The merits of participatory budgeting

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Hollie Russon Gilman at Aljazeera America: “For many Americans, government just isn’t working. In 2013, government dysfunction surpassed the economy as the top identified U.S. problem. A recent survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans rate the health of our democracy as weak — and unlikely to get better anytime soon. But in small corners throughout the United States, democratic innovations are creating new opportunities for citizens to be a part of governance. Collectively known as open government or civic innovation, these projects are engaging policymakers, citizens and civil society and proving the skeptics wrong.
One particularly promising innovation in participatory budgeting, or PB — a process to directly empower citizens to make spending decisions on a defined public budget. PB was first attempted in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1989. Its success led to the World Bank calling PB a “best practice” in democratic innovation. Since then, PB has expanded to over 1,500 cities worldwide, including several in the U.S. Starting in 2009 in Chicago’s 49th Ward with a budget of just $1 million, PB in the United States has expanded to a $27 million-a-year experiment. Municipal leaders from Vallejo, California, to New York City have turned over a portion of their discretionary funds to neighborhood residents. Boston recently launched the first youth-driven PB. Nearly half of New York’s City Council members are slated to participate this fall, after newly elected Mayor Bill de Blasio made it a cornerstone of his campaign. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel created a new manager of participatory budgeting who will help coordinate Council districts that want to participate. The White House recently included federally supported participatory budgeting as part of its international Open Government Partnership commitments.

Wants and needs

In PB, citizens are empowered to identify community needs, work with elected officials to craft budget proposals and vote upon where to spend public funds. The decisions are binding. And that’s important: Making democracy work is not just about making better citizens or changing policies. It is also about creating structures that create the conditions that make the effective exercise of democratic citizenship possible, and PB is uniquely structured to do that.

Chicago has been a particularly insightful petri dish to study PB in the U.S., mainly because the city is an unlikely candidate for democratic innovations. For decades its Democratic machine retained a strong and continuous hold over city government. The Daley family held the mayoralty for a combined 12 terms. While discretionary funds (known as “menu money”) are allocated equally — but not equitably, given different needs — to all 50 wards, the process of spending this money is at the discretion of locally elected aldermen. From 1972 to 2009, 30 Chicago aldermen were indicted and convicted of federal crimes ranging from income tax evasion to extortion, embezzlement and conspiracy. Clearly, Chicago has not always been a model of good governance.
Against this backdrop, PB has continued to expand in Chicago. This year three districts participated. The Fifth Ward, home to the University of Chicago, decided not to continue the process again this year. Instead, this year the ward had four groups of residents each allocate $250,000. The alderwoman noted that this enabled the transparency and engagement aspect of PB with fewer process resources — they had only 100 people come out to vote.
Different versions of PB are aimed to lower the current barriers to civic engagement. I have seen PB bring out people who have never before engaged in politics. Many longtime civic participants often cite PB as the single most meaningful civic engagement of their lives — far above, say, jury duty. Suddenly, citizens are empowered with real decision-making authority and leave with new relationships with their peers, community and elected officials.
However, PB is not a stand-alone endeavor. It must be part of a larger effort to improve governance. This must include greater transparency in public decision making and empowering citizens to hold their elected officials more accountable. The process provides an enormous education that can be translated into civic activity beyond PB. Ideally after engaging in PB, a citizen will be better equipped to volunteer in the community, vote or push for policy reform. What other infrastructure, both online and off, is needed to support citizens who want to further engage in more collaborative governance?  …”

An App That Makes It Easy to Pester Your Congress Member

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Klint Finley in Wired: “Joe Trippi pioneered the use of social media as a fundraising tool. As campaign manager for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean in 2004, he started a trend that has reinvented that way politicians run for office. But he believes that many politicians are still missing out on the power of the internet once they’re elected.
“There’s been a lot of focus on winning campaigns, but there’s been less focus on governing,” Trippi says. “There are a lot of tools out there for campaigns to talk to voters, but not as many looking at how to give citizens and voters more impact on actual elected leaders in Congress.”

‘There’s been a lot of focus on winning campaigns, but there’s been less focus on governing.’

