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.
Believe the hype: Big data can have a big social impact
Annika Small at the Guardian: “Given all the hype around so called big data at the moment, it would be easy to dismiss it as nothing more than the latest technology buzzword. This would be a mistake, given that the application and interpretation of huge – often publicly available – data sets is already supporting new models of creativity, innovation and engagement.
To date, stories of big data’s progress and successes have tended to come from government and the private sector, but we’ve heard little about its relevance to social organisations. Yet big data can fuel big social change.
It’s already playing a vital role in the charitable sector. Some social organisations are using existing open government data to better target their services, to improve advocacy and fundraising, and to support knowledge sharing and collaboration between different charities and agencies. Crowdsourcing of open data also offers a new way for not-for-profits to gather intelligence, and there is a wide range of freely available online tools to help them analyse the information.
However, realising the potential of big and open data presents a number of technical and organisational challenges for social organisations. Many don’t have the required skills, awareness and investment to turn big data to their advantage. They also tend to lack the access to examples that might help demystify the technicalities and focus on achievable results.
Overcoming these challenges can be surprisingly simple: Keyfund, for example, gained insight into what made for a successful application to their scheme through using a free, online tool to create word clouds out of all the text in their application forms. Many social organisations could use this same technique to better understand the large volume of unstructured text that they accumulate – in doing so, they would be “doing big data” (albeit in a small way). At the other end of the scale, Global Giving has developed its own sophisticated set of analytical tools to better understand the 57,000+ “stories” gathered from its network.
Innovation often happens when different disciplines collide and it’s becoming apparent that most value – certainly most social value – is likely to be created at the intersection of government, private and social sector data. That could be the combination of data from different sectors, or better “data collaboration” within sectors.
The Housing Association Charitable Trust (HACT) has produced two original tools that demonstrate this. Its Community Insight tool combines data from different sectors, allowing housing providers easily to match information about their stock to a large store of well-maintained open government figures. Meanwhile, its Housing Big Data programme is building a huge dataset by combining stats from 16 different housing providers across the UK. While Community Insight allows each organisation to gain better individual understanding of their communities (measuring well-being and deprivation levels, tracking changes over time, identifying hotspots of acute need), Housing Big Data is making progress towards a much richer network of understanding, providing a foundation for the sector to collaboratively identify challenges and quantify the impact of their interventions.
Alongside this specific initiative from HACT, it’s also exciting to see programmes such as 360giving, which forge connections between a range of private and social enterprises, and lays foundations for UK social investors to be a significant source of information over the next decade. Certainly, The Big Lottery Fund’s publication of open data late last year is a milestone which also highlights how far we have to travel as a sector before we are truly “data-rich”.
At Nominet Trust, we have produced the Social Tech Guide to demonstrate the scale and diversity of social value being generated internationally – much of which is achieved through harnessing the power of big data. From Knewton creating personally tailored learning programmes, to Cellslider using the power of the crowd to advance cancer research, there is no shortage of inspiration. The UN’s Global Pulse programme is another great example, with its focus on how we can combine private and public sources to pin down the size and shape of a social challenge, and calibrate our collective response.
These examples of data-driven social change demonstrate the huge opportunities for social enterprises to harness technology to generate insights, to drive more effective action and to fuel social change. If we are to realise this potential, we need to continue to stretch ourselves as social enterprises and social investors.”
The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads
Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post: “What if someone had already figured out the answers to the world’s most pressing policy problems, but those solutions were buried deep in a PDF, somewhere nobody will ever read them?
According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.
The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.
Now, granted, the bank isn’t Buzzfeed. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect thousands of downloads for reports with titles like “Detecting Urban Expansion and Land Tenure Security Assessment: The Case of Bahir Dar and Debre Markos Peri-Urban Areas of Ethiopia.” Moreover, downloads aren’t the be-all and end-all of information dissemination; many of these reports probably get some distribution by e-mail, or are printed and handed out at conferences. Still, it’s fair to assume that many big-idea reports with lofty goals to elevate the public discourse never get read by anyone other than the report writer and maybe an editor or two. Maybe the author’s spouse. Or mom.
I’m not picking on the World Bank here. In fact, they’re to be commended, strongly, for not only taking a serious look at the question but making their findings public for the rest of us to learn from. And don’t think for a second that this is just a World Bank problem. PDF reports are basically the bread and butter of Washington’s huge think tank industry, for instance. Every single one of these groups should be taking a serious look at their own PDF analytics the way the bank has.
Government agencies are also addicted to the PDF. As The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported this week, federal agencies spend thousands of dollars and employee-hours each year producing Congressionally-mandated reports that nobody reads. And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.”
Not every policy report is going to be a game-changer, of course. But the sheer numbers dictate that there are probably a lot of really, really good ideas out there that never see the light of day. This seems like an inefficient way for the policy community to do business, but what’s the alternative?
