Megan O’Neil at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Government agencies and philanthropic organizations are increasingly staging competitions as a way generate interest in solving difficult technological, social, and environmental problems, according to a new report.
“The Craft of Prize Design: Lessons From the Public Sector” found that well-designed competitions backed by cash incentives can help organizations attract new ideas, mobilize action, and stimulate markets.
“Incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private, and philanthropic sectors,” the report says.
Produced by Deloitte Consulting’s innovation practice, the report was financially supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Case; Joyce; John S. and James L. Knight; Kresge; and Rockefeller foundations.
The federal government has staged more than 350 prize competitions during the past five years to stimulate innovation and crowdsource solutions, according to the report. And philanthropic organizations are also fronting prizes for competitions promoting innovative responses to questions such as how to strengthen communities and encourage sustainable energy consumption.
One example cited by the report is the Talent Dividend Prize, sponsored by CEOs for Cities and the Kresge Foundation, which awards $1-million to the city that most increases its college graduation rate during a four-year period. A second example is the MIT Clean Energy Prize, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, which offered a total of $1 million in prize money. Submissions generated $85 million in capital and research grants, according to the report.
A prize-based project should not be adopted when an established approach to solve a problem already exists or if potential participants don’t have the interest or time to work on solving a problem, the report concludes. Instead, prize designers must gauge the capacity of potential participants before announcing a prize, and make sure that it will spur the discovery of new solutions.”
The Emerging Power of Big Data
New America Foundation Report on the Chicago experience of using big data: “Big data is transforming the commercial marketplace but it also has the potential to reshape government affairs and urban development. In a new report from the Emerging Leaders Program at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, Lincoln S. Ellis, a founding member of the World Economic Roundtable, and other authors from the Emerging Leaders Program, explore how big data can be used by mega-cities to meet the challenges they face in an age of resource constraints to improve the lives of their residents.
Using Chicago as a case study, the report examines how the explosion of data availability enables cities to do more with less—to improve government services, fund much needed transportation, provide better education, and guarantee public safety. And do more with less is what many cities have had to do over the past five years because many cities have had to cut their budgets and reduce the number of public employees in the post-financial crisis economy. It is also what they will need to continue to do in the future.
“Unfortunately, resource constraints are a consistent feature of the post-crisis global landscape,” argues Ellis. “Happily, so too is the renaissance in productivity gains garnered by our ability to leverage technology and information to achieve our most important public purposes in a smarter and more efficient way.”
Click here to view the report as a PDF.”
Transparency, legitimacy and trust
John Kamensky at Federal Times: “The Open Government movement has captured the imagination of many around the world as a way of increasing transparency, participation, and accountability. In the US, many of the federal, state, and local Open Government initiatives have been demonstrated to achieve positive results for citizens here and abroad. In fact, the White House’s science advisors released a refreshed Open Government plan in early June.
However, a recent study in Sweden says the benefits of transparency may vary, and may have little impact on citizens’ perception of legitimacy and trust in government. This research suggests important lessons on how public managers should approach the design of transparency strategies, and how they work in various conditions.
Jenny de Fine Licht, a scholar at the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, offers a more nuanced view of the influence of transparency in political decision making on public legitimacy and trust, in a paper that appears in the current issue of “Public Administration Review.” Her research challenges the assumption of many in the Open Government movement that greater transparency necessarily leads to greater citizen trust in government.
Her conclusion, based on an experiment involving over 1,000 participants, was that the type and degree of transparency “has different effects in different policy areas.” She found that “transparency is less effective in policy decisions that involve trade-offs related to questions of human life and death or well-being.”
The background
Licht says there are some policy decisions that involve what are called “taboo tradeoffs.” A taboo tradeoff, for example, would be making budget tradeoffs in policy areas such as health care and environmental quality, where human life or well-being is at stake. In cases where more money is an implicit solution, the author notes, “increased transparency in these policy areas might provoke feeling of taboo, and, accordingly, decreased perceived legitimacy.”
Other scholars, such as Harvard’s Jane Mansbridge,contend that “full transparency may not always be the best practice in policy making.” Full transparency in decision-making processes would include, for example, open appropriation committee meetings. Instead, she recommends “transparency in rationale – in procedures, information, reasons, and the facts on which the reasons are based.” That is, provide a full explanation after-the-fact.
Licht tested the hypothesis that full transparency of the decision-making process vs. partial transparency via providing after-the-fact rationales for decisions may create different results, depending on the policy arena involved…
Open Government advocates have generally assumed that full and open transparency is always better. Licht’s conclusion is that “greater transparency” does not necessarily increase citizen legitimacy and trust. Instead, the strategy of encouraging a high degree of transparency requires a more nuanced application in its use. While the she cautions about generalizing from her experiment, the potential implications for government decision-makers could be significant.
