How We’re Changing the Way We Respond to Petitions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Goldman (White House) at Medium: “…In 2011 (years before I arrived at the White House), the team here developed a petitions platform called We the People. It provided a clear and easy way for the American people to petition their government — along with a threshold for action. Namely — once a petition gains 100,000 signatures.

This was a new system for the United States government, announced as a flagship effort in the first U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Right now it exists only for the White House (Hey, Congress! We have anopen API! Get in touch!) Some other countries, including Germany and theUnited Kingdom, do online petitions, too. In fact, the European Parliamenthas even started its own online petitioning platform.

For the most part, we’ve been pretty good about responding — before today, the Obama Administration had responded to 255 petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. That’s more than 91 percent of the petitions that have met our threshold requiring a response. Some responses have taken a little longer than others. But now, I’m happy to say, we have caught up.

Today, the White House is responding to every petition in our We the Peoplebacklog — 20 in all.

This means that nearly 2.5 million people who had petitioned us to take action on something heard back today. And it’s our goal to make that response the start of the conversation, not the final page. The White House is made up of offices that research and analyze the kinds of policy issues raised by these petitions, and leaders from those offices will be taking questions today, and in the weeks to come, from petition signers, on topics such as vaccination policy, community policing, and other petition subjects.

Take a look at more We the People stats here.

We’ll start the conversation on Twitter. Follow @WeThePeople, and join the conversation using hashtag #WeThePeople. (I’ll be personally taking your questions on @Goldman44 about how we’re changing the platform specifically at 3:30 p.m. Eastern.)

We the People, Moving Forward

We’re going to be changing a few things about We the People.

  1. First, from now on, if a petition meets the signature goal within a designated period of time, we will aim to respond to it — with an update or policy statement — within 60 days wherever possible. You can read about the details of our policy in the We the People Terms of Participation.
  2. Second, other outside petitions platforms are starting to tap into the We the People platform. We’re excited to announce today that Change.org is choosing to integrate with the We the People platform, meaning the future signatures of its 100 million users will count toward the threshold for getting an official response from the Administration. We’re also opening up the code behind petitions.whitehouse.gov on Drupal.org and GitHub, which empowers other governments and outside organizations to create their own versions of this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies.
  3. Third, and most importantly, the process of hearing from us about your petition is going to look a little different. We’ve assembled a team of people responsible for taking your questions and requests and bringing them to the right people — whether within the White House or in an agency within the Administration — who may be in a position to say something about your request….(More)

Quantifying Crowd Size with Mobile Phone and Twitter Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Federico Botta, Helen Susannah Moat, and Tobias Preis in Royal Society Open Science: “Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society….(More)”

How can we ensure that cities create opportunities for healthy urbanization?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Roy Ahn, Thomas F. Burke & Anita M. McGahan on their new book: “By the year 2100, 8 out of 10 people in the world will reside in cities – a major change in demographics compared to 100 years ago.

Urbanization has sweeping consequences for population health. Most analysts evaluate the “specter of urbanization” by focusing on problems and challenges, which can include slum development, insecurity, and inequality.

As the World Health Organization and UN Habitat note in their seminal report, Hidden Cities, “Cities concentrate opportunities, jobs and services, but they also concentrate risks and hazards for health.” The urban poor are especially vulnerable because their housing conditions and access to clean water, sanitation, and health care are often severely compromised.

Additionally, the jobs available to the urban poor are often informal, dangerous, and temporary. Yet the lack of integrated governance and infrastructure responsible for urbanization problems also can create remarkable and often untapped opportunities for improving health. How can we ensure that cities create opportunities for healthy urbanization?

In our new book, Innovating for Healthy Urbanization, we argue that using the “innovations” lens can provide a unique platform through which solutions for urbanization and health can emerge.

Sometimes “innovations” can be decidedly high tech, such as holograms on medication packaging that protect against drug counterfeiters, or tiny filter paper tests costing pennies that exponentially increase access to medical diagnostic testing for poor people living in cities.

Other innovations are less tech-focused, but equally impactful, such as advocating for motorcycle helmet laws in cities or a low-cost, condom catheter-balloon kit that can save mothers from dying from postpartum hemorrhage.

What makes both high- and low-tech solutions effective? Pushing the envelope on what works and then integrating solutions to meet a community’s priority needs…..(More)”

Transforming public services the right way with impact management

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emily Bazalgette at FutureGov: “…Impact evaluation involves using a range of research methodologies to investigate whether our products and services are having an impact on users’ lives. ….Rigorous academic impact evaluation wasn’t really designed for rapidly iterating products made by a fast-moving digital and design company like FutureGov. Our products can change significantly over short periods of time — for instance, in a single workshop Doc Ready evolved from a feature-rich social media platform to a stripped-down checklist builder — and that can create a tension between our agile process and traditional evaluation methodologies, which tend to require a fixed product to support a long-term evaluation plan.