One final irony to ponder: You know that World Bank report, about how nobody reads its PDFs? It’s only available as a PDF. Given the attention it’s receiving, it may also be one of their most-downloaded reports ever.
According to a recent report by the World Bank, that scenario is not so far-fetched. The bank is one of those high-minded organizations — Washington is full of them — that release hundreds, maybe thousands, of reports a year on policy issues big and small. Many of these reports are long and highly technical, and just about all of them get released to the world as a PDF report posted to the organization’s Web site.
The World Bank recently decided to ask an important question: Is anyone actually reading these things? They dug into their Web site traffic data and came to the following conclusions: Nearly one-third of their PDF reports had never been downloaded, not even once. Another 40 percent of their reports had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. Only 13 percent had seen more than 250 downloads in their lifetimes. Since most World Bank reports have a stated objective of informing public debate or government policy, this seems like a pretty lousy track record.
Now, granted, the bank isn’t Buzzfeed. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect thousands of downloads for reports with titles like “Detecting Urban Expansion and Land Tenure Security Assessment: The Case of Bahir Dar and Debre Markos Peri-Urban Areas of Ethiopia.” Moreover, downloads aren’t the be-all and end-all of information dissemination; many of these reports probably get some distribution by e-mail, or are printed and handed out at conferences. Still, it’s fair to assume that many big-idea reports with lofty goals to elevate the public discourse never get read by anyone other than the report writer and maybe an editor or two. Maybe the author’s spouse. Or mom.
I’m not picking on the World Bank here. In fact, they’re to be commended, strongly, for not only taking a serious look at the question but making their findings public for the rest of us to learn from. And don’t think for a second that this is just a World Bank problem. PDF reports are basically the bread and butter of Washington’s huge think tank industry, for instance. Every single one of these groups should be taking a serious look at their own PDF analytics the way the bank has.
Government agencies are also addicted to the PDF. As The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reported this week, federal agencies spend thousands of dollars and employee-hours each year producing Congressionally-mandated reports that nobody reads. And let’s not even get started on the situation in academia, where the country’s best and brightest compete for the honor of seeing their life’s work locked away behind some publisher’s paywall.”
Not every policy report is going to be a game-changer, of course. But the sheer numbers dictate that there are probably a lot of really, really good ideas out there that never see the light of day. This seems like an inefficient way for the policy community to do business, but what’s the alternative?
One final irony to ponder: You know that World Bank report, about how nobody reads its PDFs? It’s only available as a PDF. Given the attention it’s receiving, it may also be one of their most-downloaded reports ever.
Working Together in a Networked Economy
Yochai Benkler at MIT Technology Review on Distributed Innovation and Creativity, Peer Production, and Commons in a Networked Economy: “A decade ago, Wikipedia and open-source software were treated as mere curiosities in business circles. Today, these innovations represent a core challenge to how we have thought about property and contract, organization theory and management, over the past 150 years.
For the first time since before the Industrial Revolution, the most important inputs into some of the most important economic sectors are radically distributed in the population, and the core capital resources necessary for these economic activities have become widely available in wealthy countries and among the wealthier populations of emerging economies. This technological feasibility of social production generally, and peer production — the kind of network collaboration of which Wikipedia is the most prominent example — more specifically, is interacting with the high rate of change and the escalating complexity of global innovation and production systems.
Increasingly, in the business literature and practice, we see a shift toward a range of open innovation and models that allow more fluid flows of information, talent, and projects across organizations.
Peer production, the most significant organizational innovation that has emerged from Internet-mediated social practice, is large-scale collaborative engagement by groups of individuals who come together to produce products more complex than they could have produced on their own. Organizationally, it combines three core characteristics: decentralization of conception and execution of problems and solutions; harnessing of diverse motivations; and separation of governance and management from property and contract.
These characteristics make peer production highly adept at experimentation, innovation, and adaptation in changing and complex environments. If the Web was innovation on a commons-based model — allocating access and use rights in resources without giving anyone exclusive rights to exclude anyone else — Wikipedia’s organizational innovation is in problem-solving.
Wikipedia’s user-generated content model incorporates knowledge that simply cannot be managed well, either because it is tacit knowledge (possessed by individuals but difficult to communicate to others) or because it is spread among too many people to contract for. The user-generated content model also permits organizations to explore a space of highly diverse interests and tastes that was too costly for traditional organizations to explore.
Peer production allows a diverse range of people, regardless of affiliation, to dynamically assess and reassess available resources, projects, and potential collaborators and to self-assign to projects and collaborations. By leaving these elements to self-organization dynamics, peer production overcomes the lossiness of markets and bureaucracies, and its benefits are sufficient that the practice has been widely adopted by firms and even governments.
