Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Young and Stefaan Verhulst at the Open Data Charter Blog: “The international Open Data Charter has emerged from the global open data community as a galvanizing document to place open government data directly in the hands of citizens and organizations. To drive this process forward, and ensure that the outcomes are both systemic and transformational, new open data policy needs to be based on evidence of how and when open data works in practice. To support this work, the GovLab, in collaboration with Omidyar Network, has recently completed research which provides vital evidence of open data projects around the world, including an analysis of 19 in-depth, impact-focused case studies and a key findings paper. All of the research is now available in an eBook published by O’Reilly Media.

The research found that open data is making an impact in four core ways, including:…(More)”

Book by Leitão, João and Alves, Helena: This volume discusses the importance of adopting entrepreneurial and innovation practices in the public sector, as mechanisms for detecting, dealing with and including citizens’ social needs, with a reflection on positive determination of their quality of life. It focuses on critical reflection and rethinking the articulation between the dimensions of transformation – entrepreneurship and innovation – of New Public Management (NPM). In this way the book contributes to deepening knowledge about the implications of this change in the organizational paradigm of the public sector for citizens’ quality of life, which is treated multi-dimensionally here, including citizens’ well-being, purchasing power, happiness, trust, safety, experience and satisfaction.
The volume constitutes a reference guide for decision makers, managers and policy makers engaged in the public sector who want to differentiate their performance by fostering entrepreneurial and innovative practices in the scope of public administration that can enhance citizens’ quality of life. This volume is also a reference guide for scholars, policy makers and practitioners interested on public innovation….(More)”

Essay by Mark A. Calabria in Cato Journal: “Behavioral economics has continued to gain momentum in challenging the standard rational actor model in economics. With a few exceptions, the emphasis has been on the cognitive failure of individuals outside of government. Niclas Berggren (2013: 200) estimates that 95.5 percent of behavioral economics articles in the leading economics journals do not contain an analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers. In this article, I offer a preliminary analysis of potential cognitive failures in the Federal Reserve’s conduct of monetary policy. Proposals to “debias” monetary policymaking are offered, along with a discussion of how the Fed’s existing institutional structure ameliorates or exasperates potential biases…(More)”

PressRelease: “Twitter and UN Global Pulse today announced a partnership that will provide the United Nations with access to Twitter’s data tools to support efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals, which were adopted by world leaders last year.

Every day, people around the world send hundreds of millions of Tweets in dozens of languages. This public data contains real-time information on many issues including the cost of food, availability of jobs, access to health care, quality of education, and reports of natural disasters. This partnership will allow the development and humanitarian agencies of the UN to turn these social conversations into actionable information to aid communities around the globe.

“The Sustainable Development Goals are first and foremost about people, and Twitter’s unique data stream can help us truly take a real-time pulse on priorities and concerns — particularly in regions where social media use is common — to strengthen decision-making. Strong public-private partnerships like this show the vast potential of big data to serve the public good,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse.

“We are incredibly proud to partner with the UN in support of the Sustainable Development Goals,” said Chris Moody, Twitter’s VP of Data Services. “Twitter data provides a live window into the public conversations that communities around the world are having, and we believe that the increased potential for research and innovation through this partnership will further the UN’s efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals.”

Organizations and business around the world currently use Twitter data in many meaningful ways, and this unique data source enables them to leverage public information at scale to better inform their policies and decisions. These partnerships enable innovative uses of Twitter data, while protecting the privacy and safety of Twitter users.

UN Global Pulse’s new collaboration with Twitter builds on existing R&D that has shown the power of social media for social impact, like measuring the impact of public health campaigns, tracking reports of rising food prices, or prioritizing needs after natural disasters….(More)”

Book by Samuel Bowles: “Why do policies and business practices that ignore the moral and generous side of human nature often fail?

Should the idea of economic man—the amoral and self-interested Homo economicus—determine how we expect people to respond to monetary rewards, punishments, and other incentives? Samuel Bowles answers with a resounding “no.” Policies that follow from this paradigm, he shows, may “crowd out” ethical and generous motives and thus backfire.

But incentives per se are not really the culprit. Bowles shows that crowding out occurs when the message conveyed by fines and rewards is that self-interest is expected, that the employer thinks the workforce is lazy, or that the citizen cannot otherwise be trusted to contribute to the public good. Using historical and recent case studies as well as behavioral experiments, Bowles shows how well-designed incentives can crowd in the civic motives on which good governance depends….(More)”

Book by Lawrence M. Friedman: “Laws and regulations are ubiquitous, touching on many aspects of individual and corporate behavior. But under what conditions are laws and rules actually effective? A huge amount of recent work in political science, sociology, economics, criminology, law, and psychology, among other disciplines, deals with this question. But these fields rarely inform one another, leaving the state of research disjointed and disorganized. Lawrence M. Friedman finds order in this cacophony. Impact gathers recent findings into one overarching analysis and lays the groundwork for a cohesive body of work in what Friedman labels “impact studies.”

