Aligning Supply and Demand for Better Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Findings regarding Open Data in the Open Government Partnership: “Many have predicted that open government data will lead to major gains in political accountability, generate economic value, and improve the quality of government services. Yet, there is a growing consensus among practitioners and experts that, for open data reforms to have strong governance, economic, and social impacts, reforms must do more than make data available and reusable. Government reforms ultimately must aim to provide data that is useful and used. There may be a high opportunity cost to investing in open data in the place of other useful governance reforms….

This paper identifies strong performances and gaps in aligning open data supply and demand. Findings from action plans and IRM reporting reveal the following trends:

  • OGP countries are making more open data commitments in their national action plans, both in absolute numbers and in percentage. This could be good for open data advocates, but may come at the expense of other open government approaches that may be more effective at countering excessive secrecy and corruption.
  • Open data commitments emphasize government supply of data and government coordination mechanisms over identifying and stimulating public demand for data.
  • Among a smaller group of countries, a growing number of commitments aim to align supply and demand by reforming the regulatory framework and by setting up mechanisms to ensure greater demand, such as participatory prioritization processes in which government solicits public input on which data sets to release. However, typical OGP action plans do not show a distinct move toward establishing or implementing the right to request data.
  • There is some evidence that sector-specific approaches to open data see higher rates of implementation than crosscutting and whole-of-government approaches to open data. Commitments emphasize data on budgets, health, natural resources, and aid…. (More)”

The Age of Every Building in Los Angeles, Mapped

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bliss at CityLab: “A fascinating resource for lovers of city planning, made possible by open data.

Image built:LA
built:LA

Construction in Los Angeles may have exploded during the postwar era, but as a new interactive map shows, the wide age range of its buildings might surprise you.

Using open data from local governments, built: LA visualizes the age of roughly 3 million buildings across L.A. County constructed between 1890 and 2008. Drag your mouse to explore the vast web of communities and neighborhoods, hover over individual properties to discover birth years, and double click to zoom in further.

Perhaps best of all, hit the rainbow stopwatch to view a decade-by-decade timelapse of development across the county. The city’s core, in particular, clusters together buildings of century-spanning generations, while suburbs and communities to the east and west tend to represent just one or two decades of development….(More).”

Tracking Employment Shocks Using Mobile Phone Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jameson L. Toole et al.: “Can data from mobile phones be used to observe economic shocks and their consequences at multiple scales? Here we present novel methods to detect mass layoffs, identify individuals affected by them, and predict changes in aggregate unemployment rates using call detail records (CDRs) from mobile phones. Using the closure of a large manufacturing plant as a case study, we first describe a structural break model to correctly detect the date of a mass layoff and estimate its size. We then use a Bayesian classification model to identify affected individuals by observing changes in calling behavior following the plant’s closure. For these affected individuals, we observe significant declines in social behavior and mobility following job loss. Using the features identified at the micro level, we show that the same changes in these calling behaviors, aggregated at the regional level, can improve forecasts of macro unemployment rates. These methods and results highlight promise of new data resources to measure micro economic behavior and improve estimates of critical economic indicators….(More)”

Video: The power of public art

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Anne Pasternak, President and Artistic Director of Creative Time USA, says artists have the power “to kick open the door to social change.” In this video for the World Economic Forum, Pasternak talks about some of Creative Time’s commissions – from lighting up the New York skyline to shaking the hands of sanitation workers – and how art can help expose and heal social issues.

Click on the video to watch the full talk, or read selected quotes below”

Want better science? Quit hoarding data, genetics researchers say

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nidhi Subbaraman at BetaBoston: “When Andrea Downing was 25, she got screened for the BRCA genes known to be associated with a variety of cancers, including breast cancer. Both her great-grandmother and grandmother had been diagnosed with the disease, so the results were no surprise: Downing carried the BRCA1 mutation in her genes. She learned there was a 87 percent chance she would get breast cancer during her lifetime, and 60 percent chance she would get ovarian cancer.
The revelation brought with it a dizzying range of choices. Should she get a mastectomy before the cancer showed? Should she choose to have her ovaries removed? Could she wait until after she had kids?