In a networked information economy, commons-based practices and open innovation provide an evolutionary model typified by repeated experimentation and adoption of successful adaptation rather than the more traditional, engineering-style approaches to building optimized systems.
Commons-based production and peer production are edge cases of a broader range of openness strategies that trade off the freedom of these two approaches and the manageability and appropriability that many more-traditional organizations seek to preserve. Some firms are using competitions and prizes to diversify the range of people who work on their problems, without ceding contractual control over the project. Many corporations are participating in networks of firms engaging in a range of open collaborative innovation practices with a more manageable set of people, resources, and projects to work with than a fully open-to-the-world project. And the innovation clusters anchored around universities represent an entrepreneurial model at the edge of academia and business, in which academia allows for investment in highly uncertain innovation, and the firms allow for high-risk, high-reward investment models.
To read the full article, click here.“
New Technologies in Constitution Making
Special Report of the US Institute of Peace by Jason Gluck and Brendon Ballou: “Summary…
- Public participation has become an integral part of constitution making, particularly since the end of the Cold War. It has strengthened national unity, built trust between governments and citizens, promoted reconciliation, and helped produce national consensus.
- Constitution drafters in the past were mostly limited to using official statements and press releases, workshops, meetings, radio and television programs, and printed materials to engage with citizens. These methods were often costly and time-consuming, and failed to reach significant segments of the public.
- New technologies can increase participation in and the perceived legitimacy of constitutional processes.
- Constitution drafters have recently begun using the web and mobile phones to educate citizens on the constitution-writing process and engage them on issues of concern. Increasingly constitution writers are also using the web to consult international experts on specific technical issues.
- Given the rapid growth of the Internet and mobile phone penetration in the developing world, the increased use of new technologies in constitution writing is nearly inevitable.
- People and organizations considering using these tools should bear four things in mind. New technologies will affect different groups differently. The people who use these tools should respect social and cultural norms. They should keep control of the process in the hands of national actors. Last, they should fit their work within the larger context of the conflict or postconflict environment in which they work.
- Constitution making is a difficult field, however, and new technologies are tools, not panaceas”
Continued Progress and Plans for Open Government Data
Steve VanRoekel, and Todd Park at the White House: “One year ago today, President Obama signed an executive order that made open and machine-readable data the new default for government information. This historic step is helping to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs while appropriately safeguarding sensitive information and rigorously protecting privacy.
Freely available data from the U.S. government is an important national resource, serving as fuel for entrepreneurship, innovation, scientific discovery, and economic growth. Making information about government operations more readily available and useful is also core to the promise of a more efficient and transparent government. This initiative is a key component of the President’s Management Agenda and our efforts to ensure the government is acting as an engine to expand economic growth and opportunity for all Americans. The Administration is committed to driving further progress in this area, including by designating Open Data as one of our key Cross-Agency Priority Goals.
Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a number of Open Data Initiatives aimed at scaling up open data efforts across the Health, Energy, Climate, Education, Finance, Public Safety, and Global Development sectors. The White House has also launched Project Open Data, designed to share best practices, examples, and software code to assist federal agencies with opening data. These efforts have helped unlock troves of valuable data—that taxpayers have already paid for—and are making these resources more open and accessible to innovators and the public.
Other countries are also opening up their data. In June 2013, President Obama and other G7 leaders endorsed the Open Data Charter, in which the United States committed to publish a roadmap for our nation’s approach to releasing and improving government data for the public.
Building upon the Administration’s Open Data progress, and in fulfillment of the Open Data Charter, today we are excited to release the U.S. Open Data Action Plan. The plan includes a number of exciting enhancements and new data releases planned in 2014 and 2015, including:
- Small Business Data: The Small Business Administration’s (SBA) database of small business suppliers will be enhanced so that software developers can create tools to help manufacturers more easily find qualified U.S. suppliers, ultimately reducing the transaction costs to source products and manufacture domestically.
- Smithsonian American Art Museum Collection: The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s entire digitized collection will be opened to software developers to make educational apps and tools. Today, even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.
- FDA Adverse Drug Event Data: Each year, healthcare professionals and consumers submit millions of individual reports on drug safety to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These anonymous reports are a critical tool to support drug safety surveillance. Today, this data is only available through limited quarterly reports. But the Administration will soon be making these reports available in their entirety so that software developers can build tools to help pull potentially dangerous drugs off shelves faster than ever before.
We look forward to implementing the U.S. Open Data Action Plan, and to continuing to work with our partner countries in the G7 to take the open data movement global”.
Can Big Data Stop Wars Before They Happen?
