive a telemental health service is. When video calls are not acceptable or feasible phone calls or text messaging may be options but tend to result in more limited conversations and briefer interactions.

The use of video calls often results in a change in visual and auditory cues, which can be disruptive for service users (especially those engaging with mental health care for the first time) and staff. There are ways to improve the therapeutic quality when using telemental health, for example, setting up cameras at an appropriate angle and height, and using a high speed internet connection at both ends, to reduce the likelihood of video glitches or audio lags.

Providing mental health care via video calls is largely seen as beneficial among mental health staff, due to its ability to improve access to care and increase efficiency of services. When training, technical support, clear guidelines and a good digital infrastructure are available, clinicians can find telemental health useful and easy to engage with. However, when training and technical support is unavailable, it can represent a challenge and concern to staff. In addition, some mental health staff express concerns regarding safety, security, liability, and confidentiality when using video calls to provide mental health care.

Optimizing the implementation of telemental health can be achieved by using guidelines and strategies that are created together (co-produced) with service users and staff.

Sub-specialties

Telepsychiatry includes a variety of sub-specialties based on different contexts of service delivery.

Home-based telepsychiatry

Psychiatric support of people who are at home or in another private setting is called home-based telepsychiatry or direct-to-consumer telepsychiatry, and it can be delivered with only a webcam and high-speed internet service. The growth in home-based telepsychiatry is attributed to a shortage of psychiatrists and the ability to reach people in rural areas. The telepsychiatrist, collaboratively with service users, needs to consider several factors before starting treatment. They must receive informed consent and guarantee that the use of telepsychiatry is safe for the patient, use secure videoconferencing platforms in order to protect the patient's privacy and provide the same standard of care as in a traditional office. Telepsychiatry produces similar treatment outcomes and has similar reliability of diagnosis compared to face-to-face therapy. Patient satisfaction with telepsychiatry is generally high, although providers report lower levels of satisfaction than patients. Despite a higher up-front cost, telepsychiatry is more cost-effective in the long run due to savings in travel expenses. At the same time patients may lack access to privacy in their homes to attend telepsychiatry appointments.

Forensic telepsychiatry

Forensic telepsychiatry is the use of a remote psychiatrist or nurse practitioner for psychiatry in a prison or correctional facility, including psychiatric assessment, medication consultation, suicide watch, pre-parole evaluations and more. Telepsychiatry can deliver significant cost savings to correctional facilities by eliminating the need for prisoners to be escorted to off-site appointments and psychiatric interventions.

On-demand telepsychiatry

As of 2008, guidelines are being developed for the provision of telepsychiatric consultation for emergency psychiatric patients, such as the evaluation of people who are distressed and feeling suicidal, depressed, manic, or experience psychosis, acute anxiety patients. However, emergency telepsychiatry services are already being provided to hospital emergency departments, jails, community mental health centers, substance abuse treatment facilities, and schools. Emergency telepsychiatry can ease staff shortages in overworked hospital emergency departments and increase the number of people with mental health conditions who can receive care. Rather than employ expensive, short-term locum tenens doctors or have emergency department physicians evaluate the psychiatric stability of their patients, hospitals can use telepsychiatry to decrease costs and increase patient access to behavioral health evaluations by psychiatric specialists.

Crisis telepsychiatry is also an efficient means of reducing the need for psychiatric boarding. Psychiatric boarding is when someone is detained, often in a hospital emergency department, while waiting for proper psychiatric treatment. With the increased throughput offered by telepsychiatry, psychiatric consumers enjoy reduced wait times and faster access to care.

Scheduled telepsychiatry

Many facilities that offer behavioral health care are turning to telepsychiatry providers to allow for an increased care capacity. With routine telepsychiatry, a consistent provider or small group of providers serve a regular caseload of service users in previously scheduled blocks of time. Remote providers can be consulted for medication management, treatment team meetings, supervision, or to offer traditional psychiatric assessment and consultations.

Having access to remote providers allows facilities, especially those in rural areas that struggle to recruit and maintain providers, access to a greater variety of speciality care to offer their service users. For example behavioural therapy is an effective treatment for tics in children but many can not access this service due to a lack of professionals. Offering an online, self-guided but therapist-supported intervention can be effective in reducing tics and could allow more people to receive care.