For the first several years after her diagnosis, Downing sought out support groups, then began booking appointments with researchers and examining the latest literature. “I’m a little different from your usual patient who tested positive,” Downing said. “I wanted to go beyond to challenge myself and understand the science of cancer.”

Then, in 2013, she chanced on was ClinVar, a research database funded by the National Institute of Health that acts as a kind of Wikipedia to catalogue scientific research on mutations in genes. It gave her a roadmap for the research associated with her variant, called C16G.

Downing typed in the letters and numbers of her mutation, and the website spit out a list of companies and labs that have studied her variant. Though much of that information was technical, she said, “the things I do understand about it are very empowering. It’s a starting point to answering questions I don’t know.”

When the database first launched, the idea was that the single repository would present a unified picture of a variant, drawing from all available research that was publicly shared by companies and research labs.

Two years later, the team behind the operation has published a progress report of sorts in the New England Journal of Medicine. They argue that this shared approach is working — doctors and researchers are using the database — and they are advocating for more companies and groups to join the effort to reach a more comprehensive understanding of the variants in disease genes. In particular, they’re challenging companies to be more open with their data, instead of keeping it to themselves….(More)”

The Everyone City: How ICT-Based Participation Shapes Urban Form

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 

Book Chapter by Sara Levy, Karel Martens,  and Rob van der Heijden : “Citizen participation is a cornerstone of urban planning. One common criticism is that the process can be cumbersome and slow. However, in the face of recent advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), those problems can be easily overcome, making it possible to extend public participation to a wider sphere of urban planning matters. But what do we know of how ICT-based public participation affects urban form? What does a city shaped by social networks and other ICT-tools look like? We develop an agent-based model of urban growth to improve our understanding of these issues. Our model consists of a spatially disaggregated, micro-economic-based, real estate market model coupled with an ICT-based planning process. In the model, public participation is based on social network affiliation and preferences over the height of buildings….(More)”

 

How the Internet, the Sharing Economy, and Reputational Feedback Mechanisms Solve the ‘Lemons Problem’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Thierer, Adam D. and Koopman, Christopher and Hobson, Anne and Kuiper, Chris: “This paper argues that the sharing economy — through the use of the Internet and real time reputational feedback mechanisms — is providing a solution to the “lemons problem” that many regulations, and regulators, have spent decades attempting to overcome. Section I provides an overview of the sharing economy and traces its rapid growth. Section II revisits “lemons problem” theory as well as the various regulatory solutions proposed to deal with the problem of asymmetric information, and provides some responses. Section III discusses the relationship between reputation and trust and analyzes how reputational incentives have been used historically in commercial interactions. Section IV discusses how information asymmetries were addressed in the pre-Internet era. Section V surveys how the evolution of the Internet and information systems (especially sharing economy reputational feedback mechanisms) addresses the “lemons problem” concern. Section VI explains how these new realities affect public policy and concludes that asymmetric information is not a legitimate rationale for policy intervention in light of technological changes. We also argue continued use of this rationale to regulate in the name of consumer protection might, in fact, make consumers worse off. This has ramifications for the current debate over regulation of the sharing economy….(More)”

Nudging hits Berlin

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hanno Burmester, Philipp Sälhoff  and Marie Wachinger at Policy Network: “Despite suspicion, the nudge theory may have a place in the process of party reform. Ever since Germany’s Kanzleramt published a job ad in 2014 to recruit three behavioural scientists, “nudging” has become a political buzzword in Berlin. For people outside the Berlin bubble, this may come as a surprise: the British government established its Behavioural Insights Team in 2010 (the less Orwellian nickname is the Nudge Unit). The city of Copenhagen followed soon after and started experimenting with the concept in 2012. Still, nudging seems to have only hit Berlin in recent months, sparking fierce debate among political experts, as well as the German public….

