Forecasting Freedom of Information – Why it faces problems—and how experts say they could be solved,

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by David Cuillier: “People must have access to reliable public information to make informed decisions and hold their elected officials accountable. Without transparent government at all levels—local, state and federal—representative democracy is threatened. For a generation, presidents of both parties have in different ways tightened controls on government information. “The natural progress of things,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “is for liberty to yield, and government to gain ground.”

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation commissioned this study to better understand the landscape involving public access to government records by gathering information and insights from 336 freedom of information experts—journalists, advocates, record custodians, technology companies, scholars and others. In all, from December 2016 through January 2017, 108 experts were interviewed and 228 surveyed online. The study is not representative of journalists or society as a whole, but rather a cross section of those who deal with public record laws routinely. They are the active members, and in some cases the leaders, of America’s freedom of information community. Freedom of information is not decided only in Washington, D.C. All levels of government are involved, bringing into view a diversity of government officials. Our objective was to canvass experts to identify barriers to information access and possible solutions, looking broadly at the law, public education, networking and new technology. We found dissatisfaction, uncertainty and worry.

Key points:

1. MANY EXPERTS SAY ACCESS IS WORSE TODAY COMPARED WITH FOUR YEARS AGO: About half of the 228 experts surveyed online reported that access to state and local records has gotten worse during the past four years (41 percent said it stayed the same, and 13 percent said it has gotten better2 ), and 41 percent said access to federal records has worsened. “What I hear from reporters in Washington and my students is that exemptions are being used in way too many cases and delays are still very long,” said Leonard Downie, former Washington Post executive editor and current Weil Family Professor of Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “I hope the door doesn’t get shut tighter.”

2. NEARLY 4 IN 10 SEE A RISE IN DENIALS: Though most respondents (57 percent) said denials have stayed the same during the past four years, 38 percent said they have been denied records at any level of government more frequently, and only 6 percent said denials have decreased. …

3. OVERWHELMINGLY, EXPERTS PREDICTED THAT ACCESS WILL GET WORSE: Nearly 9 out of 10 predicted that access to government will worsen because of the new presidential administration. “I think it’s going to be a backyard brawl,” said Ted Bridis, investigations editor for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. Over the past several months, nonprofit organizations scrambled to save data purged from federal websites and listed the many restrictions placed on communications with the public.

This report lays out problems with freedom of information and synthesizes solutions aimed at making freedom of information laws work as their creators intended—as an open, honest way for the public to know what its government is doing….(More)”

Eight Common Challenges to Scaling Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jenn Gustetic: “Implementing an innovative approach within the federal government takes relentlessness, stamina, and strategy. It can be incredibly lonely. You are often your own best champion. It can feel impossible– like being the underdog trying to win a sporting match. But after all the frustrations and setbacks, when you win that first match it is also overwhelmingly satisfying.

But for the change agents in government, winning the first match is not enough. To make innovative approaches more routine, winning one match is just the beginning. The scaling challenge begins when you try to win over and over—and when you try to get more people to join your team….

There are eight common critical elements to scaling innovative approaches across the federal government that are not unique.

  1. Legal and policy frameworks: Even without an explicit legal authority, policy guidance on existing available authorities can have a great impact on initial scaling efforts.
  2. Shared infrastructure and common platforms: It is not cost-effective for each agency to have to recreate similar capabilities to support each innovative approach; shared services for some functions can reduce barriers to entry and increase efficiency.
  3. Emergence and sustainability of communities of practice: People are the most important part in developing and sharing the knowledge for innovative approaches—and their individual energy can be channeled for higher impact when intentionally connected with shared purpose.
  4. Knowledge capture and sharing: Toolkits increase the impact of interactions between experts and new learners by making basic knowledge more easily discoverable.
  5. Budget: Finding ways to build flexibility into program annual budget requests to allow for the funding of innovative approaches is critical to unlocking more resources to support these approaches that are owned by the programs themselves.
  6. Agency processes: Spending time modernizing the “un-sexy” protocols owned by procurement, human resources, and other Agency mission support functions might be the single most important door to unlock to scale new approaches.
  7. Reporting requirements: Creating centralized mechanisms (whether required or voluntary) for reporting and being disciplined in collecting quality reports that describe results on a project level builds the evidence base for scaling.
  8. External assessments and impact studies: Federal agencies should also support independent assessments of their use of innovative approaches in order to capture non-biased impact analysis and improve practice, based on evidence.