Foreign Policy: “It has been almost two decades exactly since conflict prevention shot to the top of the peace-building agenda, as large-scale killings shifted from interstate wars to intrastate and intergroup conflicts. What could we have done to anticipate and prevent the 100 days of genocidal killing in Rwanda that began in April 1994 or the massacre of thousands of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica just over a year later? The international community recognized that conflict prevention could no longer be limited to diplomatic and military initiatives, but that it also requires earlier intervention to address the causes of violence between nonstate actors, including tribal, religious, economic, and resource-based tensions.
For years, even as it was pursued as doggedly as personnel and funding allowed, early intervention remained elusive, a kind of Holy Grail for peace-builders. This might finally be changing. The rise of data on social dynamics and what people think and feel — obtained through social media, SMS questionnaires, increasingly comprehensive satellite information, news-scraping apps, and more — has given the peace-building field hope of harnessing a new vision of the world. But to cash in on that hope, we first need to figure out how to understand all the numbers and charts and figures now available to us. Only then can we expect to predict and prevent events like the recent massacres in South Sudan or the ongoing violence in the Central African Republic.
A growing number of initiatives have tried to make it across the bridge between data and understanding. They’ve ranged from small nonprofit shops of a few people to massive government-funded institutions, and they’ve been moving forward in fits and starts. Few of these initiatives have been successful in documenting incidents of violence actually averted or stopped. Sometimes that’s simply because violence or absence of it isn’t verifiable. The growing literature on big data and conflict prevention today is replete with caveats about “overpromising and underdelivering” and the persistent gap between early warning and early action. In the case of the Conflict Early Warning and Response Mechanism (CEWARN) system in central Africa — one of the earlier and most prominent attempts at early intervention — it is widely accepted that the project largely failed to use the data it retrieved for effective conflict management. It relied heavily on technology to produce large databases, while lacking the personnel to effectively analyze them or take meaningful early action.
To be sure, disappointments are to be expected when breaking new ground. But they don’t have to continue forever. This pioneering work demands not just data and technology expertise. Also critical is cross-discipline collaboration between the data experts and the conflict experts, who know intimately the social, political, and geographic terrain of different locations. What was once a clash of cultures over the value and meaning of metrics when it comes to complex human dynamics needs to morph into collaboration. This is still pretty rare, but if the past decade’s innovations are any prologue, we are hopefully headed in the right direction.
* * *
Over the last three years, the U.S. Defense Department, the United Nations, and the CIA have all launched programs to parse the masses of public data now available, scraping and analyzing details from social media, blogs, market data, and myriad other sources to achieve variations of the same goal: anticipating when and where conflict might arise. The Defense Department’s Information Volume and Velocity program is designed to use “pattern recognition to detect trends in a sea of unstructured data” that would point to growing instability. The U.N.’s Global Pulse initiative’s stated goal is to track “human well-being and emerging vulnerabilities in real-time, in order to better protect populations from shocks.” The Open Source Indicators program at the CIA’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity aims to anticipate “political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages, and natural disasters.” Each looks to the growing stream of public data to detect significant population-level changes.
Large institutions with deep pockets have always been at the forefront of efforts in the international security field to design systems for improving data-driven decision-making. They’ve followed the lead of large private-sector organizations where data and analytics rose to the top of the corporate agenda. (In that sector, the data revolution is promising “to transform the way many companies do business, delivering performance improvements not seen since the redesign of core processes in the 1990s,” as David Court, a director at consulting firm McKinsey, has put it.)
What really defines the recent data revolution in peace-building, however, is that it is transcending size and resource limitations. It is finding its way to small organizations operating at local levels and using knowledge and subject experts to parse information from the ground. It is transforming the way peace-builders do business, delivering data-led programs and evidence-based decision-making not seen since the field’s inception in the latter half of the 20th century.
One of the most famous recent examples is the 2013 Kenyan presidential election.
In March 2013, the world was watching and waiting to see whether the vote would produce more of the violence that had left at least 1,300 people dead and 600,000 homeless during and after 2010 elections. In the intervening years, a web of NGOs worked to set up early-warning and early-response mechanisms to defuse tribal rivalries, party passions, and rumor-mongering. Many of the projects were technology-based initiatives trying to leverage data sources in new ways — including a collaborative effort spearheaded and facilitated by a Kenyan nonprofit called Ushahidi (“witness” in Swahili) that designs open-source data collection and mapping software. The Umati (meaning “crowd”) project used an Ushahidi program to monitor media reports, tweets, and blog posts to detect rising tensions, frustration, calls to violence, and hate speech — and then sorted and categorized it all on one central platform. The information fed into election-monitoring maps built by the Ushahidi team, while mobile-phone provider Safaricom donated 50 million text messages to a local peace-building organization, Sisi ni Amani (“We are Peace”), so that it could act on the information by sending texts — which had been used to incite and fuel violence during the 2007 elections — aimed at preventing violence and quelling rumors.
