Stefaan Verhulst

David Donaldson at The Mandarin: “Victorian public servants will have the opportunity to be randomly matched with others for coffee dates, as part of the government’s plan to foster links across silos and bolster innovation.

That is just one of many initiatives planned by Victoria in its new Public Sector Innovation Strategy, released on Tuesday.The plan acknowledges that plenty of innovative thinking is already happening, so the best way to drive further ideas is to connect people better and provide tools and case studies so they can learn from one another.

Six themes repeatedly came up in conversations around innovation in the public service, says the document:

1. Leaders who enable and reward — too often new ideas are stifled by leaders who don’t support them;
2. Employees who feel confident and supported;
3. Learning well — pockets of innovation exist, and stronger efforts to learn and develop from them will help;
4. Sharing with each other;
5. Partnering with the community and other organisations;
6. Delivering value — don’t innovate on random things. Focus on what makes a difference.

“This strategy helps to find, encourage and support change that adds value across the public sector. We need to unlock good intent and talent, share examples and experiences, and learn from each other,” says Chris Eccles, secretary of the Department of Premier and Cabinet.

“At our best, we all contribute our different skills and roles to generate more public value, shaped by the common purpose of creating a better society.”

To kick off progress, the government has outlined a series of actions it will undertake:

• A reverse mentoring plan to help executives learn from more junior staff. Due September 2017.
• Build on a current departmental trial that builds innovation into executive performance development plans. December 2017.
• Establish a high-profile event to recognise and reward practical innovation across government. March 2018.
• A practical innovation bank, to provide a common digital space for cross-government sharing of practical resources (case studies, contacts, templates, guides, lessons learned and so on). December 2017.
• Ideas challenge toolkit to provide guidance on how to run an ideas challenge. December 2017.
• Learning lab trial, which will provide an incubator environment for cross-government use on a project by project basis. March 2018.
• VPS Academy, a new peer to peer learning project, will go through two more pilots to build the case for scaling up. July and December 2017…(More)”.

Saritha Rai at Bloomberg Technology: “In Bangalore, tech giants and startups typically spend their days fiercely battling each other for customers. Now they are turning their attention to a common enemy: the Indian city’s infernal traffic congestion.

Cross-town commutes that can take hours has inspired Gridlock Hackathon, a contest initiated by Flipkart Online Services Pvt. for technology workers to find solutions to the snarled roads that cost the economy billions of dollars. While the prize totals a mere $5,500, it’s attracting teams from global giants Microsoft Corp., Google and Amazon.com. Inc. to local startups including Ola.

The online contest is crowdsourcing solutions for Bangalore, a city of more than 10 million, as it grapples with inadequate roads, unprecedented growth and overpopulation. The technology industry began booming decades ago and with its base of talent, it continues to attract companies. Just last month, Intel Corp. said it would invest $178 million and add more workers to expand its R&D operations.

The ideas put forward at the hackathon range from using artificial intelligence and big data on traffic flows to true moonshots, such as flying cars.

The gridlock remains a problem for a city dependent on its technology industry and seeking to attract new investment…(More)”.

Larry M. Bartels for the SSRC: “A key characteristic of a democracy,” according to Robert Dahl, is “the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.” Much empirical research over the past half century, most of it focusing on the United States, has examined the relationship between citizens’ policy preferences and the policy choices of elected officials. According to Robert Shapiro, this research has generated “evidence for strong effects of public opinion on government policies,” providing “a sanguine picture of democracy at work.”

In recent years, however, scholars of American politics have produced striking evidence that the apparent “strong effects” of aggregate public opinion in these studies mask severe inequalities in responsiveness. As Martin Gilens put it, “The American government does respond to the public’s preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent citizens. Indeed, under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt.”

One possible interpretation of these findings is that the American political system is anomalous in its apparent disregard for the preferences of middle-class and poor people. In that case, the severe political inequality documented there would presumably be accounted for by distinctive features of the United States, such as its system of private campaign finance, its weak labor unions, or its individualistic political culture. But, what if severe political inequality is endemic in affluent democracies? That would suggest that fiddling with the political institutions of the United States to make them more like Denmark’s (or vice versa) would be unlikely to bring us significantly closer to satisfying Dahl’s standard of democratic equality. We would be forced to conclude either that Dahl’s standard is fundamentally misguided or that none of the political systems commonly identified as democratic comes anywhere close to meriting that designation.