Telepsychiatry around the world

In the United States

One of the drivers behind telepsychiatry's growth in the United States has been a national shortage of psychiatrists, particularly in specialty areas such as child and adolescent psychiatry. Telepsychiatry can allow fewer doctors to serve more patients by improving utilization of the psychiatrist's time. The most common means of insurance coverage for telehealth services among the United States is to incorporate coverage into the Medicare program. Reimbursement for Medicare-covered services must satisfy federal requirements of efficiency, economy and quality of care. Since 1999, Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement for all kinds of telehealth services have expanded, requirements of providers have been reduced, and grants have been given to support telehealth program adoption. For 2014, the Center for Medicare (CMS) services does cover telemedicine services, including telepsychiatry in many areas.

HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a United States federal law that establishes security and privacy standards for electronic medical information exchange, including telemental health services. In order to comply with HIPAA guidelines, many providers develop their own specialized videoconferencing services, since common third-party consumer solutions do not include sufficient security and privacy safeguards. There are also a growing number of HIPAA-compliant technologies available for telepsychiatry.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation and Epic Research database of electronic health records, 40% of mental health and substance abuse visits in the United States were conducted by telehealth in 2021 (as compared with only 5% of all other outpatient care visits and virtually no mental health and substance abuse visits being conducted by telehealth prior to the COVID-19 pandemic), while more than 150 million Americans lived in designated healthcare shortage areas for mental health professionals by the Health Resources and Services Administration in 2022.

Since the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in November 2021, the telehealth industry in the United States has expanded due to its $65 billion appropriation for broadband internet access expansion, and online mental health start-up companies saw a $4.8 billion increase in investment in 2022 according to Rock Health.

Digital advertising spending by telehealth companies increased from approximately $10 million in 2020 to $100 million in 2021 (while $23 million in telehealth digital advertising was spent on TikTok alone from January to November 2022). In December 2022, The Wall Street Journal published an analysis it conducted in October and November of that year of telehealth digital advertisements that found that 20 companies ran more than 2,100 advertisements on Facebook and Instagram that described prescription drug benefits without citing risks (including for ketamine and testosterone), that promoted unapproved usages of drugs, or that featured testimonials without disclosing the speaker's relationship with the company, while 15 telehealth companies ran more than 1,800 other social media advertisements without prescription drug warnings or risks (including at least 800 that promoted controlled substances).

Several U.S. based media publishers have even invested in testing and surveying to find what makes the best online psychiatry services. Brands like HelpGuide, a non-profit that specializes in mental health education and awareness, has conduct studies to identify the top providers in online psychiatry in the United States.

In India

India's large population and relatively small number of psychiatrists makes telepsychiatric service a good option for expanding access to mental health care. Telepsychiatry in India is still a young industry, but it is gradually growing, led by institutes such as the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in Chandigarh and the Schizophrenia Research Foundation in Chennai.

In the UK

In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic the National Health Service (NHS) has been slow at implementing telepsychiatry.

During the pandemic, there was rapid utilisation of telemental health to maintain contact and provide some services to people with mental health problems. Technological initiatives have also helped to address social isolation, which worsened throughout the pandemic. There were large increases in remote consultations in NHS primary care, and national data reported that most contacts in NHS mental health settings were delivered remotely in 2020 particularly during the first UK lockdown (March to July 2020).

Global health

There is an increasing demand for telemental health services in low- and middle income countries. This is especially pronounced due to the lack of access to quality healthcare, underfunding and low awareness of mental health issues. In a global health context telemental health may offer access to high-quality mental health services for a wider range of people. At the same time there are concerns around data security and challenges regarding proper infrastructure, capacity, access and skills.

Telemental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

Due to lockdowns or ‘stay at home’ orders at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health services in high-income countries were able to adapt existing service provision to telemental health care. Estimates suggest that between 48% and 100% of service users who were already receiving care at the start of the pandemic were able to continue their mental health care using remote methods. Some face-to-face appointments still took place if necessary.

During the pandemic telemental health care (mostly phone and video calls) was effective and viewed as acceptable by the majority of clinicians and service users for use in an emergency situation. However both groups had concerns regarding the longer term use of telemental health care. For example, clinicians identified concerns including difficulties with medication appointments, concerns around engaging and assessing new patients, and finding it harder to assess some physical indicators of mental health status remotely. Service users identified barriers including a lack of private space at home to access during their sessions or access to technology.

The rates of telemental health use seem to have declined as COVID-19 restrictions were loosened, indicating that face-to-face care might be preferable for some service users and clinicians.