Stefaan Verhulst

Open Government Guide

Curated on November 19, 2013May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Government Partnership: “We were proud to unveil the new Open Government Guide… The Guide—with its accompanying web site—has been developed to support this action planning in three ways :

It gives readers an overview of what open government means across a range of topics, to help countries identify core ‘cross-cutting issues’ (like conflict of interest management, and public contracting) and to select amongst ‘focused’ issues (like land, police, and extractive industries).
For each topic, it also provides a “deep dive”, outlining potential commitments tagged as basic, intermediate, advanced and innovative.
It links to other resources – over 330 case studies and country examples, and external resources on standards .

To read the Guide go to OpenGovGuide.com. You can also use the Report Builder function and create a custom download tailored to your own country or to the officials and other audiences in the local planning process.
Anyone seeking governance reforms, from inside or outside government, faces political as well as logistical challenges, so the Guide is also intended to serve as a way to frame the sometimes difficult conversations about the steps to make reform a reality and show examples from other countries
The OGP process includes four “cohorts” of countries. The largest group are currently drafting their first action plans, and another cohort are already at work on their second plans. The Open Government Guide can help any group seeking to promote reform.
While the Guide is quite comprehensive, it is also a living document. We will continue to add more detailed topic areas. A new section is currently in development on the security sector, drafted by the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Initiative and including recommendations on transparency and accountability of military spending and on surveillance, drawing on the new International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance and the Global Principles on National Security and the Right to Information (The Tswhane Principles). To preview and comment on this document, please watch for the draft version at www.opengovguide.com/news. “

Four critiques of open data initiatives

Curated on November 19, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Rob Kitchin: “The arguments concerning the benefits of open data are now reasonably well established and include contentions that open data lead to increased transparency and accountability with respect to public bodies and services; increases the efficiency and productivity of agencies and enhances their governance; promotes public participation in decision making and social innovation; and fosters economic innovation and job and wealth creation (Pollock 2006; Huijboom and Van der Broek 2011; Janssen 2012; Yiu 2012).
What is less well examined are the potential problems affecting, and negative consequences of, open data initiatives. Consequently, as a provocation for Wednesday’s (Nov 13th, 4-6pm) Programmable City open data event I thought it might be useful to outline four critiques of open data, each of which deserves and demands critical attention: open data lacks a sustainable financial model; promotes a politics of the benign and empowers the empowered; lacks utility and usability; and facilitates the neoliberalisation and marketisation of public services. These critiques do not suggest abandoning the move towards opening data, but contend that open data initiatives need to be much more mindful of what data are being made open, how data are made available, how they are being used, and how they are being funded.”

Social innovation, an answer to contemporary societal challenges? Locating the concept in theory and practice

Curated on November 18, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by R. Grimm, C. Fox, S. Baines, and K. Albertson in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research: “Social innovation discourses see in social challenges opportunities to make societies more sustainable and cohesive through inclusive practices, coproduction and pro-active grassroots initiatives. In this paper we are concerned first that the concept has been stretched in so many directions that it is at breaking point. We illustrate this by documenting the varied uses of social innovation in different academic and policy discourses. Second, we assume that, if social innovation is to be a useful concept for policy-makers, then it must tell us something about what adjustments are needed to develop an effective political economy that is social innovation ready. Finally, we argue that what is needed is more theoretical and empirical work to help social innovation to develop into an effective policy tool”

Privacy in the 21st Century: From the “Dark Ages” to “Enlightenment”?

Curated on November 18, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by P. Kitsos and A. Yannoukakou in the International Journal of E-Politics (IJEP): “The events of 9/11 along with the bombarding in Madrid and London forced governments to resort to new structures of privacy safeguarding and electronic surveillance under the common denominator of terrorism and transnational crime fighting. Legislation as US PATRIOT Act and EU Data Retention Directive altered fundamentally the collection, processing and sharing methods of personal data, while it granted increased powers to police and law enforcement authorities concerning their jurisdiction in obtaining and processing personal information to an excessive degree. As an aftermath of the resulted opacity and the public outcry, a shift is recorded during the last years towards a more open governance by the implementation of open data and cloud computing practices in order to enhance transparency and accountability from the side of governments, restore the trust between the State and the citizens, and amplify the citizens’ participation to the decision-making procedures. However, privacy and personal data protection are major issues in all occasions and, thus, must be safeguarded without sacrificing national security and public interest on one hand, but without crossing the thin line between protection and infringement on the other. Where this delicate balance stands, is the focal point of this paper trying to demonstrate that it is better to be cautious with open practices than hostage of clandestine practices.”