Here’s a little bit more context about why these are all important elements to scaling innovation…(More)”

Can Technology Save Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Adele Peters in Fast Company: “On March 11, in a state parliament election in West Australia, 24 candidates made only one campaign promise: If they won, they promised to vote on every bill according to the wishes of their constituents, as determined via an app called Flux. (While the votes are still being tallied, it looks unlikely that any will win.)

Flux’s app is one of a handful of new platforms that aim to use technology to let people participate directly in politics, at scale. All are premised on the fact that–around the world–representative democracy isn’t working well. But technology could potentially help end corruption and lobbying, allow people to delegate votes to trusted friends rather than politicians, and empower experts in a field to meaningfully impact policy.

Does Democracy Work?

In 2015, shortly after Donald Trump announced that he was running for president, polls found that only 19% of Americans trusted the government “always” or “most of the time.” (The survey has not been repeated, but presumably, the numbers have not improved.) Only 11% approved of Congress.

Those numbers are historic lows; in 1958, when a poll first asked the question, 73% of Americans said that they could trust the government most of the time. The results can be partisan–people are less likely to trust the government when the opposing party is in power, and Republicans are less likely to trust government, in general, than Democrats. But the overall message is clear. Most people don’t think democracy is working in its current form….

The problems may stem from our form of government. “The problem, fundamentally, is representative democracy,” says Nathan Spataro, cofounder of both the Flux political party in Australia and XO.1, the startup making the software that powers the Flux app. “It is not that your politicians are corrupt, it’s that the politicians are corrupt because of the system. You don’t have to look far to watch how politicians start their career, and how then the system fundamentally changes them by the time they get to the end of it.”

Liquid Democracy

True direct democracy, in which every member of a society votes on everything, could eliminate the problem of lobbying, but has rarely existed. In ancient Athens, assemblies made up of all the citizens gathered to make decisions (women and slaves were not allowed to be citizens). In some Swiss cantons, citizens can participate directly in local government. In both cases, though, issues facing voters were relatively simple and limited in scope. While direct democracy might be the ideal–a government that’s literally by the people and for the people–it’s hard to scale up. In a large society with complex issues, it isn’t possible for even the most dedicated individual to keep up with every possible item that requires a vote–or have an informed opinion about them.

Representative democracy, which ideally solves that problem, also struggles with size. “One of the key problems of the U.S. political system is that it runs into scaling limits,” says Bryan Ford, a computer scientist who leads the Decentralized/Distributed Systems lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Sixteen years ago, Ford began thinking about what he calls delegative democracy, now also known as liquid democracy. “The whole idea of delegative democracy is to try to create a representative system that responds to the needs of individuals but also scales,” he says. “In some sense, delegative or liquid democracy is an approximation to the completely impractical idea of fully participatory, direct democracy.”

It works like this: Rather than asking citizens to vote on every issue, it gives each person the power to vote or to appoint a delegate to vote for them. Unlike a typical representative, that delegate could be changed at any time depending on the issue….(More)”.

Did artificial intelligence deny you credit?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in The Conversation: “People who apply for a loan from a bank or credit card company, and are turned down, are owed an explanation of why that happened. It’s a good idea – because it can help teach people how to repair their damaged credit – and it’s a federal law, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Getting an answer wasn’t much of a problem in years past, when humans made those decisions. But today, as artificial intelligence systems increasingly assist or replace people making credit decisions, getting those explanations has become much more difficult.

Traditionally, a loan officer who rejected an application could tell a would-be borrower there was a problem with their income level, or employment history, or whatever the issue was. But computerized systems that use complex machine learning models are difficult to explain, even for experts.