Analyzing policy responsiveness

“I have attempted to test the extent to which policymakers in a variety of affluent democracies respond to the preferences of their citizens considered as political equals.”

To address this question, I have attempted to test the extent to which policymakers in a variety of affluent democracies respond to the preferences of their citizens considered as political equals. My analyses focus on the relationship between public opinion and government spending on social welfare programs, including pensions, health, education, and unemployment benefits. These programs represent a major share of government spending in every affluent democracy and, arguably, an important source of public well-being. Moreover, social spending figures prominently in the comparative literature on the political impact of public opinion in affluent democracies, with major scholarly works suggesting that it is significantly influenced by citizens’ preferences.

My analyses employ data on citizens’ views about social spending and the welfare state from three major cross-national survey projects—the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the World Values Survey (WVS), and the European Values Survey (EVS). In combination, these three sources provide relevant opinion data from 160 surveys conducted between 1985 and 2012 in 30 countries, including most of the established democracies of Western Europe and the English-speaking world and some newer democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I examine shifts in (real per capita) social spending in the two years following each survey. Does greater public enthusiasm for the welfare state lead to increases in social spending, other things being equal? And, more importantly here, do the views of low-income people have the same apparent influence on policy as the views of affluent people?…(More)”.

Report by Future Care Capital: “….Data is often referred to as the ‘new oil’ – the 21st century raw material which, when hitched to algorithmic refinement, may be mined for insight and value – and ‘data flows’ are said to have exerted a greater impact upon global growth than traditional goods flows in recent years (Manyika et al, 2016). Small wonder, then, that governments around the world are endeavouring to strike a balance between individual privacy rights and protections on the one hand, and organisational permissions to facilitate the creation of social, economic and environmental value from broad-ranging data on the other: ‘data rights’ are now of critical importance courtesy of technological advancements. The tension between the two is particularly evident where health and care data in the UK is concerned. Individuals are broadly content with anonymised data from their medical records being used for public benefit but are, understandably, anxious about the implications of the most intimate aspects of their lives being hacked or, else, shared without their knowledge or consent….

The potential for health and care data to be transformative remains, and there is growing concern that opportunities to improve the use of health and care data in peoples’ interests are being missed….

we recommend additional support for digitisation efforts in social care settings. We call upon the Government to streamline processes associated with Information Governance (IG) modelling to help data sharing initiatives that traverse organisational boundaries. We also advocate for investment and additional legal safeguards to make more anonymised data sets available for research and innovation. Crucially, we recommend expediting the scope for individuals to contribute health and care data to sharing initiatives led by the public sector through promotion, education and pilot activities – so that data is deployed to transform public health and support the ‘pivot to prevention’.

In Chapter Two, we explore the rationale and scope for the UK to build upon emergent practice from around the world and become a global leader in ‘data philanthropy’ – to push at the boundaries of existing plans and programmes, and support the development of and access to unrivalled health and care data sets. We look at member-controlled ‘data cooperatives’ and what we’ve termed ‘data communities’ operated by trusted intermediaries. We also explore ‘data collaboratives’ which involve the private sector engaging in data philanthropy for public benefit. Here, we make recommendations about promoting a culture of data philanthropy through the demonstration of tangible benefits to participants and the wider public, and we call upon Government to assess the appetite and feasibility of establishing the world’s first National Health and Care Data Donor Bank….(More)”

ODX Canada: “In Canada, the open data environment should be viewed as a supply chain. The movement of open data from producers to consumers involves many different organizations, people, activities, projects and initiatives, all of which work together to push out a final product. Naturally, if there is a break or hurdle in this supply chain, it doesn’t work efficiently. A fundamental hurdle highlighted by companies across the country was the inability to scale their business at the provincial, national and international levels.

This blueprint aims to address the challenges Canadian entrepreneurs are facing by encouraging municipalities to launch open data initiatives. By sharing best practices, we hope to encourage the accessibility of datasets within existing jurisdictions. The structured recommendations in this Open Data Blueprint are based on feedback and best practices seen in major cities across Canada collected through ODX’s primary research….(More)”

(Read more about the OD150 initiative here)

UNDP: “In 2014, UNDP, with the generous support of the Government of Denmark, established an Innovation Facility to improve service delivery and support national governments and citizens to tackle complex challenges.

The report ‘Spark, Scale, Sustain’ shares UNDP’s approach to innovation, over 40 case studies of innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals in practice and Features on Alternative Finance, Behavioral Insights, Data Innovation and Public Policy Labs.