OECD: Government at a Glance 2013

Curated on November 18, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD: “Government at a Glance 2013 provides readers with a dashboard of key indicators assembled with the goal of contributing to the analysis and international comparison of public sector performance. Indicators on government revenues, expenditures, and employment are provided alongside key output and outcome data in the sectors of education and health. Government at a Glance also includes indicators on key governance and public management issues, such as transparency in governance, regulatory governance, new ways in delivering public services and HRM and compensation practices in the public service. While measuring government performance has long been recognized as playing an important role in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public administration, following the economic crisis and fiscal tightening in many member countries, good indicators are needed more than ever to help governments make informed decisions regarding tough choices and help restore confidence in government institutions.”

How social networks can make us smarter

Curated on November 15, 2013July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kurzweil News: The secret to why some cultures thrive and others disappear may lie in our social networks and our ability to imitate, rather than our individual smarts, according to a new University of British Columbia study.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Sciences (open access), shows that when people can observe and learn from a wider range of teachers, groups can better maintain technical skills and even increase the group’s average skill over successive generations.
The findings show that a larger population size and social connectedness are crucial for the development of more sophisticated technologies and cultural knowledge, says lead author Michael Muthukrishna, a PhD student in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology.
“This is the first study to demonstrate in a laboratory setting what archeologists and evolutionary theorists have long suggested: that there is an important link between a society’s sociality and the sophistication of its technology,” says Muthukrishna, who co-authored the research with UBC Prof. Joseph Henrich…
For the study, participants were asked to learn new skills — digital photo editing and knot-tying — and then pass on what they learned to the next “generation” of participants.
The groups with greater access to experts accumulated significantly more skill than those with less access to teachers. Within ten “generations,” each member of the group with multiple mentors had stronger skills than the group limited to a single mentor.
Groups with greater access to experts also retained their skills much longer than groups who began with less access to mentors, sustaining higher levels of “cultural knowledge” over multiple generations.
According to the researchers, the study has important implications for several areas, from skills development and education to protecting endangered languages and cultural practices…. “These results suggest that rather than our individual intelligence, it is our sociality — being embedded in large, well-connected populations — that explains our success. In the modern world, innovations like the Internet and online social networks can support these processes by giving us access to an unprecedented number of people and their ideas.
“An example of an application of this research might be in how we design models of mentorship to facilitate cultural transmission in a company. Although a mentor-protege model is very common, our research suggests that giving people access to multiple mentors might result in better outcomes.”
Michael Muthukrishna et al., Sociality influences cultural complexity, Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Sciences, 2013, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2511 (open access)

Innovation in Multi-Stakeholder Engagement

Curated on November 15, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New INSEAD working paper by Mahroum, Sami, Bell, Simon and Yassin, Nasser: “This paper is concerned with the multitude of interleaving issues which emerge when engaging multiple stakeholders in decision making. Whilst recognising the intrinsic values of group work (including shared views, wide option selection, public spirited focus, legitimacy of decisions and improved intellectual content) and keeping in mind the numerous issues which confuse and obscure clear findings from group work (including multiple roles for participants, bias due to domination and distortion emerging from uneven group inputs) this paper uses an innovative methodology – the Triple Task – to propose a new framework for organising multi-stakeholder consultations. The Triple Task methodology was applied to test the new framework on multi-stakeholders in the context of education in Abu Dhabi, where various small groups were tasked and assessed using the methodology. The results indicate that moving participants from heterogeneous to homogenous groups results on these groups becoming more focused in their outcomes with greater clarity in the thinking of group members”

Measuring Internet Activity: a (Selective) Review of Methods and Metrics

Curated on November 15, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Faris, Robert and Heacock, Rebekah (part of the Internet Monitor series): “Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions.”

NEW: The Open Governance Knowledge Base

Curated on November 15, 2013November 1, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

In its continued efforts to organize and disseminate learnings in the field of technology-enabled governance innovation, today, The Governance Lab is introducing a collaborative, wiki-style repository of information and research at the nexus of technology, governance and citizenship. Right now we’re calling it the Open Governance Knowledge Base, and it goes live today.
Our goal in creating this collaborative platform is to provide a single source of research and insights related to the broad, interdiscplinary field of open governance for the benefit of: 1) decision-makers in governing institutions seeking information and inspiration to guide their efforts to increase openness; 2) academics seeking to enrich and expand their scholarly pursuits in this field; 3) technology practitioners seeking insights and examples of familiar tools being used to solve public problems; and 4) average citizens simply seeking interesting information on a complex, evolving topic area.
While you can already find some pre-populated information and research on the platform, we need your help! The field of open governance is too vast, complex and interdisciplinary to meaningfully document without broad collaboration.
Here’s how you can help to ensure this shared resource is as useful and engaging as possible:

What should we call the platform? We want your title suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments or tweet them to us @TheGovLab.
And more importantly: Share your knowledge and research. Take a look at what we’ve posted, create an account, refer to this MediaWiki formatting guide as needed and start editing!