It is not surprising, therefore, that the notions of nudging and libertarian paternalism has quickly found its enemies in the German political debate. Libertarianism here is understood as a radical political ideology which, with the disappearance from federal politics of the centre-right liberal FDP with its partly libertarian agenda, has no representatives at all on the national political stage. Paternalism evokes negative political connotations as well. Moreover, in contrast to the United States, extensive government regulation enjoys widespread public acceptance. At the same time, Germans harbour a deep distrust against opaque and/or seemingly manipulative government actions. The concept of nudging, which explicitly acknowledges that its subjects can be unaware of being consciously influenced, thus feeds into a cultural distrust that, with regards to German and European history, is more than understandable.

Interestingly, however, the political left seems less averse to the idea of stimulating behavioural change through government action. For instance, the German minister of justice and consumer protection, the Social Democrat, Heiko Maas, lauded the approach in an op-ed, saying that it would be wise to acknowledge that citizens do not act rationally all the time. Nudging thus could be a wise compromise “between over-regulation of everyday affairs and laissez-faire politics”.

Nudging is more than a tool for governments, though. We believe it offers advantages in fields that, from an ethical perspective, are less controversial. One of those is the reform of political parties. Since August 2014 we have been  developing new approaches and to party reform in our projectLegitimation and Self-efficacy: Impulses for the Future of Party Democracy. The past decades have shown how hard it is to implement structural reforms in political parties, irrespective of the national context. On the left, for instance, the German Social Democratic party shows a remarkable institutional immunity to change, despite a widespread desire for parties to reflect the demands of rapidly changing societies.

Nudging may provide a tool to identify and analyse current practices of exerting political influence, thereby opening new prospects for changing organisational structures….(More)”

Law school students crowdsource commencement address

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chronicle of Higher Education: “Though higher education is constantly changing, commencement ceremonies have largely stayed the same. A graduating student at Stanford Law School is trying to change that.

Marta F. Belcher is crowdsourcing the speech she will give next month at the law school’s precommencement diploma ceremony, offering her classmates an opportunity to share in crafting that final message.

The point of a student commencement speaker, Ms. Belcher said, is to have someone who can speak to the student experience. But as she learned when she gave the student address at her undergraduate ceremony, it’s not easy for one person to represent hundreds, or even thousands, of classmates.

With all the online collaboration tools that are available today, Ms. Belcher saw the possibility of updating the tradition. So she competed to be the student speaker and invited classmates to contribute to her address.

“That was so clearly the right choice — for Stanford, especially, in the Silicon Valley at the cutting edge of innovation — that we should be the ones to sort of pioneer this new kind of way of writing a graduation speech,” she said.

After holding a number of meetings and fielding questions from skeptics, Ms. Belcher set up a wiki to gather ideas. The months-long effort was divided into three stages. First students would establish themes and ideas; next they would start contributing actual content for the speech; and finally, those pieces would be edited into a cohesive narrative during collaborative “edit-a-thons.”

Since the wiki went up, in February, 85 students have contributed to it….(More)”

A Repository of Open Data Repositories: Open Data Impact Case Studies and Examples

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“As part of its core mission, the GovLab has been engaged in a series of ongoing efforts to build awareness and gather evidence about the value, use, and impact of open data around the world – including the GovLab’s Open Data 500.

The GovLab is currently scoping a project with Omidyar Network to build a repository of in-depth, global case studies on existing examples of open data demand, use and impact. The goal of the project is to develop a more nuanced understanding of the various processes and factors underlying the value chain of open data.

As a part of our literature review in undertaking this scoping project, and in time for the 3rd International Open Data Conference, we first mapped several repositories of open data cases and examples that may serve as an empirical foundation for further case-studies.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of organizations that have compiled open data case study repositories in a complementary fashion.

LET US KNOW if you are aware of other compilations of open data examples and case studies we should include as to complete the below overview… by emailing Stefaan Verhulst (stefaan at thegovlab.org).

1. Open Data Case Study Repositories
2. Open Data Portal Repositories
3. Open Data Intermediary Repositories“