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)”

A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

R2D3 introduction: “In machine learning, computers apply statistical learning techniques to automatically identify patterns in data. These techniques can be used to make highly accurate predictions.

Keep scrolling. Using a data set about homes, we will create a machine learning model to distinguish homes in New York from homes in San Francisco…./

 

  1. Machine learning identifies patterns using statistical learning and computers by unearthing boundaries in data sets. You can use it to make predictions.
  2. One method for making predictions is called a decision trees, which uses a series of if-then statements to identify boundaries and define patterns in the data
  3. Overfitting happens when some boundaries are based on on distinctions that don’t make a difference. You can see if a model overfits by having test data flow through the model….(More)”

Accur8Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Accur8Africa aims to be the leading platform supporting the accuracy of data in the continent. If we intend to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the next fifteen years, accurate data remains a non-negotiable necessity. Accur8Africa recognizes that nothing less than a data revolution is required. To achieve this we are building the statistical capacity of institutions across Africa and encouraging the use of data-driven decisions alongside better development metrics for key sectors such as gender equality, climate change, equity and social inclusion and health.

Africa has data in abundance but it exists in a fragmented and disorganized manner. As a result, the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals will be largely unquantifiable. As we transition from the MDG’s to the Sustainable Development Goals, and national governments meet to discuss the 17 goals that could transform the world by 2030, we believe that the African Continent deserves better and more accurate data…..Africa has a great role to play in the next fifteen years. The United Nations development agenda has generated momentum for a worldwide “data revolution,” shining a much-needed light on the need for better development data in Africa and elsewhere. Governments, international institutions, and donors need accurate data on basic development metrics such as inflation, vaccination coverage, and school enrolment in order to accurately plan, budget, and evaluate their activities. Governments, citizens, and civil society can then use this data as a “currency” for accountability. When statistical systems function properly, good-quality data are exchanged freely amongst all stakeholders ensuring that funding and development efforts are producing the desired results….(More)”

Urban Informatics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of Data Engineering: “Most data related to people and the built world originates in urban settings. There is increasing demand to capture and exploit this data to support efforts in areas such as Smart Cities, City Science and Intelligent Transportation Systems. Urban informatics deals with the collection, organization, dissemination and analysis of urban information used in such applications. However, the dramatic growth in the volume of this urban data creates challenges for existing data-management and analysis techniques. The collected data is also increasingly diverse, with a wide variety of sensor, GIS, imagery and graph data arising in cities. To address these challenges, urban informatics requires development of advanced data-management approaches, analysis methods, and visualization techniques. It also provides an opportunity to confront the “Variety” axis of Big Data head on. The contributions in this issue cross the spectrum of urban information, from its origin, to archiving and retrieval, to analysis and visualization. …

Collaborative Sensing for Urban Transportation (By Sergio Ilarri, et al)

Open Civic Data: Of the People, For the People, By the People (by Arnaud Sahuguet, et al, The GovLab)

Plenario: An Open Data Discovery and Exploration Platform for Urban Science (by Charlie Catlett et al)

Riding from Urban Data to Insight Using New York City Taxis (by Juliana Freire et al)…(More)”

 

Ethics Experts as an Instrument of Technocratic Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Annabelle Littoz-Monnet examining EU Medical Biotechnology Policy in Governance: “This article challenges the assumption that ethics committees introduce democratic control in policy areas where scientific expertise and ethical concerns collide. The claim is that politicians or bureaucrats are likely to resort to the use of ethical expertise when they face a specific type of dilemma: the impossibility, on the one hand, of yielding a consensus on controversial value-based issues via the democratic route and the need, on the other, to legitimize controversial policy choices in these areas. The article examines this dynamic with regard to the European Union’s medical biotechnology policy, a contested policy domain where ethical specialists are awarded expert status. The article finds that establishing ethical experts as a new category of expertise alongside scientific experts actually bolsters the technocratic domain in areas where it is contested, thus reinforcing the authority of experts and bureaucrats in the policy process, rather than democratic control….(More)”

Transparency in Social Media

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book on “Tools, Methods and Algorithms for Mediating Online Interactions” edited by Matei, Sorin; Adam; Russell Martha G.: and Bertino, Elisa (Eds.): “The volume presents, in a synergistic manner, significant theoretical and practical contributions in the area of social media reputation and authorship measurement, visualization, and modeling. The book justifies and proposes contributions to a future agenda for understanding the requirements for making social media authorship more transparent. Building on work presented in a previous volume of this series, Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets, this book discusses new tools, applications, services, and algorithms that are needed for authoring content in a real-time publishing world. These insights may help people who interact and create content through social media better assess their potential for knowledge creation. They may also assist in analyzing audience attitudes, perceptions, and behavior in informal social media or in formal organizational structures. In addition, the volume includes several chapters that analyze the higher order ethical, critical thinking, and philosophical principles that may be used to ground social media authorship. Together, the perspectives presented in this volume help us understand how social media content is created and how its impact can be evaluated.

The chapters demonstrate thought leadership through new ways of constructing social media experiences and making traces of social interaction visible. Transparency in Social Media aims to help researchers and practitioners design services, tools, or methods of analysis that encourage a more transparent process of interaction and communication on social media. Knowing who has added what content and with what authority to a specific online social media project can help the user community better understand, evaluate and make decisions and, ultimately, act on the basis of such information …(More)”