Article by Maaike Kaasenbrood et al in the International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA): “Governments are increasingly opening their datasets, allowing use. Drawing on a multi-method approach, this paper develops a framework for identifying factors influencing the adoption of Open Government Data (OGD) by private organisations. Subsequently the framework was used to analyse five cases. The findings reveal that for private organizations to use OGD, the content and source of the data needs to be clear, a usable open data license must be present and continuity of data updates needs to be ensured. For none of the investigated private organisations OGD was key to their existence. Organisations use OGD in addition to, or as an enhancement of their core activities. As the official OGD-channels are bypassed trustworthy relationships between the data user and data provider were found to play an important role in finding and using OGD. The findings of this study can help government agencies in developing OGD-policies and stimulating OGD-use….(More).”
The Dawn of System Leadership
Peter Senge, Hal Hamilton, & John Kania at SSIReview: “…At no time in history have we needed such system leaders more. We face a host of systemic challenges beyond the reach of existing institutions and their hierarchical authority structures. Problems like climate change, destruction of ecosystems, growing scarcity of water, youth unemployment, and embedded poverty and inequity require unprecedented collaboration among different organizations, sectors, and even countries. Sensing this need, countless collaborative initiatives have arisen in the past decade—locally, regionally, and even globally. Yet more often than not they have floundered—in part because they failed to foster collective leadership within and across the collaborating organizations.
The purpose of this article is to share what we are learning about the system leaders needed to foster collective leadership. We hope to demystify what it means to be a system leader and to continue to grow as one….
Systemic change needs more than data and information; it needs real intelligence and wisdom. Jay Forrester, the founder of the system dynamics method that has shaped our approach to systems thinking, pointed out that complex non-linear systems exhibit “counterintuitive behavior.” He illustrated this by citing the large number of government interventions that go awry through aiming at short-term improvement in measurable problem symptoms but ultimately worsening the underlying problems—like increased urban policing that leads to short-term reductions in crime rates but does nothing to alter the sources of embedded poverty and worsens long-term incarceration rates.9 Another systems thinking pioneer, Russell Ackoff, characterized wisdom as the ability to distinguish the short-term from the long-term effects of an intervention.10 The question is, How does the wisdom to transcend pressures for low-leverage symptomatic interventions arise in practice?
System leaders like Baldwin and Winslow understand that collective wisdom cannot be manufactured or built into a plan created in advance. And it is not likely to come from leaders who seek to “drive” their predetermined change agenda. Instead, system leaders work to create the space where people living with the problem can come together to tell the truth, think more deeply about what is really happening, explore options beyond popular thinking, and search for higher leverage changes through progressive cycles of action and reflection and learning over time. Knowing that there are no easy answers to truly complex problems, system leaders cultivate the conditions wherein collective wisdom emerges over time through a ripening process that gradually brings about new ways of thinking, acting, and being…. (More)”.
Open Standards and the Digital Age
Book by Andrew L. Russell: “How did openness become a foundational value for the networks of the twenty-first century? Open Standards and the Digital Age answers this question through an interdisciplinary history of information networks that pays close attention to the politics of standardization. For much of the twentieth century, information networks such as the monopoly Bell System and the American military’s Arpanet were closed systems subject to centralized control. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, engineers in the United States and Europe experimented with design strategies to create new digital networks. In the process, they embraced discourses of “openness” to describe their ideological commitments to entrepreneurship, technological innovation, and participatory democracy. The rhetoric of openness has flourished – for example, in movements for open government, open source software, and open access publishing – but such rhetoric also obscures the ways the Internet and other “open” systems still depend heavily on hierarchical forms of control….(More).”
The smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology
Adam Greenfield at the Guardian: “We are lucky enough to live at a time in which a furious wave of innovation is breaking across the cities of the global south, spurred on both by the blistering pace of urbanisation, and by the rising popular demand for access to high-quality infrastructure that follows in its wake.
From Porto Alegre’s participatory budgeting and the literally destratifying cable cars of Caracas, to Nairobi’s “digital matatus” and the repurposed bus-ferries of Manila, the communities of the south are responsible for an ever-lengthening parade of social and technical innovations that rival anything the developed world has to offer for ingenuity and practical utility.
Nor is India an exception to this tendency. Transparent Chennai’s participatory maps and the work of the Mumbai-based practices CRIT and URBZ are better-known globally, but it is the tactics of daily survival devised by the unheralded multitude that really inspire urbanists. These techniques maximise the transactive capacity of the urban fabric, wrest the very last increment of value from the energy invested in the production of manufactured goods, and allow millions to eke a living, however precarious, from the most unpromising of circumstances. At a time of vertiginously spiralling economic and environmental stress globally, these are insights many of us in the developed north would be well advised to attend to – and by no means merely the poorest among us.