The first challenges came around 10 a.m. on the opening day of voting. “Rowdy youth overpowered police at a polling station in Dandora Phase 4,” one of the informal settlements in Nairobi that had been a site of violence in 2007, wrote Neelam Verjee, programs manager at Sisi ni Amani. The young men were blocking others from voting, and “the situation was tense.”
Sisi ni Amani sent a text blast to its subscribers: “When we maintain peace, we will have joy & be happy to spend time with friends & family but violence spoils all these good things. Tudumishe amani [“Maintain the peace”] Phase 4.” Meanwhile, security officers, who had been called separately, arrived at the scene and took control of the polling station. Voting resumed with little violence. According to interviews collected by Sisi ni Amani after the vote, the message “was sent at the right time” and “helped to calm down the situation.”
In many ways, Kenya’s experience is the story of peace-building today: Data is changing the way professionals in the field think about anticipating events, planning interventions, and assessing what worked and what didn’t. But it also underscores the possibility that we might be edging closer to a time when peace-builders at every level and in all sectors — international, state, and local, governmental and not — will have mechanisms both to know about brewing violence and to save lives by acting on that knowledge.
Three important trends underlie the optimism. The first is the sheer amount of data that we’re generating. In 2012, humans plugged into digital devices managed to generate more data in a single year than over the course of world history — and that rate more than doubles every year. As of 2012, 2.4 billion people — 34 percent of the world’s population — had a direct Internet connection. The growth is most stunning in regions like the Middle East and Africa where conflict abounds; access has grown 2,634 percent and 3,607 percent, respectively, in the last decade.
The growth of mobile-phone subscriptions, which allow their owners to be part of new data sources without a direct Internet connection, is also staggering. In 2013, there were almost as many cell-phone subscriptions in the world as there were people. In Africa, there were 63 subscriptions per 100 people, and there were 105 per 100 people in the Arab states.
The second trend has to do with our expanded capacity to collect and crunch data. Not only do we have more computing power enabling us to produce enormous new data sets — such as the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) project, which tracks almost 300 million conflict-relevant events reported in the media between 1979 and today — but we are also developing more-sophisticated methodological approaches to using these data as raw material for conflict prediction. New machine-learning methodologies, which use algorithms to make predictions (like a spam filter, but much, much more advanced), can provide “substantial improvements in accuracy and performance” in anticipating violent outbreaks, according to Chris Perry, a data scientist at the International Peace Institute.
This brings us to the third trend: the nature of the data itself. When it comes to conflict prevention and peace-building, progress is not simply a question of “more” data, but also different data. For the first time, digital media — user-generated content and online social networks in particular — tell us not just what is going on, but also what people think about the things that are going on. Excitement in the peace-building field centers on the possibility that we can tap into data sets to understand, and preempt, the human sentiment that underlies violent conflict.
Realizing the full potential of these three trends means figuring out how to distinguish between the information, which abounds, and the insights, which are actionable. It is a distinction that is especially hard to make because it requires cross-discipline expertise that combines the wherewithal of data scientists with that of social scientists and the knowledge of technologists with the insights of conflict experts.
How Helsinki Became the Most Successful Open-Data City in the World
Olli Sulopuisto in Atlantic Cities: “If there’s something you’d like to know about Helsinki, someone in the city administration most likely has the answer. For more than a century, this city has funded its own statistics bureaus to keep data on the population, businesses, building permits, and most other things you can think of. Today, that information is stored and freely available on the internet by an appropriately named agency, City of Helsinki Urban Facts.
There’s a potential problem, though. Helsinki may be Finland’s capital and largest city, with 620,000 people. But it’s only one of more than a dozen municipalities in a metropolitan area of almost 1.5 million. So in terms of urban data, if you’re only looking at Helsinki, you’re missing out on more than half of the picture.
Helsinki and three of its neighboring cities are now banding together to solve that problem. Through an entity called Helsinki Region Infoshare, they are bringing together their data so that a fuller picture of the metro area can come into view.
That’s not all. At the same time these datasets are going regional, they’re also going “open.” Helsinki Region Infoshare publishes all of its data in formats that make it easy for software developers, researchers, journalists and others to analyze, combine or turn into web-based or mobile applications that citizens may find useful. In four years of operation, the project has produced more than 1,000 “machine-readable” data sources such as a map of traffic noise levels, real-time locations of snow plows, and a database of corporate taxes.
A global leader
All of this has put the Helsinki region at the forefront of the open-data movement that is sweeping cities across much of the world. The concept is that all kinds of good things can come from assembling city data, standardizing it and publishing it for free. Last month, Helsinki Region Infoshare was presented with the European Commission’s prize for innovation in public administration.
The project is creating transparency in government and a new digital commons. It’s also fueling a small industry of third-party application developers who take all this data and turn it into consumer products.