That’s why Trippi is working with an internet startup called Countable, which seeks to give citizens a greater voice in national politics. The company’s online service, which launches to the public today, gives you a simple and concise overview of the bills your national representatives are debating, and it lets you instantly send emails to these representatives, telling them how you would like them to vote.
Countable joins a growing wave of online tools that can improve the dialogue between citizens and representatives, including Madison, which lets you add your thoughts to both proposed bills and existing policies, and ThinkUp, a tool the White House uses to gauge popular sentiment through social media. The new service is most similar to Democracy OS, which lets governments and non-profits set up websites where people can discuss issues and vote on particular topics. But instead of building a platform that government operations must install on their own computer servers, Countable is offering a ready-made service.
In other words, you don’t have to wait for your representatives to adopt anything. All you have to do is sign up and start sending your thoughts to Congress….
One of the biggest challenges the company faces is providing enough information for citizens to develop informed opinions, without overwhelming them with details. “Fortunately, most pieces of legislation can be reasonably straight forward,” Myers says. “It’s when you get into complicated legislation with different political motivations associated with it that things get hard.”
For example, politicians often add amendments to bills that contain additional regulations or spending unrelated to the bill in question. Myers says that Countable will post updates to bills that have such riders. “Being able to call that out is actually a benefit in what we do,” he says.
The company is hiring writers from a variety of backgrounds, including politics and marketing, to ensure that the content is both accurate and understandable. Myers says the company strives to offer a balanced view of the pros and cons of each piece of legislation. “The editorial team represents multiple different political view points, but it will never be perfect,” he admits. To improve develop the editorial process, the company is also advised by former Reuters News publisher Andrew Goldner.
countablescreen.jpg
The other issue is e-mailing your representatives may not be that effective. And since Countable doesn’t do much to verify that you are who you say you are, a lobbyist or advocacy group could sign-up for multiple accounts and make it look like constituents feel more strongly about an issue than they actually do. But Myers says this isn’t much an issue, at least for now. “When talking with representatives, it’s not a major concern,” Myers says. “You can already e-mail your representatives without verifying your identity…”

Conceptualizing Open Data ecosystems: A timeline analysis of Open Data development in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Tom Heath et al: “In this paper, we conceptualize Open Data ecosystems by analysing the major stakeholders in the UK. The conceptualization is based on a review of popular Open Data definitions and business ecosystem theories, which we applied to empirical data using a timeline analysis. Our work is informed by a combination of discourse analysis and in-depth interviews, undertaken during the summer of 2013. Drawing on the UK as a best practice example, we identify a set of structural business ecosystem properties: circular flow of resources, sustainability, demand that encourages supply, and dependence developing between suppliers, intermediaries, and users. However, significant gaps and shortcomings are found to remain. Most prominently, demand is not yet fully encouraging supply and actors have yet to experience fully mutual interdependence.”

Transparency Trumps Technology: Reconciling Open Meeting Laws with Modern Technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Note by Cassandra B. Roeder in Wm. & Mary L. Rev: “As technological advances revolutionize communication patterns in the private and public sectors, government actors must consider their reactions carefully. Public representatives may take advantage of modern technology to improve communications with constituents and to operate more efficiently. However, this progress must be made with an eye to complying with certain statutory restrictions placed on public bodies…
This Note will argue that, in order to comply with the spirit and the letter of open meeting laws, public bodies should limit use of modern technology to: (1) providing information and soliciting public feedback through noninteractive websites, and (2) enabling remote participation of public body members at meetings. This Note will then contend that public bodies should not utilize interactive online forums or group e-mails. Although these technologies may offer certain obvious benefits, this Note argues that: (1) they do not comply with current open meeting law requirements, and (2) legislatures should not alter open meeting laws to allow for their use.8 It concludes that although more permissive statutes might lead to an increase in civic participation and government efficiency, these potential gains must be sacrificed in order to preserve transparency, the primary purpose of open meeting laws…”

 