But, for whatever reason, this is not the face of urban innovation official India wants to share with the world – perhaps small-scale projects or the tactics of the poor simply aren’t dramatic enough to convey the magnitude and force of national ambition. We hear, instead, of schemes like Palava City, a nominally futuristic vision of digital technology minutely interwoven into the texture of everday urban life. Headlines were made around the planet this year when Narendra Modi’s government announced it had committed to building no fewer than 100 similarly “smart” cities….(More).”
New Implementation Guide for Local Government Innovation
Living Cities Blog and Press Release: “Living Cities, with support from the Citi Foundation, today released a toolkit to help local governments adopt cutting-edge approaches to innovation as part of the City Accelerator program. The implementation guide offers practical guidance to local government officials on how to build a durable culture and practice of innovation that draws from leading practices with promising results from cities around the United States, as well as from the private sector. The guide was developed as part of the City Accelerator, a $3 million program of Living Cities with the Citi Foundation to speed the spread of innovation with the potential to benefit low-income people in local governments. The implementation guide – authored by Nigel Jacob, co-founder of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston and Urban Technologist-in-Residence at Living Cities – addresses some of the key barriers that local governments face when looking to incorporate innovation in their cities, and introduces fresh ideas as well…(More)”
Manual: Start building digital by default services
UK Government Service Design Manual: “…The service manual is here to help service managers and digital delivery teams across government make services so good that people prefer to use them. It’s made up of two things;
- the Digital by Default Service Standard, a list of criteria that services and teams must meet before they go live
- the Government Service Design Manual, a pool of guidance and advice about how to design and build digital services from teams across government…
Typically, government services are built after long, costly procurement processes.
In this way of working, users are seldom – if ever – consulted about the service they’ll be using. The first time the public might see a service is when it goes live, by which time it’s too late to make any changes when it turns out to be unfit for purpose.
This way of working tends to encourage the creation of overly prescriptive policy, which then forms the basis of the requirements document. Instead, teams need to constantly iterate against user feedback.
This means building and testing in small chunks, working quickly to deliver improvements to a service. Teams will work out how to best meet the needs of users, releasing code regularly and working in an agile way. This new approach allows closer working between policy and delivery teams and as a result, the development of more responsive policy, two aims of the Civil Service Reform plan….
When you’re confident about the basics of service design and the requirement of the standard, you can start exploring the advice and guidance in the manual.
You can explore the manual by phase of delivery, specific roles, or by topic…(More).”
New open access journal will publish across all disciplines
Claudia Lupp at Elsevier: “When it comes to publishing, there is no one-size-fits-all approach or format. In years gone by, getting published was largely limited to presenting research in a specialized field. But with the vast increase in research output – and more and more researchers collaborating across borders and disciplines – things are changing rapidly. While there is still a vital role for the traditional field-specific journal, researchers want more choices of where and how to publish their research. Journals that feature sound research across all disciplines significantly broaden those much-coveted publishing options.
To expand and refine that concept even further, Elsevier is preparing to collaborate with the research community to develop an open access journal covering all disciplines on a platform that will enable continual experimentation and innovation. Plans include improving the end-to-end publishing process and integrating our smart technologies to improve search and discovery.
The new journal will offer researchers a streamlined, simple and intuitive publishing platform that connects their research to the relevant communities. Articles will be assessed for sound research rather than their scope or impact….
We are building an online interface that provides authors with a step-by-step, quick and intuitive submission process. As part of a transparent publishing process, we will alert authors on the progress of their submitted papers at each stage.
To streamline the editorial process, we plan to use assets and technology developed by Elsevier. For example, by using data from Scopus and the technology behind it, we can quickly match papers to relevant editors and reviewers, significantly shortening peer review times….
Once papers have been reviewed, edited and published, the goal is to bring this vast amount of information to readers and help them make sense of it for their own research. Every reputable journal aims to publish papers that are accurate and disseminate them to the right reader to support the advancement of science. But how do you do that effectively when there are more researchers and research papers than ever before?… (More)”
The new journal will offer researchers a streamlined, simple and intuitive publishing platform that connects their research to the relevant communities. Articles will be assessed for sound research rather than their scope or impact….
We are building an online interface that provides authors with a step-by-step, quick and intuitive submission process. As part of a transparent publishing process, we will alert authors on the progress of their submitted papers at each stage.
To streamline the editorial process, we plan to use assets and technology developed by Elsevier. For example, by using data from Scopus and the technology behind it, we can quickly match papers to relevant editors and reviewers, significantly shortening peer review times….
Once papers have been reviewed, edited and published, the goal is to bring this vast amount of information to readers and help them make sense of it for their own research. Every reputable journal aims to publish papers that are accurate and disseminate them to the right reader to support the advancement of science. But how do you do that effectively when there are more researchers and research papers than ever before?… (More)”
The Next 5 Years in Open Data: 3 Key Trends to Watch
Kevin Merritt (Socrata Inc.) at GovTech: “2014 was a pivotal year in the evolution of open data for one simple and powerful reason – it went mainstream and was widely adopted on just about every continent. Open data is now table stakes. Any government that is not participating in open data is behind its peers…The move toward data-driven government will absolutely accelerate between 2015 and 2020, thanks to three key trends.
