Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Goldsmith 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)”

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)”

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)”.

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)”.

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)”

Bruce Brown in Digital Trends: “As modern cities smarten up, the priority for many will be transportation. Belfort, a mid-sized French industrial city of 50,000, serves as proof of concept for improved urban transportation that does not require the time and expense of covering the city with sensors and cameras.

Working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and GFI Informatique, the Board of Public Transportation of Belfort overhauled bus service management of the city’s 100-plus buses. The project entailed a combination of ID cards, GPS-equipped card readers on buses, and big data analysis. The collected data was used to measure bus speed from stop to stop, passenger flow to observe when and where people got on and off, and bus route density. From start to finish, the proof of concept project took four weeks.

Using the TCS Intelligent Urban Exchange system, operations managers were able to detect when and where about 20 percent of all bus passengers boarded and got off on each city bus route. Utilizing big data and artificial intelligence the city’s urban planners were able to use that data analysis to make cost-effective adjustments including the allocation of additional buses on routes and during times of greater passenger demand. They were also able to cut back on buses for minimally used routes and stops. In addition, the system provided feedback on the effect of city construction projects on bus service….

Going forward, continued data analysis will help the city budget wisely for infrastructure changes and new equipment purchases. The goal is to put the money where the needs are greatest rather than just spending and then waiting to see if usage justified the expense. The push for smarter cities has to be not just about improved services, but also smart resource allocation — in the Belfort project, the use of big data showed how to do both….(More)”

HBS Case Study by Mitchell Weiss and Maria Fernanda Miguel: “There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the labyrinth system that provided an estimated 14 million rides a day. Gabriella Gómez-Mont, the Lab’s founder and director, had led her team in a project to crowd-source the routes from volunteer riders in what came to be known as Mapatón CDMX. After four pilots and a two-week “mapping marathon” later, she wondered exactly what to make of the lab’s fiftieth experiment? Was Mapatón successful?

Learning objective:

LabCDMX and their crowdsourced bus mapping project provides the setting to explore risk taking and experimentation in public settings. The case is designed to focus students most acutely on questions of can government take more risk and how? This is a key question for public entreprenuers. In class, students are encouraged to think both about the obstacles for risk taking and the tactics that elected leaders and innovation champions can take to surmount those obstacles. Students consider whether experimentation is one of those potential skills and, if so, how best and rigorously those experiments must be run. How willing must government be to admit failure if experiments don’t pan out? What can give them that leeway? How, tactically, can governments run these kinds of experiments? Is using off-the-shelf technology for quick, but imperfect beta services a productive strategy for securing buy-in and for learning? The case is adaptable for exploring big company settings, too. Mexico City’s municipal government is a giant organization, with 300,000 public workers. What is the role of an innovation office and it’s handful of employees in that context? How does it gain credibility with the rest of the organization? How do experiments help – or hurt – in that effort?…(More)”.

A Conversation With Chris Anderson: “If we could measure the world, how would we manage it differently? This is a question we’ve been asking ourselves in the digital realm since the birth of the Internet. Our digital lives—clicks, histories, and cookies—can now be measured beautifully. The feedback loop is complete; it’s called closing the loop. As you know, we can only manage what we can measure. We’re now measuring on-screen activity beautifully, but most of the world is not on screens.

As we get better and better at measuring the world—wearables, Internet of Things, cars, satellites, drones, sensors—we are going to be able to close the loop in industry, agriculture, and the environment. We’re going to start to find out what the consequences of our actions are and, presumably, we’ll take smarter actions as a result. This journey with the Internet that we started more than twenty years ago is now extending to the physical world. Every industry is going to have to ask the same questions: What do we want to measure? What do we do with that data? How can we manage things differently once we have that data? This notion of closing the loop everywhere is perhaps the biggest endeavor of our age.

Closing the loop is a phrase used in robotics. Open-loop systems are when you take an action and you can’t measure the results—there’s no feedback. Closed-loop systems are when you take an action, you measure the results, and you change your action accordingly. Systems with closed loops have feedback loops; they self-adjust and quickly stabilize in optimal conditions. Systems with open loops overshoot; they miss it entirely…(More)”

Book by Tynesia Boyea-Robinson: “… is a collection of stories and case studies to evolve the way we think about and approach systemic causes of inequities facing low-income communities, particularly communities of color. The book successfully addresses:

• Cross-sector collaboration as a requirement for sustainable social change;
• Moving away from siloed programs with single-focused solutions to building systems and infrastructures that improve inequities at the population-level; and
• Reframing how to think about and measure success in order to achieve scale and impact.

Read about leaders across the country who have successfully created sustainable, long-lasting solutions to address key root causes of inequities in their communities:

• How the Detroit Corridor Initiative, Cincinnati, and Minneapolis-St Paul used shared results for successful cross-sector partnerships
• How Nexus Community Partners in Minneapolis changed how they collaborate with the community they’re serving towards a more authentic community engagement
• How Best Start for Kids in Seattle/King County effectively used cross-sector partnerships
• How Camden City in New Jersey partnered with Campbell’s Soup for better health outcomes

Discover tested tools and strategies to implement change in your own communities, such as:

• How the Model Behavior, Align Resources, Catalyze Change (MAC) framework harnesses intrinsic motivation for behavior change
• How the Data Inventory helps you figure out what data needs to be collected and how to get it
• Four components of creating effective shared results that will drive your cross-sector partnership towards success…(More)”.