Download the report to find out more about the innovation initiatives that are testing and scaling solutions to address challenges across five areas:

• Eradicate Poverty, Leave No One Behind
• Protect the Planet
• Build Peaceful Societies, Prevent Violent Conflict
• Manage Risk, Improve Disaster Response
• Advance Gender Equality & Women’s Empowerment….(More)”.

National Institutes of Health: “Using a larger dataset than for any previous human movement study, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, have tracked physical activity by population for more than 100 countries. Their research follows on a recent estimate that more than 5 million people die each year from causes associated with inactivity.

The large-scale study of daily step data from anonymous smartphone users dials in on how countries, genders, and community types fare in terms of physical activity and what results may mean for intervention efforts around physical activity and obesity. The study was published July 10, 2017, in the advance online edition of Nature.

“Big data is not just about big numbers, but also the patterns that can explain important health trends,” said Grace Peng, Ph.D., director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) program in Computational Modeling, Simulation and Analysis.

“Data science and modeling can be immensely powerful tools. They can aid in harnessing and analyzing all the personalized data that we get from our phones and wearable devices.”

Almost three quarters of adults in developed countries and half of adults in developing economies carry a smartphone. The devices are equipped with tiny accelerometers, computer chip that maintains the orientation of the screen, and can also automatically record stepping motions. The users whose data contributed to this study subscribed to the Azumio Argus app, a free application for tracking physical activity and other health behaviors….

In addition to the step records, the researchers accessed age, gender, and height and weight status of users who registered the smartphone app. They used the same calculation that economists use for income inequality — called the Gini index — to calculate activity inequality by country.

“These results reveal how much of a population is activity-rich, and how much of a population is activity-poor,” Delp said. “In regions with high activity inequality there are many people who are activity poor, and activity inequality is a strong predictor of health outcomes.”…

The researchers investigated the idea that making improvements in a city’s walkability — creating an environment that is safe and enjoyable to walk — could reduce activity inequality and the activity gender gap.

“If you must cross major highways to get from point A to point B in a city, the walkability is low; people rely on cars,” Delp said. “In cities like New York and San Francisco, where you can get across town on foot safely, the city has high walkability.”

Data from 69 U.S. cities showed that higher walkability scores are associated with lower activity inequality. Higher walkability is associated with significantly more daily steps across all age, gender, and body-mass-index categories.  However, the researchers found that women recorded comparatively less activity than men in places that are less walkable.

The study exemplifies how smartphones can deliver new insights about key health behaviors, including what the authors categorize as the global pandemic of physical inactivity….(More)”.

National Academies of Sciences Report: “Publicly available statistics from government agencies that are credible, relevant, accurate, and timely are essential for policy makers, individuals, households, businesses, academic institutions, and other organizations to make informed decisions. Even more, the effective operation of a democratic system of government depends on the unhindered flow of statistical information to its citizens.

In the United States, federal statistical agencies in cabinet departments and independent agencies are the governmental units whose principal function is to compile, analyze, and disseminate information for such statistical purposes as describing population characteristics and trends, planning and monitoring programs, and conducting research and evaluation. The work of these agencies is coordinated by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. Statistical agencies may acquire information not only from surveys or censuses of people and organizations, but also from such sources as government administrative records, private-sector datasets, and Internet sources that are judged of suitable quality and relevance for statistical use. They may conduct analyses, but they do not advocate policies or take partisan positions. Statistical purposes for which they provide information relate to descriptions of groups and exclude any interest in or identification of an individual person, institution, or economic unit.

Four principles are fundamental for a federal statistical agency: relevance to policy issues, credibility among data users, trust among data providers, and independence from political and other undue external influence.� Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency: Sixth Edition presents and comments on these principles as they’ve been impacted by changes in laws, regulations, and other aspects of the environment of federal statistical agencies over the past 4 years….(More)”.

Erna Ruijer et al in Government Information Quarterly: “Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to take into account the variation of open data practices and specific contexts of usage. This study, therefore, argues that next to general requirements: we also need to collect context-specific user requirements for open data platforms. We take different societal issues as the starting point for open data platform design. To illustrate the value of this context-specific approach, we apply scenario-based design methodology in the Province of Groningen in The Netherlands. The results show that different scenarios result partly in similar but also partly in different user requirements, leading to a deeper and richer understanding of user requirements. We conclude that a context-specific approach thereby connecting data, users and societal issues can be used to guide government agencies and designers in efforts to develop open data platforms that actually meet the needs of citizens….(More)”.