We’ve decided to embrace this tension by using Theories of Change, a useful evaluation tool recommended to us by our investors and partners Nesta Impact Investments. To give you a flavour (excuse the pun), below we have Casserole Club’s Theory of Change.

Casserole toc

The problem we’re trying to solve (reducing social isolation) doesn’t tend to change, but the way we solve it might (the inputs and short to medium-term outcomes). In future, we may find that we need to adapt to serve new user groups, or operate in different channels, or that there are mediating outcomes for social isolation that Casserole Club produces other than social contact with a Casserole Club cook. Theories of Change allow us to stay focused on big-picture outcomes, while being flexible about how the product delivers on these outcomes.

Another lesson is to make evaluation everyone’s business. Like many young-ish companies, FutureGov is not at the stage where we have the resources to support a full-time, dedicated Head of Impact. But we’ve found that you can get pretty far if you’ve got a flat structure and lots of passionate people (both of which, luckily, we have). Our lack of hierarchy means that anyone can take up a project and run with it, and collaboration across the company is encouraged. Product impact evaluation is owned by the product teams who manage the product over time. This means we can get more done, that research design benefits from the deep knowledge of our product teams, and that evaluation skills (like how to design a decent survey or depth interview) have started to spread across the organisation….(More)”

Disrupting development with digital technologies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kemal Derviş at Brookings: “The emergence of a new digital economy is changing the ways in which businesses and development organizations engage in emerging and developing countries. Transaction costs have been radically driven down, enabling greater inclusion. And technology is driving efficiency improvements, and permitting rapid scaling-up and transformational change.

Three trends in particular have the potential to redefine how global development occurs and how efforts will support it over the next 10 years: (1) the growing adoption of digital payments serving people everywhere with near-frictionless transactions; (2) the spread of Internet connectivity and digital literacy; and (3) the harnessing of data to better serve the poor and to generate new knowledge….. Brookings commissioned six essays …present some of the most current information and thinking on what might be termed “digital disruption,” we are making them publicly available to stimulate wider discussion. The six essays and their authors are:

Transform Government From The Outside In

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review by GCN of a new report by Forrester: “Agencies struggles to match the customer experience available from the private sector, and that causes citizens to become dissatisfied with government. In fact, seven of the 10 worst organizations in the Forrester’s U.S. Customer Experience Index are federal agencies, and only a third of Americans say their experience with the government meets expectations.

FINDINGS: To keep up with public expectations, Forrester found governments must embrace mobile, turn big data into actionable insights, improve the customer experience and accelerate digital government.  Among the recommendations:

Agencies must shift their thinking to make mobile the primary platform for connection between citizens and government.  Government staff should also have mobile access to the tools and resources needed to complete tasks in the field. Agencies should learn what mobile methods work best for citizens, ensure all citizen services are mobile-friendly and use the mobile platform for sharing information with the public and gathering incident reports and sentiments. By building mobile-friendly infrastructure and processes, like municipal Wi-Fi hotspots, the government (and its services) can be constantly connected to its citizens and businesses.

Governments must find ways to integrate, share and use the large amounts of data and analytics it collects. By aggregating citizen-driven data from precinct-level or agency-specific databases and data collected by systems already in place, the government can increase responsiveness, target areas in need and make better short-term decisions and long-term plans. Opening data to researchers, the private sector and citizens can also spark innovation across industries.

Better customer experience has a ripple effect through government, improving the efficacy of legislation, compliance, engagement and the effectiveness of government offices. This means making processes such as applying for healthcare, registering a car or paying taxes easier and available with highly functioning user-friendly websites.  Such improvements in  communication and digital customer service, will save citizens’ time, increase the use of government services and reduce agencies’ workloads….(More)”

eGov Benchmark 2015 (EU)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Capgemini: “The state of public service provision today across Europe is progressing – but not fast enough according to the latest eGovernment Benchmark report. Policymakers need to steer the course towards digital transformation now.The Background Report assesses eGovernment’s role in seven high-impact events in citizens’ lives and the availability of key IT building blocks ….

The report found that Europe is gaining more in digital maturity  as more online public services  improved in user centricity. What Member States need to focus on are improvements to mobile, transparency, and simplification.
What we found:

  • Europe is gaining in digital maturity: With an average score of 73% in 2014, user-centricity is confirmed as the most advanced indicator at the EU-28+ level, ending 3 percentage points higher than a year earlier. The results indicate year-on-year progress across all the European countries compared.
  • Mobile – a missed opportunity: Only one in four public sector websites is mobile friendly which misses out a large segment of service users.
  • Improved Transparency but still long way to go to build trust: We saw a 3 percentage point improvement from the previous measurement, but it is still unsatisfactory as it stops at 51%.
  • Slowly moving to smarter government: 1-point improvement to adopting key enablers in technology risks the transition to a smart government. Key enablers, such as authentic sources, allow for automation of services and re-use of data to further reduce burdens.
  • The Digital Single Market is yet to come: Set as one of the ten priorities by the Juncker Commission, cross-border mobility is not yet even halfway to being fully achieved.