Consumer credit decisions are just one way this problem arises. Similar concerns exist in health care, online marketing and even criminal justice. My own interest in this area began when a research group I was part of discovered gender bias in how online ads were targeted, but could not explain why it happened.

All those industries, and many others, who use machine learning to analyze processes and make decisions have a little over a year to get a lot better at explaining how their systems work. In May 2018, the new European Union General Data Protection Regulation takes effect, including a section giving people a right to get an explanation for automated decisions that affect their lives. What shape should these explanations take, and can we actually provide them?

Identifying key reasons

One way to describe why an automated decision came out the way it did is to identify the factors that were most influential in the decision. How much of a credit denial decision was because the applicant didn’t make enough money, or because he had failed to repay loans in the past?

My research group at Carnegie Mellon University, including PhD student Shayak Sen and then-postdoc Yair Zick created a way to measure the relative influence of each factor. We call it the Quantitative Input Influence.

In addition to giving better understanding of an individual decision, the measurement can also shed light on a group of decisions: Did an algorithm deny credit primarily because of financial concerns, such as how much an applicant already owes on other debts? Or was the applicant’s ZIP code more important – suggesting more basic demographics such as race might have come into play?…(More)”

Geospatial big data and cartography: research challenges and opportunities for making maps that matter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Screen Shot 2017-03-14 at 8.06.51 AMAnthony C. Robinson et al in the International Journal Of Cartography; “Geospatial big data present a new set of challenges and opportunities for cartographic researchers in technical, methodological and artistic realms. New computational and technical paradigms for cartography are accompanying the rise of geospatial big data. Additionally, the art and science of cartography needs to focus its contemporary efforts on work that connects to outside disciplines and is grounded in problems that are important to humankind and its sustainability. Following the development of position papers and a collaborative workshop to craft consensus around key topics, this article presents a new cartographic research agenda focused on making maps that matter using geospatial big data. This agenda provides both long-term challenges that require significant attention and short-term opportunities that we believe could be addressed in more concentrated studies….(More)”.

Analytics Tools Could Be the Key to Effective Message-Driven Nudging

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 in Government Technology: “Appealing to the nuances of the human mind has been a feature of effective governance for as long as governance has existed, appearing prominently in the prescriptions of every great political theorist from Plato to Machiavelli. The most recent and informed iteration of this practice is nudging: leveraging insights about how humans think from behavioral science to create initiatives that encourage desirable behaviors.

Public officials nudge in many ways. Some seek to modify people’s behavior by changing the environments in which they make decisions, for instance moving vegetables to the front of a grocery store to promote healthy eating. Others try to make desirable behaviors easier, like streamlining a city website to make it simpler to sign up for a service. Still others use prompts like email reminders of a deadline to receive a free checkup to nudge people to act wisely by providing useful information.

Thus far, examples of the third type of nudging — direct messaging that prompts behavior — have been decidedly low tech. Typical initiatives have included sending behaviorally informed letters to residents who have not complied with a city code or mailing out postcard reminders to renew license plates. Governments have been attracted to these initiatives for their low cost and proven effectiveness.

While these low-tech nudges should certainly continue, cities’ recent adoption of tools that can mine and analyze data instantaneously has the potential to greatly increase the scope and effectiveness of message-driven nudging.

For one, using Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems, cities can provide residents with real-time information so that they may make better-informed decisions. For example, cities could connect traffic sensors to messaging systems and send subscribers text messages at times of high congestion, encouraging them to take public transportation. This real-time information, paired with other nudges, could increase transit use, easing traffic and bettering the environment…
Instantaneous data-mining tools may also prove useful for nudging citizens in real time, at the moments they are most likely to partake in detrimental behavior. Tools like machine learning can analyze users’ behavior and determine if they are likely to make a suboptimal choice, like leaving the website for a city service without enrolling. Using clickstream data, the site could determine if a user is likely to leave and deliver a nudge, for example sending a message explaining that most residents enroll in the service. This strategy provides another layer of nudging, catching residents who may have been influenced by an initial nudge — like a reminder to sign up for a service or streamlined website — but may need an extra prod to follow through….(More)”