For example, Helsinki’s city council has a paperless system called Ahjo for handling its agenda items, minutes and exhibits that accompany council debates. Recently, the datasets underlying Ahjo were opened up. The city built a web-based interface for browsing the documents, but a software developer who doesn’t even live in Helsinki created a smartphone app for it. Now anyone who wants to keep up with just about any decision Helsinki’s leaders have before them can do so easily.
Another example is a product called BlindSquare, a smartphone app that helps blind people navigate the city. An app developer took the Helsinki region’s data on public transport and services, and mashed it up with location data from the social networking app Foursquare as well as mapping tools and the GPS and artificial voice capabilities of new smartphones. The product now works in dozens of countries and languages and sells for about €17 ($24 U.S.)
…
Helsinki also runs competitions for developers who create apps with public-sector data. That’s nothing new — BlindSquare won the Apps4Finland and European OpenCities app challenges in 2012. But this year, they’re trying a new approach to the app challenge concept, funded by the European Commission’s prize money and Sitra.
It’s called Datademo. Instead of looking for polished but perhaps random apps to heap fame and prize money on, Datademo is trying to get developers to aim their creative energies toward general goals city leaders think are important. The current competition specifies that apps have to use open data from the Helsinki region or from Finland to make it easier for citizens to find information and participate in democracy. The competition also gives developers seed funding upfront.
Datademo received more than 40 applications in its first round. Of those, the eight best suggestions were given three months and €2,000 ($2,770 U.S) to implement their ideas. The same process will be repeated two times, resulting in dozens of new app ideas that will get a total of €48,000 ($66,000 U.S.) in development subsidies. Keeping with the spirit of transparency, the voting and judging process is open to all who submit an idea for each round….”
How Britain’s Getting Public Policy Down to a Science
in Governing: “Britain has a bold yet simple plan to do something few U.S. governments do: test the effectiveness of multiple policies before rolling them out. But are American lawmakers willing to listen to facts more than money or politics?
In medicine they do clinical trials to determine whether a new drug works. In business they use focus groups to help with product development. In Hollywood they field test various endings for movies in order to pick the one audiences like best. In the world of public policy? Well, to hear members of the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) characterize it, those making laws and policies in the public sector tend to operate on some well-meaning mix of whim, hunch and dice roll, which all too often leads to expensive and ineffective (if not downright harmful) policy decisions.
….One of the prime BIT examples for why facts and not intuition ought to drive policy hails from the U.S. The much-vaunted “Scared Straight” program that swept the U.S. in the 1990s involved shepherding at-risk youth into maximum security prisons. There, they would be confronted by inmates who, presumably, would do the scaring while the visiting juveniles would do the straightening out. Scared Straight seemed like a good idea — let at-risk youth see up close and personal what was in store for them if they continued their wayward ways. Initially the results reported seemed not just good, but great. Programs were reporting “success rates” as high as 94 percent, which inspired other countries, including the U.K., to adopt Scared Straight-like programs.
The problem was that none of the program evaluations included a control group — a group of kids in similar circumstances with similar backgrounds who didn’t go through a Scared Straight program. There was no way to see how they would fare absent the experience. Eventually, a more scientific analysis of seven U.S. Scared Straight programs was conducted. Half of the at-risk youth in the study were left to their own devices and half were put through the program. This led to an alarming discovery: Kids who went through Scared Straight were more likely to offend than kids who skipped it — or, more precisely, who were spared it. The BIT concluded that “the costs associated with the programme (largely related to the increase in reoffending rates) were over 30 times higher than the benefits, meaning that ‘Scared Straight’ programmes cost the taxpayer a significant amount of money and actively increased crime.”
It was witnessing such random acts of policymaking that in 2010 inspired a small group of political and social scientists to set up the Behavioural Insights Team. Originally a small “skunk works” tucked away in the U.K. Treasury Department, the team gained traction under Prime Minister David Cameron, who took office evincing a keen interest in both “nonregulatory solutions to policy problems” and in spending public money efficiently, Service says. By way of example, he points to a business support program in the U.K. that would give small and medium-sized businesses up to £3,000 to subsidize advice from professionals. “But there was no proven link between receiving that money and improving business. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you could first test the efficacy of some million-pound program or other, rather than just roll it out?’”
The BIT was set up as something of a policy research lab that would scientifically test multiple approaches to a public policy problem on a limited, controlled basis through “randomized controlled trials.” That is, it would look at multiple ways to skin the cat before writing the final cat-skinning manual. By comparing the results of various approaches — efforts to boost tax compliance, say, or to move people from welfare to work — policymakers could use the results of the trials to actually hone in on the most effective practices before full-scale rollout.
The various program and policy options that are field tested by the BIT aren’t pie-in-the-sky surmises, which is where the “behavioural” piece of the equation comes in. Before settling on what options to test, the BIT takes into account basic human behavior — what motivates us and what turns us off — and then develops several approaches to a policy problem based on actual social science and psychology.