1. Comparative Analytics for Government Employees
The first noteworthy trend that will drive open data change in 2015 is that open data technology offerings will deliver first-class benefits to public-sector employees. This means government employees will be able to derive enormous insights from their own data and act on them in a deep, meaningful and analytical way. Until only recently, the primary beneficiaries of open data initiatives were external stakeholders: developers and entrepreneurs; scientists, researchers, analysts, journalists and economists; and ordinary citizens lacking technical training. The open data movement, until now, has ignored an important class of stakeholders – government employees….
2. Increased Global Expansion for Open Data
The second major trend fueling data-driven government is that 2015 will be a year of accelerating adoption of open data internationally.
Right now, for example, open data is being adopted prolifically in Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
….
We will continue to see international governments adopt open data in 2015 for a variety of reasons. Northern European governments, for instance, are interested in efficiency and performance right now; Southern European governments, on the other hand, are currently focused on transparency, trust, and credibility. Despite the different motivations, the open data technology solutions are the same. And, looking out beyond 2015, it’s important to note that Southern European governments will also adopt open data to help increase job creation and improve delivery of services.
3. “Open Data” Will Simply Become “Government Data”
The third trend that we’ll see in the arena of open data lies a little further out on the horizon, and it will be surprising. In my opinion, the term “open data” may disappear within a decade; and in its place will simply be the term “government data.”
That’s because virtually all government data will be open data by 2020; and government data will be everywhere it needs to be – available to the public as fast as it’s created, processed and accumulated….(More).”
The Fundamental Shortcoming With How We View Innovation
David Dabscheck on “Why we should all be Chief Innovation Officers at work” at FastCompany: “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years?” asked a fellow attendee at Innovation Enterprise’s recent Chief Innovation Officer Summit in New York.
It was a hard question to answer, particularly because I had no idea what a “CINO” was.
Even though I am literally a card-carrying member of the new religion of innovation, I hadn’t realized our high priests secured their own coveted C-suite acronym—CINOs for Chief INnovation Officer. Certainly this signals a function on the rise and was reinforced by the variety of industries represented over the two-day conference, including conservative ones that are more commonly associated with regulation than innovation, such as banking and healthcare. Indeed, Dr. Molly Coye, Chief Innovation Officer at UCLA Health, described how when she started in 2010 there were perhaps two or three similar positions, whereas today there are conferences purely for healthcare CINOs….
As even with vigorous C-suite support, innovation is often a misunderstood and misused concept because it presents psychological, as well as organizational challenges. The devil is not just in the details with innovation; he is dozing in our brains while simultaneously flipping off managers agonizing over their P&L statements.
What we need are conferences where people with “innovation” anywhere in their title cannot attend; where what is new is not the content, but those hearing it; where attendees learn that if innovation is what those people do “over there” it will never succeed “right here.” That is not to say those working in innovation do not also need more rigor within their approaches and genuinely appreciate why this word too often becomes a synonym for “expensive diversion.”
To return to the original question, the longevity of CINOs depends ironically on how effectively they make themselves redundant. They will succeed by helping employees view themselves as “innovative” exactly like they see themselves as “punctual” or “enthusiastic.” I am looking forward to the CINO conference where I am instead asked, “Do you think CINO’s will be around in five years, as aren’t we all one already?”…(More).
The News We Need to Hear
David Bornstein in the New York Times: “When we began writing the column in late 2010 we hoped to show that serious reporting about responses to social problems could both provide useful insights for society and engage readers. We aimed to distinguish Fixes — an example of what we call solutions journalism — from uncritical “good news” reporting by examining approaches to social problems that show results and focusing on the specifics of how they work and what we can learn from them….
Journalists need better tools to find these stories systematically. Because the problems scream, but the solutions whisper, we often overlook them. We’re not good at letting society know when we are winning against problems; we are hamstrung by our techniques and our very sense of purpose. If winning means there is never another police killing of an unarmed black man, then it may also mean that the story goes away at its finest moment.
But it doesn’t have to. In our experience writing this column, we have found that it is almost always worthwhile to ask the question, Who’s doing it better?
Consider the immigration crisis in the United States. The news coverage focuses on the battle in Washington and the politics around tougher policing of the border. But immigration is at heart a local story that will continue to unfold in countless ways in the year ahead. Which cities or communities are doing a better job building or improving relations between new immigrants and their receiving communities? What are they doing and what can be learned from them?…
To be sure, journalism is not meant to be an obstacle to progress; it’s meant to describe the world accurately and circulate real-time information to help societies understand themselves and improve. But the news can influence human behavior in unintended ways. “The way in which the world is imagined determines at any particular moment what men will do,” wrote Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion, in 1922.
It turns out, this isn’t just an armchair observation. Research now supports that our behavior is strongly influenced by what we imagine other people are doing — and it works in both directions, positive or negative. This is called “social norming.”… (More)”