Dark Web

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kristin Finklea for the Congressional Research Service: “The layers of the Internet go far beyond the surface content that many can easily access in their daily searches. The other content is that of the Deep Web, content that has not been indexed by traditional search engines such as Google. The furthest corners of the Deep Web, segments known as the Dark Web, contain content that has been intentionally concealed. The Dark Web may be used for legitimate purposes as well as to conceal criminal or otherwise malicious activities. It is the exploitation of the Dark Web for illegal practices that has garnered the interest of officials and policymakers.

Individuals can access the Dark Web by using special software such as Tor (short for The Onion Router). Tor relies upon a network of volunteer computers to route users’ web traffic through a series of other users’ computers such that the traffic cannot be traced to the original user. Some developers have created tools—such as Tor2web—that may allow individuals access to Torhosted content without downloading and installing the Tor software, though accessing the Dark Web through these means does not anonymize activity. Once on the Dark Web, users often navigate it through directories such as the “Hidden Wiki,” which organizes sites by category, similar to Wikipedia. Individuals can also search the Dark Web with search engines, which may be broad, searching across the Deep Web, or more specific, searching for contraband like illicit drugs, guns, or counterfeit money.

While on the Dark Web, individuals may communicate through means such as secure email, web chats, or personal messaging hosted on Tor. Though tools such as Tor aim to anonymize content and activity, researchers and security experts are constantly developing means by which certain hidden services or individuals could be identified or “deanonymized.” Anonymizing services such as Tor have been used for legal and illegal activities ranging from maintaining privacy to selling illegal goods—mainly purchased with Bitcoin or other digital currencies. They may be used to circumvent censorship, access blocked content, or maintain the privacy of sensitive communications or business plans. However, a range of malicious actors, from criminals to terrorists to state-sponsored spies, can also leverage cyberspace and the Dark Web can serve as a forum for conversation, coordination, and action. It is unclear how much of the Dark Web is dedicated to serving a particular illicit market at any one time, and, because of the anonymity of services such as Tor, it is even further unclear how much traffic is actually flowing to any given site.

Just as criminals can rely upon the anonymity of the Dark Web, so too can the law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities. They may, for example, use it to conduct online surveillance and sting operations and to maintain anonymous tip lines. Anonymity in the Dark Web can be used to shield officials from identification and hacking by adversaries. It can also be used to conduct a clandestine or covert computer network operation such as taking down a website or a denial of service attack, or to intercept communications. Reportedly, officials are continuously working on expanding techniques to deanonymize activity on the Dark Web and identify malicious actors online….(More)”

Better Jobs Information Benefits Everyone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Reamer in Issues: “Workers, employers, educators, and government officials all need access to more timely and more consistent middle-skills labor market data.

Economic growth and full employment require well-functioning labor markets—ones that enable workers to acquire skills that are in demand and employers to hire workers with necessary skills. Accurate and detailed information is essential to the functioning of a labor market that will make this possible.

To find a decent job in today’s economy, most workers need some level of specialized knowledge and skills, but it is not easy to figure out what specializations are in demand now and are likely to be needed in the future. Choosing poorly has long-term career consequences.

Unfortunately, the information needed to make good decisions, particularly concerning middle-skills jobs, either does not exist or is difficult to find. Neither Congress nor the executive branch has adequately fulfilled its responsibility to collect, organize, and make available reliable labor market information. A coordinated and adequately funded federal program to make this information available could provide enormous benefits to middle-skills workers and to employers as well as to a variety of other constituencies including students, educators, career and guidance counselors, state and federal policy makers, and researchers, all of whom play a role in creating an efficient labor market.

The needed information includes:

  • Occupational descriptions, including tasks performed and knowledge, skills, abilities, and training required.
  • Occupational demand and supply, current and projected, at the local, state, and national levels.
  • Employment outcomes of individual education and training programs and particular career pathways.
  • Extent of the match between existing talent pool and occupational and career options….(More)”.