To date, many of the various Open Government initiatives across the country have assumed a “one size fits all” approach, across the board. Licht’s conclusions, however, help explain why the results of various initiatives have been divergent in terms of citizen acceptance of open decision processes.
Her experiment seems to suggest that citizen engagement is more likely to create a greater citizen sense of legitimacy and trust in areas involving “routine” decisions, such as parks, recreation, and library services. But that “taboo” decisions in policy areas involving tradeoffs of human life, safety, and well-being may not necessarily result in greater trust as a result of the use of full and open transparency of decision-making processes.
While she says that transparency – whether full or partial – is always better than no transparency, her experiment at least shows that policy makers will, at a minimum, know that the end result may not be greater legitimacy and trust. In any case, her research should engender a more nuanced conversation among Open Government advocates at all levels of government. In order to increase citizens’ perceptions of legitimacy and trust in government, it will take more than just advocating for Open Data!”
Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target
New Report commissioned by Omydiar Network on the Business Case for Open Data: “Economic analysis has confirmed the significant contribution to economic growth and productivity achievable through an open data agenda. Governments, the private sector, individuals and communities all stand to benefit from the innovation and information that will inform investment, drive the creation of new industries, and inform decision making and research. To mark a step change in the way valuable information is created and reused, the G20 should release information as open data.
In May 2014, Omidyar Network commissioned Lateral Economics to undertake economic analysis on the potential of open data to support the G20’s 2% growth target and illustrate how an open data agenda can make a significant contribution to economic growth and productivity. Combining all G20 economies, output could increase by USD 13 trillion cumulatively over the next five years. Implementation of open data policies would thus boost cumulative G20 GDP by around 1.1 percentage points (almost 55%) of the G20’s 2% growth target over five years.
Recommendations
Importantly, open data cuts across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption. This memo suggests an open data thread that runs across all G20 priorities. The more data is opened, the more it can be used, reused, repurposed and built on—in combination with other data—for everyone’s benefit.
We call on G20 economies to sign up to the Open Data Charter.
The G20 should ensure that data released by G20 working groups and themes is in line with agreed open data standards. This will lead to more accountable, efficient, effective governments who are going further to expose inadequacy, fight corruption and spur innovation.
Data is a national resource and open data is a ‘win-win’ policy. It is about making more of existing resources. We know that the cost of opening data is smaller than the economic returns, which could be significant. Methods to respect privacy concerns must be taken into account. If this is done, as the public and private sector share of information grows, there will be increasing positive returns.
The G20 opportunity
This November, leaders of the G20 Member States will meet in Australia to drive forward commitments made in the St Petersburg G20 Leaders Declaration last September and to make firm progress on stimulating growth. Actions across the G20 will include increasing investment, lifting employment and participation, enhancing trade and promoting competition.
The resulting ‘Brisbane Action Plan’ will encapsulate all of these commitments with the aim of raising the level of G20 output by at least 2% above the currently projected level over the next five years. There are major opportunities for cooperative and collective action by G20 governments.
Governments should intensify the release of existing public sector data – both government and publicly funded research data. But much more can be done to promote open data than simply releasing more government data. In appropriate circumstances, governments can mandate public disclosure of private sector data (e.g. in corporate financial reporting).
Recommendations for action
- G20 governments should adopt the principles of the Open Data Charter to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
- G20 governments should adopt specific open data targets under each G20 theme, as illustrated below, such as releasing open data related to beneficial owners of companies, as well revenues from extractive industries
- G20 governments should consider harmonizing licensing regimes across the G20
- G20 governments should adopt metrics for measuring the quantity and quality of open data publication, e.g. using the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Certificates as a bottom-up mechanism for driving the adoption of common standards.
Illustrative G20 examples
Fiscal and monetary policy
Governments possess rich real time data that is not open or accessed by government macro-economic managers. G20 governments should:
- Open up models that lie behind economic forecasts and help assess alternative policy settings;
- Publish spending and contractual data to enable comparative shopping by government between government suppliers.
Anti corruption
Open data may directly contribute to reduced corruption by increasing the likelihood corruption will be detected. G20 governments should:
- Release open data related to beneficial owners of companies as well as revenues from extractive industries,
- Collaborate on harmonised technical standards that permit the tracing of international money flows – including the tracing of beneficial owners of commercial entities, and the comparison and reconciliation of transactions across borders.
Trade
Obtaining and using trade data from multiple jurisdictions is difficult. Access fees, specific licenses, and non-machine readable formats all involve large transaction costs. G20 governments should:
- Harmonise open data policies related to trade data.
- Use standard trade schema and formats.
Employment
Higher quality information on employment conditions would facilitate better matching of employees to organizations, producing greater job-satisfaction and improved productivity. G20 governments should:
- Open up centralised job vacancy registers to provide new mechanisms for people to find jobs.