The Emerging Science of Superspreaders (And How to Tell If You're One Of Them)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Who are the most influential spreaders of information on a network? That’s a question that marketers, bloggers, news services and even governments would like answered. Not least because the answer could provide ways to promote products quickly, to boost the popularity of political parties above their rivals and to seed the rapid spread of news and opinions.
So it’s not surprising that network theorists have spent some time thinking about how best to identify these people and to check how the information they receive might spread around a network. Indeed, they’ve found a number of measures that spot so-called superspreaders, people who spread information, ideas or even disease more efficiently than anybody else.
But there’s a problem. Social networks are so complex that network scientists have never been able to test their ideas in the real world—it has always been too difficult to reconstruct the exact structure of Twitter or Facebook networks, for example. Instead, they’ve created models that mimic real networks in certain ways and tested their ideas on these instead.
But there is growing evidence that information does not spread through real networks in the same way as it does through these idealised ones. People tend to pass on information only when they are interested in a topic and when they are active, factors that are hard to take into account in a purely topological model of a network.
So the question of how to find the superspreaders remains open. That looks set to change thanks to the work of Sen Pei at Beihang University in Beijing and a few pals who have performed the first study of superspreaders on real networks.
These guys have studied the way information flows around various networks ranging from the Livejournal blogging network to the network of scientific publishing at the American Physical Society’s, as well as on subsets of the Twitter and Facebook networks. And they’ve discovered the key indicator that identifies superspreaders in these networks.
In the past, network scientists have developed a number of mathematical tests to measure the influence that individuals have on the spread of information through a network. For example, one measure is simply the number of connections a person has to other people in the network, a property known as their degree. The thinking is that the most highly connected people are the best at spreading information.
Another measure uses the famous PageRank algorithm that Google developed for ranking webpages. This works by ranking somebody more highly if they are connected to other highly ranked people.
Then there is ‘betweenness centrality’ , a measure of how many of the shortest paths across a network pass through a specific individual. The idea is that these people are more able to inject information into the network.
And finally there is a property of nodes in a network known as their k-core. This is determined by iteratively pruning the peripheries of a network to see what is left. The k-core is the step at which that node or person is pruned from the network. Obviously, the most highly connected survive this process the longest and have the highest k-core score..
The question that Sen and co set out to answer was which of these measures best picked out superspreaders of information in real networks.
They began with LiveJournal, a network of blogs in which individuals maintain lists of friends that represent social ties to other LiveJournal users. This network allows people to repost information from other blogs and to use a reference the links back to the original post. This allows Sen and co to recreate not only the network of social links between LiveJournal users but also the way in which information is spread between them.
Sen and co collected all of the blog posts from February 2010 to November 2011, a total of more than 56 million posts. Of these, some 600,000 contain links to other posts published by LiveJournal users.
The data reveals two important properties of information diffusion. First, only some 250,000 users are actively involved in spreading information. That’s a small fraction of the total.
More significantly, they found that information did not always diffuse across the social network. The found that information could spread between two LiveJournal users even though they have no social connection.
That’s probably because they find this information outside of the LiveJournal ecosystem, perhaps through web searches or via other networks. “Only 31.93% of the spreading posts can be attributed to the observable social links,” they say.
That’s in stark contrast to the assumptions behind many social network models. These simulate the way information flows by assuming that it travels directly through the network from one person to another, like a disease spread by physical contact.
The work of Sen and co suggests that influences outside the network are crucial too. In practice, information often spreads via several seemingly independent sources within the network at the same time. This has important implications for the way superspreaders can be spotted.
Sen and co say that a person’s degree– the number of other people he or her are connected to– is not as good a predictor of information diffusion as theorists have thought.  “We find that the degree of the user is not a reliable predictor of influence in all circumstances,” they say.
What’s more, the Pagerank algorithm is often ineffective in this kind of network as well. “Contrary to common belief, although PageRank is effective in ranking web pages, there are many situations where it fails to locate superspreaders of information in reality,” they say….
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1405.1790 : Searching For Superspreaders Of Information In Real-World Social Media”

Open Source Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Christopher Hobbs, Matthew Moran and Daniel Salisbury: “This edited volume takes a fresh look at the subject of open source intelligence (OSINT), exploring both the opportunities and the challenges that this emergent area offers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In particular, it explores the new methodologies and approaches that technological advances have engendered, while at the same time considering the risks associated with the pervasive nature of the Internet.
Drawing on a diverse range of experience and expertise, the book begins with a number of chapters devoted to exploring the uses and value of OSINT in a general sense, identifying patterns, trends and key areas of debate. The focus of the book then turns to the role and influence of OSINT in three key areas of international security – nuclear proliferation; humanitarian crises; and terrorism. The book offers a timely discussion on the merits and failings of OSINT and provides readers with an insight into the latest and most original research being conducted in this area.”
Table of contents:
PART I: OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE: NEW METHODS AND APPROACHES
1. Exploring the Role and Value of Open Source Intelligence; Stevyn Gibson
2. Towards the discipline of Social Media Intelligence ‘ SOCMINT’; David Omand,  Carl Miller and Jamie Bartlett
3. The Impact of OSINT on Cyber-Security; Alastair Paterson and James Chappell
PART II: OSINT AND PROLIFERATION
4. Armchair Safeguards: The Role of OSINT in Proliferation Analysis; Christopher Hobbs and Matthew Moran
5. OSINT and Proliferation Procurement: Combating Illicit Trade; Daniel Salisbury
PART III: OSINT and Humanitarian Crises
6. Positive and Negative Noise in Humanitarian Action: The OSINT Dimension; Randolph Kent
7. Human Security Intelligence: Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Humanitarian Crises; Fred Bruls and Walter Dorn
PART IV:OSINT and Counter-terrorism
8. Detecting Events from Twitter: Situational Awareness in the Age of Social Media; Simon Wibberley and Carl Miller
9. Jihad Online: What Militant Groups Say about Themselves and What it Means for Counterterrorism Strategy; John Amble
Conclusion; Christopher Hobbs, Matthew Moran and Daniel Salisbury