The first important factor that has a bearing on impact is communication. A rule or law has no effect if it never reaches its intended audience. The public’s fund of legal knowledge, the clarity of the law, and the presence of information brokers all influence the flow of information from lawmakers to citizens. After a law is communicated, subjects sometimes comply, sometimes resist, and sometimes adjust or evade. Three clusters of motives help shape which reaction will prevail: first, rewards and punishments; second, peer group influences; and third, issues of conscience, legitimacy, and morality. When all of these factors move in the same direction, law can have a powerful impact; when they conflict, the outcome is sometimes unpredictable….(More)”

Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.

Real-time research

One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.

“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”

Data to the people

New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.

Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.

Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.

Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.

Enhancing connection

Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.

Mobilizing the world

Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”

Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “…social coordination theory…. is one of the most powerful ways to analyse complex social problems and to develop effective solutions. I spoke this morning to the Transparency Task Force and it gave me an opportunity to apply the theory to the issue of corporate openness.

First, a very brief recap of the theory:

My own approach focusses on the four modes as approaches to the challenge of social coordination. Human beings are complex social beings who have to work together to survive and flourish. The hierarchical perspective puts emphasis on leadership, strategy and expertise as the way to coordinate human activity. The solidaristic view emphasises the glue of belonging and shared values. The individualistic view sees coordination as emerging largely spontaneously and its goal being to provide a platform of individual ambition and competitive endeavour. The fatalistic view sees effective coordination, variously, as intractable, unlikely to deliver intended outcomes or irrelevant to the things that make it hardest to be human.

Each mode has a substrate in human evolution and psychology – these competing theories have emerged from who we are as a species. Each mode or combination of modes has been dominant at different times in our history. Also, each mode generates behavioural and ideological predispositions: Solidaristic views – which emphasise membership and values – are often associated with rigid ideologies (on both the left and right); individualism goes with liberal attitudes (again of both left and right varieties).

In a kind of fractal which stretches from individual preferences to global problem solving, each mode is available as a perspective on complex social problems. Crucially, for the kind of problems which the modern world increasingly generates, the best solutions will combine aspects of each method. But there is a problem: each mode is, in part, a critique of the others. Each has both benign and malign aspects; hierarchy can be strategic and overbearing, individualism can be enterprising and selfish, solidarity can be altruistic and tribal, fatalism can be stoical and defeatist. The theory explains why success can so quickly turn to failure. Even when the modes are successfully combined – what I call a ‘fully engaged’ solution – internal dynamics or external shocks will sooner or later upset the balance.

This is all rather theoretical so let me be more concrete. If we are trying to solve a problem like encouraging and enabling a corporation to be more transparent we need to understand the arguments both in favour and against such a move from each of the perspectives. If we don’t many people, many ideas and many approaches will be ignored. In short, we will be much more likely to fail.

Here is a simple guide to what might be seen as the pros and cons of greater transparency from the four standpoints:

People in authority and those who see things from a hierarchical perspective (we all see things from different perspectives at different times and in different places) will worry that transparency will make decision making more difficult and that, by opening up things like the underlying business model to scrutiny by customers and competitors, it would threaten the interests of the organisation. Conversely, the hierarchical case for transparency is that it can increase trust and understanding towards leaders and the challenges they face and it can aid alignment, clarity and commitment by exposing practices that don’t fit with corporate strategy.

Those who approach things from a solidaristic perspective are often the most outspoken champions of transparency. They see it as increasing integrity as companies have to live up to their stated values and fairness as unfair practices are exposed.  However, there are also solidaristic concerns; what if transparency exposes vulnerable people or if transparency makes life harder for the team to which I belong (the company or my part of the company)?

From an individualistic starting point transparency can be viewed suspiciously as promoting a focus on process rather than outcomes and also being adverse to risk and reward (you can justify the means by the ends only if you have been able to achieve the ends without someone looking over your shoulder). On the other hand, the individualistic case for transparency can cite its contribution to innovation (by looking under the bonnet and seeing all the working parts we have better insights into what can be improved) and the promotion of rewards based on fair competition instead of covert rent-seeking or organisational nepotism.

Finally, those in a fatalistic mind set will tend to see transparency as either irrelevant or – and this is a more forensic critique – illusory (the secret stuff will just get hidden better). However there is also an appeal to be made to fatalists that transparency can help reveal warning signs of future dangers and make it easier to mount a defence when things go wrong (‘even if we failed, we can show that we tried’).

To win the case for transparency and also to implement it effectively its advocates need to stress the positives from the different perspectives and also address the legitimate concerns; both of which should make it easier to confront objections that are not reasonable. …(More)”