- Provide open statistical information about the demand for skills in particular areas to help those supporting training and education to hone their offerings.
Energy
Open data will help reduce the cost of energy supply and improve energy efficiency. G20 governments should:
- Provide incentives for energy companies to publish open data from consumers and suppliers to enable cost savings through optimizing energy plans.
- Release energy performance certifications for buildings
- Publish real-time energy consumption for government buildings.
Infrastructure
Current infrastructure asset information is fragmented and inefficient. Exposing current asset data would be a significant first step in understanding gaps and providing new insights. G20 governments should:
- Publish open data on governments’ infrastructure assets and plans to better understand infrastructure gaps, enable greater efficiency and insights in infrastructure development and use and analyse cost/benefits.
- Publish open infrastructure data, including contracts via Open Contracting Partnership, in a consistent and harmonised way across G20 countries…”
App pays commuters to take routes that ease congestion
Springwise: “Congestion at peak hours is a major problem in the world’s busiest city centres. We’ve recently seen Gothenburg in Sweden offering free bicycles to ease the burden on public transport services, but now a new app is looking to take a different approach to the same problem. Urban Engines uses algorithms to help cities determine key congestion choke points and times, and can then reward commuters for avoiding them.
The Urban Engines system is based on commuters using the smart commuter cards already found in many major cities. The company tracks journeys made with those commuter cards, and uses that data to identify main areas of congestion, and at what times the congestion occurs. The system has already been employed in Washington, D.C, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, helping provide valuable data for work with city planners.
It’s in Singapore, however, where the most interesting work has been achieved so far. There, commuters who have signed up and registered their commuter cards can earn rewards when they travel. They will earn one point for every kilometre travelled during peak hours, or triple that when travelling off-peak. The points earned can then be converted into discounts on future journeys, or put towards an in-app raffle game, where they have the opportunity to win sums of money. Urban Engines claim there’s been a 7 to 13 percent reduction in journeys made during peak hours, with 200,000 commuters taking part.
The company is based on an original experiment carried out in Bangalore. The rewards program there, carried out among 20,000 employees of the Indian company Infosys, lead to 17 percent of traffic shifting to off-peak travel times in six months. A similarly successful experiment has also been carried out on the Stanford University campus, and the plan is to now expand to other major cities…”
Poetica
Mike Butcher at TechnologyCrunch: “The ability to collaborate on the draft of a document is actually fiendishly tedious online. Many people might be used to Microsoft Word ‘Track Changes’ (ugh) despite the fact it looks awful and takes some getting used to. Nor does Google Docs really create a collaboration experience that mere mortals can get into. Step in Poetica, a brand new startup co-founded by Blaine Cook, formerly Twitter’s founding lead engineer.
Cook has now raised an angel round of funding for the London-based company which is hoping to change how teams create, share and edit work on the web, across any devices and mediums.
Poetica, which opens its doors to new signups today, is a browser-based editor and Chrome extension that portrays a more traditional view of text collaboration – in the same way you might see someone scribble on a piece of paper….
Cook says the goal is to “bring rich collaboration tools based on cutting-edge technology and design to everyone” who wants to communicate online. In other words, they are going for a fairly big play here. And he reckons he can do it from London, over the Valley, where he worked at Twitter: “London has an incredible community of brilliant software engineers and designers, and a growing and supportive investor base.”
How collective intelligence emerges: knowledge creation process in Wikipedia from microscopic viewpoint
Kyungho Lee for the 2014 International Working Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces: “The Wikipedia, one of the richest human knowledge repositories on the Internet, has been developed by collective intelligence. To gain insight into Wikipedia, one asks how initial ideas emerge and develop to become a concrete article through the online collaborative process? Led by this question, the author performed a microscopic observation of the knowledge creation process on the recent article, “Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.” The author collected not only the revision history of the article but also investigated interactions between collaborators by making a user-paragraph network to reveal an intellectual intervention of multiple authors. The knowledge creation process on the Wikipedia article was categorized into 4 major steps and 6 phases from the beginning to the intellectual balance point where only revisions were made. To represent this phenomenon, the author developed a visaphor (digital visual metaphor) to digitally represent the article’s evolving concepts and characteristics. Then the author created a dynamic digital information visualization using particle effects and network graph structures. The visaphor reveals the interaction between users and their collaborative efforts as they created and revised paragraphs and debated aspects of the article.”
Crowdsourcing moving beyond the fringe
Bob Brown in Networked World: ” Depending up on how you look at it, crowdsourcing is all the rage these days — think Wikipedia, X Prize and Kickstarter — or at the other extreme, greatly underused.