Health plan giants to make payment data accessible to public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paul Demko in ModernHealthCare: “A new initiative by three of the country’s largest health plans has the potential to transform the accessibility of claims payment data, according to healthcare finance experts. UnitedHealthcare, Aetna and Humana announced a partnership on Wednesday with the Health Care Cost Institute to create a payment database that will be available to the public for free. …The database will be created by HCCI, a not-for-profit group established in 2011, from information provided by the insurers. HCCI expects it to be available in 2015 and that more health plans will join the initiative prior to its launch.
UnitedHealthcare is the largest insurer in the country in terms of the number of individuals covered through its products. All three participating plans are publicly traded, for-profit companies.
Stephen Parente, chair of HCCI’s board, said the organization was approached by the insurance companies about the initiative. “I’m not quite sure what the magic trigger was,” said Parente, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota and advised John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign on healthcare issues. “We’ve kind of proven as a nonprofit and an independent group that we can be trustworthy in working with their data.”
Experts say cost transparency is being spurred by a number of developments in the healthcare sector. The trend towards high-deductible plans is giving consumers a greater incentive to understand how much healthcare costs and to utilize it more efficiently. In addition, the launch of the exchanges under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has brought unprecedented attention to the difficulties faced by individuals in shopping for insurance coverage.
“There’s so many things that are kind of pushing the industry toward this more transparent state,” Hempstead said. “There’s just this drumbeat that people want to have this information.”
Insurers may also be realizing they aren’t likely to have a choice about sharing payment information. In recent years, more and more states have passed laws requiring the creation of claims databases. Currently, 11 states have all payer claims databases, and six other states are in the process of creating such a resource, according to the All-Payer Claims Database Council….”

Rethinking Personal Data: A New Lens for Strengthening Trust

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New report from the World Economic Forum: “As we look at the dynamic change shaping today’s data-driven world, one thing is becoming increasingly clear. We really do not know that much about it. Polarized along competing but fundamental principles, the global dialogue on personal data is inchoate and pulled in a variety of directions. It is complicated, conflated and often fueled by emotional reactions more than informed understandings.
The World Economic Forum’s global dialogue on personal data seeks to cut through this complexity. A multi-year initiative with global insights from the highest levels of leadership from industry, governments, civil society and academia, this work aims to articulate an ascendant vision of the value a balanced and human-centred personal data ecosystem can create.
Yet despite these aspirations, there is a crisis in trust. Concerns are voiced from a variety of viewpoints at a variety of scales. Industry, government and civil society are all uncertain on how to create a personal data ecosystem that is adaptive, reliable, trustworthy and fair.
The shared anxieties stem from the overwhelming challenge of transitioning into a hyperconnected world. The growth of data, the sophistication of ubiquitous computing and the borderless flow of data are all outstripping the ability to effectively govern on a global basis. We need the means to effectively uphold fundamental principles in ways fit for today’s world.
Yet despite the size and scope of the complexity, it cannot become a reason for inaction. The need for pragmatic and scalable approaches which strengthen transparency, accountability and the empowerment of individuals has become a global priority.
Tools are needed to answer fundamental questions: Who has the data? Where is the data? What is being done with it? All of these uncertainties need to be addressed for meaningful progress to occur.
Objectives need to be set. The benefits and harms for using personal data need be more precisely defined. The ambiguity surrounding privacy needs to be demystified and placed into a real-world context.
Individuals need to be meaningfully empowered. Better engagement over how data is used by third parties is one opportunity for strengthening trust. Supporting the ability for individuals to use personal data for their own purposes is another area for innovation and growth. But combined, the overall lack of engagement is undermining trust.
Collaboration is essential. The need for interdisciplinary collaboration between technologists, business leaders, social scientists, economists and policy-makers is vital. The complexities for delivering a sustainable and balanced personal data ecosystem require that these multifaceted perspectives are all taken into consideration.
With a new lens for using personal data, progress can occur.