InnovationAre European Public Services Helping Realise the Digital Single Market? to Drive the European Advantage

New technologies and models offer governments to apply innovative solutions to deliver better, faster and cheaper services.

We put forward four key recommendations for European public sector organizations to innovate.

  • Enable: Build a shared digital infrastructure as the basis. The infrastructure foundation is required to develop any technology building blocks to digital transformation – across agencies, and tiers.
  • Entice: Move from customer services to customized services. Services that entice and engage users to go online also keep them there.
  • Exploit: Make online services mandatory. Aim to make ‘By digital by default’ become the natural next step.
  • Educate. Educate. Educate: Practitioners, civil servants, leaders and users must be trained up in digital skills.

See also Infographic: Are Government Services Prepared for the Digital Age?

Smartphones as Locative Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Jordan Frith: “Smartphone adoption has surpassed 50% of the population in more than 15 countries, and there are now more than one million mobile applications people can download to their phones. Many of these applications take advantage of smartphones as locative media, which is what allows smartphones to be located in physical space. Applications that take advantage of people’s location are called location-based services, and they are the focus of this book.

Smartphones as locative media raise important questions about how we understand the complicated relationship between the Internet and physical space. This book addresses these questions through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a detailed analysis of how various popular mobile applications including Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Yelp, and Foursquare use people’s location to provide information about their surrounding space….(More)”

This Is What Controversies Look Like in the Twittersphere

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “A new way of analyzing disagreement on social media reveals that arguments in the Twittersphere look like fireworks.

Many a controversy has raged on social media platforms such as Twitter. Some last for weeks or months, others blow themselves in an afternoon. And yet most go unnoticed by most people. That would change if there was a reliable way of spotting controversies in the Twitterstream in real time.

That could happen thanks to the work of Kiran Garimella and pals at Aalto University in Finland. These guys have found a way to spot the characteristics of a controversy in a collection of tweets and distinguish this from a noncontroversial conversation.

Various researchers have studied controversies on Twitter but these have all focused on preidentified arguments, whereas Garimella and co want to spot them in the first place. Their key idea is that the structure of conversations that involve controversy are different from those that are benign.

And they think this structure can be spotted by studying various properties of the conversation, such as the network of connections between those involved in a topic; the structure of endorsements, who agrees with whom; and the sentiment of the discussion, whether positive and negative.

They test this idea by first studying ten conversations associated with hashtags that are known to be controversial and ten that are known to be benign. Garimella and co map out the structure of these discussion by looking at the networks of retweets, follows, keywords and combinations of these….(More)

More: arxiv.org/abs/1507.05224 : Quantifying Controversy in Social Media

Accelerating the Use of Prizes to Address Tough Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Kalil and Jenn Gustetic in DigitalGov: “Later this year, the Federal government will celebrate the fifth anniversary of Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop that has prompted tens of thousands of individuals, including engaged citizens and entrepreneurs, to participate in more than 400 public-sector prize competitions with more than $72 million in prizes.

The May 2015 report to Congress on the Implementation of Federal Prize Authority for Fiscal Year 2014 highlights that Challenge.gov is a critical component of the Federal government’s use of prize competitions to spur innovation. Federal agencies have used prize competitions to improve the accuracy of lung cancer screenings,develop environmentally sustainable brackish water desalination technologies, encourage local governments to allow entrepreneurs to launch new startups in a day, and increase the resilience of communities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Numerous Federal agencies have discovered that prizes allow them to:

  • Pay only for success and establish an ambitious goal without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed.
  • Reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of citizen solvers and entrepreneurs tackling a problem.
  • Bring out-of-discipline perspectives to bear.
  • Increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars.
  • Inspire risk-taking by offering a level playing field through credible rules and robust judging mechanisms.

To build on this momentum, the Administration will hold an event this fall to highlight the role that prizes play in solving critical national and global issues. The event will showcase public- and private-sector relevant commitments from Federal, state, and local agencies, companies, foundations, universities, and non-profits. Individuals and organizations interested in participating in this event or making commitments should send us a note at challenges [at] ostp.gov by August 28, 2015.

Commitments may include the announcement of specific, ambitious incentive prizes and/or steps that will increase public- and/or private-sector capacity to design high-impact prizes and challenges. For example:….

  • Foundations could sponsor fellowships for prize designers in the public sector to encourage the development and implementation of ambitious prizes in areas of national importance. Foundations could also sponsor workshops that bring together companies, university researchers, non-profits, and government agencies to identify potential high-impact incentive prizes.
  • Universities could establish courses and online material to help students and mid-career professionals learn to design effective prizes and challenges.
  • Researchers could conduct empirical research on incentive prizes and other market-shaping techniques (e.g. Advance Market Commitments, milestone payments) to increase our understanding of how and under what circumstances these approaches can best be used to accelerate progress on important problems.
    Working together, we can use incentive prizes to inspire people to solve some of our toughest challenges. (More)”