To the team behind the new “insight network” Yegii, crowdsourcing has not nearly reached its potential despite having its roots as far back as the early 1700s and a famous case of the British Government seeking a solution to “The Longitude Problem” in order to make sailing less life threatening. (I get the impression that mention of this example is obligatory at any crowdsourcing event.)
This angel-funded startup, headed by an MIT Sloan School of Management senior lecturer and operating from a Boston suburb, is looking to exploit crowdsourcing’s potential through a service that connects financial, healthcare, technology and other organizations seeking knowledge with experts who can provide it – and fairly fast. To CEO Trond Undheim, crowdsourcing is “no longer for fringe freelance work,” and the goal is to get more organizations and smart individuals involved.
“Yegii is essentially a network of networks, connecting people, organizations, and knowledge in new ways,” says Undheim, who explains that the name Yegii is Korean for “talk” or “discussion”. “Our focus is laser sharp: we only rank and rate knowledge that says something essential about what I see as the four forces of industry disruption: technology, policy, user dynamics and business models. We tackle challenging business issues across domains, from life sciences to energy to finance. The point is that today’s industry classification is falling apart. We need more specific insight than in-house strategizing or generalist consulting advice.”
Undheim attempted to drum up interest in the new business last week at an event at Babson College during which a handful of crowdsourcing experts spoke. Harvard Business School adjunct professor Alan MacCormack discussed the X Prize, Netflix Prize and other examples of spurring competition through crowdsourcing. MIT’s Peter Gloor extolled the virtue of collaborative and smart swarms of people vs. stupid crowds (such as football hooligans). A couple of advertising/marketing execs shared stories of how clients and other brands are increasingly tapping into their customer base and the general public for new ideas from slogans to products, figuring that potential new customers are more likely to trust their peers than corporate ads. Another speaker dove into more details about how to run a crowdsourcing challenge, which includes identifying motivation that goes beyond money.
All of this was to frame Yegii’s crowdsourcing plan, which is at the beta stage with about a dozen clients (including Akamai and Santander bank) and is slated for mass production later this year. Yegii’s team consists of five part-timers, plus a few interns, who are building a web-based platform that consists of “knowledge assets,” that is market research, news reports and datasets from free and paid sources. That content – on topics that range from Bitcoin’s impact on banks to telecom bandwidth costs — is reviewed and ranked through a combination of machine learning and human peers. Information seekers would pay Yegii up to hundreds of dollars per month or up to tens of thousands of dollars per project, and then multidisciplinary teams would accept the challenge of answering their questions via customized reports within staged deadlines.
“We are focused on building partnerships with other expert networks and associations that have access to smart people with spare capacity, wherever they are,” Undheim says.
One reason organizations can benefit from crowdsourcing, Undheim says, is because of the “ephemeral nature of expertise in today’s society.” In other words, people within your organization might think of themselves as experts in this or that, but when they really think about it, they might realize their level of expertise has faded. Yegii will strive to narrow down the best sources of information for those looking to come up to speed on a subject over a weekend, whereas hunting for that information across a vast search engine would not be nearly as efficient….”
Lawsuit Would Force IRS to Release Nonprofit Tax Forms Digitally
Suzanne Perry at the Chronicle of Philanthropy on how “Open Data Could Shine a Light on Pay and Lobbying”: “Nonprofits that want to find out what their peers are doing can find a wealth of information in the forms the groups must file each year with the Internal Revenue Service—how much they pay their chief executives, how much they spend on fundraising, who is on their boards, where they offer services.
But the way the IRS makes those data available harkens to the digital dark ages, and critics who want to overhaul the system have been shaking up the generally polite nonprofit world with legal challenges, charges of monopoly, and talk of “disrupting” the status quo.
The issue will take center stage in a courtroom this week when a federal district judge in San Francisco is scheduled to consider arguments about whether to approve the IRS’s move to dismiss a lawsuit filed by an open-records group.
The group wants to obtain some specific Forms 990s, the informational tax documents filed by nonprofits, in a format that can be read by computers.
In theory, that shouldn’t be difficult since the nine nonprofits involved— including the American National Standards Institute, the New Horizons Foundation, and the International Code Council—submitted the forms electronically. But the IRS converts all 990s, no matter how they were filed, into images, rendering them useless for digital operations like searching multiple forms for information.
That means watchdog groups and those that provide information on charities, like Charity Navigator, GuideStar, and the Urban Institute, have to spend money to manually enter the data they get from the IRS before making it available to the public, even if it has previously been digitized.
The lawsuit against the IRS, filed by Public.Resource.Org, aims to end that practice.
Carl Malamud, who heads the group, is a longtime activist who successfully pushed the Securities and Exchange Commission to post corporate filings free online in the 1990s, among other projects.
He wants to do the same with the IRS, arguing that data should be readily available at no cost about a sector that represents more than 1.5 million tax-exempt organizations and more than $1.5-trillion in revenue.