Society, Regulation and Governance New Modes of Shaping Social Change?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Regine Paul, Marc Mölders, Alfons Bora, Michael Huber and Peter Münte: “Society, Regulation and Governance critically appraises the issue of intentional social change through the lens of regulation and governance studies. A twofold understanding of regulation and governance underpins the conceptual and empirical engagement throughout the book. On the one hand, regulation and governance are understood to be innovatively minded. On the other hand the book argues that, at their respective cores, regulation and governance are continuously concerned with how intentional social change can be fostered and what results can be yielded in terms of shaping society.

This book brings together sociologists, political scientists, legal scholars and historians to produce an interdisciplinary critical evaluation of alleged ‘new modes’ of social change, specifically: risk, publics and participation. It makes three key contributions by:

• offering a consolidation and re-appraisal of a debate that has become increasingly vague with its academic and political proliferation;

• identifying a uniting conceptual-analytical core between regulation and governance which explains the adaptability and innovation-mindedness of processes of ‘shaping society’; and

• re-focusing on the ‘essence’ of regulation and governance approaches – intentional modes of social change.

Society, Regulation and Governance will give significant insight into the potential and limits of new methods of social change, suiting a wide range of social science and legal academics due to its collaborative nature….(More)”.

Fighting Corruption in Health Care? There’s an App for That

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Akjibek Beishebaeva at Voices (OSF): “As an industry that relies heavily on approvals from government officials, the pharmaceutical field in places like Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan—which lack strong mechanisms for public oversight—is particularly susceptible to corruption.

The problem in those countries is exacerbated by the absence of any reliable system to monitor market prices for drugs. For example, a hospital manager bribed by a pharmaceutical representative could agree to procure a drug at a price 10 times higher than at a neighboring hospital. In addition, those medicines procured by the state and meant to be dispensed freely to patients often appear for sale at hospital-based pharmacies instead.

These aren’t victimless crimes. The most needy patients are often the first to suffer when funds are diverted away from lifesaving treatments and medicines.

To tackle this issue, last year the Soros Foundation–Kyrgyzstan and the International Renaissance Foundation jointly conducted the Health Data Hackathon in the Yssyk-Kul region of Kyrgyzstan. Two teams from Ukraine and three teams from Kyrgyzstan—consisting of coders, journalists, and activists—took part. Their goal was to find innovative solutions to address corruption in public procurements and access to health services for vulnerable populations.

Over the two-and-a-half-day effort, one of the Ukrainian teams developed a prototype for a software application to improve the e-tendering platform for all public procurement in Ukraine—ProZorro.

ProZorro itself revolutionized the tender process when it first launched in 2015. It combined a centralized database of online markets and was made accessible to the public. Journalists, activists, and patients today can log in to the system and scrutinize tenders approved by the government. The transparency provided by the system has already shown savings of more than a billion UAH (US$37 million). However, the database is huge and can be tricky to navigate without training.

The application developed at the hackathon makes it even easier to monitor the purchase prices of medicines in Ukraine. Specfically, it will allow users to automatically and instantly compare prices for the same products—a process which previously took many days of manual effort.

The application also offers a more intuitive interface and improved search functionality that will help further reduce corruption and save money—savings that can be redirected towards treatments for people living with HIV, cancer, and hepatitis C. The team is now testing the software and working with the government to introduce it early this year.

Another team came up with the idea to let patients monitor supplies of medicine at facilities in real time. If a hospital representative says that a patient needs to buy drugs that should be readily available, for example, the patient can check online and hold the hospital accountable if the medicines are meant to be provided for free. The tool, called WikiLiky, has already been implemented in the Sumy region of Ukraine.

Likewise, one of the Kyrgyz teams looked at price monitoring in their own country, focusing on the inefficient and mistake-prone acquisition process. For instance, the name of one drug might be misspelled in several different ways, making it difficult to track prices accurately. The team redesigned the functionality of the government e-procurement portal called Codifier, creating uniformity across the system of names, dosages, and other medical specifications….(More)”