Figure 1: A new lens for strengthening trust
 

Source: World Economic Forum

Obama Signs Nation's First 'Open Data' Law

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

William Welsh in Information Week: “President Barack Obama enacted the nation’s first open data law, signing into law on May 9 bipartisan legislation that requires federal agencies to publish their spending data in a standardized, machine-readable format that the public can access through USASpending.gov.
The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (S. 994) amends the eight-year-old Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act to make available to the public specific classes of federal agency spending data “with more specificity and at a deeper level than is currently reported,” a White House statement said….
Advocacy groups applauded the bipartisan legislation, which is being heralded the nation’s first open data law and furnishes a legislative mandate for Obama’s one-year-old Open Data Policy.
“The DATA Act will unlock a new public resource that innovators, watchdogs, and citizens can mine for valuable and unprecedented insight into federal spending,” said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition. “America’s tech sector already has the tools to deliver reliable, standardized, open data. [The] historic victory will put our nation’s open data pioneers to work for the common good.”
The DATA Act requires agencies to establish government-wide standards for financial data, adopt accounting approaches developed by the Recovery Act’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB), and streamline agency reporting requirements.
The DATA Act empowers the Secretary of the Treasury to establish a data analytics center, which is modeled on the successful Recovery Operations Center. The new center will support inspectors general and law enforcement agencies in criminal and other investigations, as well as agency program offices in the prevention of improper payments. Assets of the RATB related to the Recovery Operations Center would transfer to the Treasury Department when the board’s authorization expires.
The treasury secretary and the Director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget are jointly tasked with establishing the standards required to achieve the goals and objectives of the new statute.
To ensure that agencies comply with the reporting requirements, agency inspectors general will report on the quality and accuracy of the financial data provided to USASpending.gov. The Government Accountability Office also will report on the data quality and accuracy and create a Government-wide assessment of the financial data reported…”

New crowdsourcing site like ‘Yelp’ for philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Small in the Washington Post: “Billionaire investor Warren Buffett once said that there is no market test for philanthropy. Foundations with billions in assets often hand out giant grants to charity without critique. One watchdog group wants to change that.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy has created a new Web site that posts public feedback about a foundation’s giving. Think Yelp for the philanthropy sector.
Along with public critiques, the new Web site, Philamplify.org, uploads a comprehensive assessment of a foundation conducted by researchers at the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
The assessment includes a review of the foundation’s goals, strategies, partnerships with grantees, transparency, diversity in its board and how any investments support the mission.
The site also posts recommendations on what would make the foundation more effective in the community. The public can agree or disagree with each recommendation and then provide feedback about the grantmaker’s performance.
People who post to the site can remain anonymous.
NCRP officials hope the site will stir debate about the giving practices of foundations.
“Foundation leaders rarely get honest feedback because no one wants to get on the wrong side of a foundation,” said Lisa Ranghelli, a director at NCRP. “There’s so much we need to do as a society that we just want these philanthropic resources to be used as powerfully as possible and for everyone to feel like they have a voice in how philanthropy operates.”
With nonprofit rating sites such as Guidestar and Charity Navigator, Philamplify is just one more move to create more transparency in the nonprofit sector. But the site might be one of the first to force transparency and public commentary exclusively about the organizations that give grants.
Foundation leaders are open to the site, but say that some grantmakers already use various evaluation methods to improve their strategies.
Groups such as Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and the Center for Effective Philanthropy provide best practices for foundation giving.
The Council on Foundations, an Arlington-based membership organization of foundation groups, offers a list of tools and ideas for foundations to make their giving more effective.
“We will be paying close attention to Philamplify and new developments related to it as the project unfolds,” said Peter Panepento, senior vice president of community and knowledge at the Council on Foundations.
Currently there are three foundations up for review on the Web site: the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, which focuses on improving the Greater Philadelphia community; the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation in Atlanta, which gives grants in science and education; and the Lumina Foundation for Education in Indianapolis, which focuses on access to higher learning….”
Officials say Philamplify will focus on the top 100 largest foundations to start. Large foundations would include groups such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and the foundations of companies such as Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Johnson & Johnson and GlaxoSmithKline.
Although there are concerns about the site’s ability to keep comments objective, grantees hope it will start a dialogue that has been absent in philanthropy.