The a
pproach seems to work. Take, for example, the issue of recruiting organ donors. It can be a touchy topic, suggesting one’s own mortality while also conjuring up unsettling images of getting carved up and parceled out by surgeons. It’s no wonder, then, that while nine out of 10 people in England profess to support organ donations, fewer than one in three are officially registered as donors. To increase the U.K.’s ratio, the BIT decided to play around with the standard recruitment message posted on a high-traffic gov.uk website that encourages people to sign up with the national Organ Donor Register (see “‘Please Help Others,’” page 18). Seven different messages that varied in approach and tone were tested, and at the end of the trial, one message emerged clearly as the most effective — so effective, in fact, that the BIT concluded that “if the best-performing message were to be used over the whole year, it would lead to approximately 96,000 extra registrations completed.”
According to the BIT there are nine key steps to a defensible controlled randomized trial, the first and second — and the two most obvious — being that there must be at least two policy interventions to compare and that the outcome that the policies they’re meant to influence must be clear. But the “randomized” factor in the equation is critical, and it’s not necessarily easy to achieve.
In BIT-speak, “randomization units” can range from individuals (randomly chosen clients) entering the same welfare office but experiencing different interventions, to different groups of clientele or even different institutions like schools or congregate care facilities. The important point is to be sure that the groups or institutions chosen for comparison are operating in circumstances and with clientele similar enough so that researchers can confidently say that any differences in outcomes are due to different policy interventions and not other socioeconomic or cultural exigencies. There are also minimum sampling sizes that ensure legitimacy — essentially, the more the merrier.
As a matter of popular political culture, the BIT’s approach is known as “nudge theory,” a strand of behavioral economics based on the notion that the economic decisions that human beings make are just that — human — and that by tuning into what motivates and appeals to people we can much better understand why those economic decisions are made. In market economics, of course, nudge theory helps businesses tune into customer motivation. In public policy, nudge theory involves figuring out ways to motivate people to do what’s best for themselves, their families, their neighborhoods and society.
When the BIT started playing around with ways to improve tax compliance, for example, the group discovered a range of strategies to do that, from the very obvious approach — make compliance easy — to the more behaviorally complex. The idea was to key in on the sorts of messages to send to taxpayers that will resonate and improve voluntary compliance. The results can be impressive. “If you just tell taxpayers that the majority of folks in their area pay their taxes on time [versus sending out dunning letters],” says the BIT’s Service, “that adds 3 percent more people who pay, bringing in millions of pounds.” Another randomized controlled trial showed that in pestering citizens to pay various fines, personal text messages were more effective than letters.
There has been pushback on using randomized controlled trials to develop policy. Some see it as a nefarious attempt at mind control on the part of government. “Nudge” to some seems to mean “manipulate.” Service bridles at the criticism. “We’re sometimes referred to as ‘the Nudge Team,’ but we’re the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ because we’re interested in human behavior, not mind control.”
The essence of the philosophy, Service adds, is “leading people to do the right thing.” For those interested in launching BIT-like efforts without engendering immediate ideological resistance, he suggests focusing first on “non-headline-grabbing” policy areas such as tax collection or organ donation that can be launched through administrative fiat.”
Is Your City’s Crime Data Private Property?
Adam Wisnieski at the Crime Report: “In February, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) announced it was moving into a new era of transparency and openness with the launch of a new public crime map.
“Crime analysis and mapping data is now in the hands of the city’s citizens,” reads the first line of the press release.
According to the release, the MPD will feed incident report data to RAIDS (Regional Analysis and Information Data Sharing) Online, a nationwide crime map operated by crime analysis software company BAIR Analytics.
Since the announcement, Minneapolis residents have used RAIDS to look at reports of murder, robbery, burglary, assault, rape and other crimes reported in their neighborhoods on a sleek, easy-to-use map, which includes data as recent as yesterday.
On the surface, it’s a major leap forward for transparency in Minneapolis. But some question why the data feed is given exclusively to a single private company.
Transparency advocates argue in fact that the data is not truly in the hands of the city’s residents until citizens can download the raw data so they can analyze, chart or map it on their own.
“For it to actually be open data, it needs to be available to the public in machine readable format,” said Lauren Reid, senior public affairs manager for Code for America, a national non-profit that promotes participation in government through technology.
“Anybody should be able to go download it and read it if they want. That’s open data.”
The Open Knowledge Foundation, a national non-profit that advocates for more government openness, argues open data is important so citizens can participate and engage government in a way that was not possible before.
“Much of the time, citizens are only able to engage with their own governance sporadically — maybe just at an election every 4 or 5 years,” reads the Open Knowledge website. “By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed and involved in decision-making.
“This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full ‘read/write’ society — not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governance, but being able to contribute to it.”.
Minneapolis is not alone.
As Americans demand more information on criminal activity from the government, police departments are flocking to private companies to help them get the information into the public domain.
For many U.S. cities, hooking up with these third-party mapping vendors is the most public their police department has ever been. But the trend has started a messy debate about how “public” the public data actually is.
Outsourcing Makes It Easy
For police departments, outsourcing the presentation of their crime data to a private firm is an easy decision.
Most of the crime mapping sites are free or cost very little. (The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com charges between $600 and $2,400 per year, depending on the size of the agency.)
The department chooses what information it wants to provide. Once the system is set up, the data flows to the companies and then to the public without a lot of effort on behalf of the department.
For the most part, the move doesn’t need legislative approval, just a memorandum of understanding. A police department can even fulfill a new law requiring a public crime map by releasing report data through one of these vendors.
Commander Scott Gerlicher of the MPD’s Strategic Information and Crime Analysis Division says the software has saved the department time.
“I don’t think we are entertaining quite as many requests from the media or the public,” he told The Crime Report. “Plus the price was right: it was free.”
The companies that run some of the most popular sites — The Omega Group’s CrimeMapping.com, Public Engines’ CrimeReports and BAIR Analytics’ RAIDS — are in the business of selling crime analysis and mapping software to police departments.
Some departments buy internal software from these companies; though some cities, like Minneapolis, just use RAIDS’ free map and have no contracts with BAIR for internal software.
Susan Smith, director of operations at BAIR Analytics, said the goal of RAIDS is to create one national map that includes all crime reports from across all jurisdictions and departments (state and local police).
For people who live near or at the edge of a city line, finding relevant crime data can be hard.
The MPD’s Gerlicher said that was one reason his department chose RAIDS — because many police agencies in the Minneapolis area had already hooked up with the firm.
The operators of these crime maps say they provide a community service.
“We try to get as many agencies as we possibly can. We truly believe this is a good service for the community,” says Gabriela Coverdale, a marketing director at the Omega Group.
Raw Data ‘Off Limits’
However, the sites do not allow the public to download any of the raw data and prohibit anyone from “scraping,” using a program to automatically pull the data from their maps.
In Minneapolis, the police department continues to post PDFs and excel spreadsheets with data, but only RAIDS gets a feed with the most recent data.
Alan Palazzolo, a Code for America fellow who works as an interactive developer for the online non-profit newspaper MinnPost, used monthly reports from the MPD to build a crime application with a map and geographic-oriented chart of crime in Minneapolis.
Nevertheless, he finds the new tool limiting.
“[The MPD’s] ability to actually put out more data, and more timely data, really opens things up,” he said. “It’s great, but they are not doing that with us.”
According to Palazzolo, the arrangement gives BAIR a market advantage that effectively prevents its data from being used for purposes it cannot control.
“Having granular, complete, and historical data would allow us to do more in-depth analysis,” wrote Palazzolo and Kaeti Hinck in an article in MinnPost last year.
“Granular data would allow us to look at smaller areas,” reads the article. “[N]eighborhoods are a somewhat arbitrary boundary when it comes to crime. Often high crime is isolated to a couple of blocks, but aggregated data does not allow us to explore this.
“More complete data would allow us to look at factors like exact locations, time of day, demographic issues, and detailed categories (like bike theft).”
The question of preference gets even messier when looking at another national crime mapping website called SpotCrime.
Unlike the other third-party mapping sites, SpotCrime is not in the business of selling crime analysis software to police departments. It operates more like a newspaper — a newspaper focused solely on the police blotter pages — and makes money off advertising.
Years ago, SpotCrime requested and received crime report data via e-mail from the Minneapolis Police Department and mapped the data on its website. According to SpotCrime owner Colin Drane, the MPD stopped sending e-mails when terminals were set up in the police department for the public to access the data.
So he instead started going through the painstaking process of transferring data from PDFs the MPD posted online and mapping them.
When the MPD hooked up with RAIDS in February, Drane asked for the same feed and was denied. He says more and more police departments around the country are hooking up with one of his competitors and not giving him the same timely data.
The MPD said it prefers RAIDS over SpotCrime and criticized some of the advertisements on SpotCrime.
“We’re not about supporting ad money,” said Gerlicher.
Drane believes all crime data in every city should be open to everyone, in order to prevent any single firm from monopolizing how the information is presented and used.
“The onus needs to be on the public agencies,” he adds. “They need to be fair with the data and they need to be fair with the public.” he said.
Transparency advocates worry that the trend is going in the opposite direction.
Ohio’s Columbus Police Department, for example, recently discontinued its public crime statistic feed and started giving the data exclusively to RAIDS.
The Columbus Dispatch wrote that the new system had less information than the old…”