Hollie Gilman: “Stanford’s Social Algorithm’s Lab SOAL has built an interactive Participatory Budgeting Platform that allows users to simulate budgetary decision making on $1 million dollars of public monies. The center brings together economics, computer science, and networking to work on problems and understand the impact of social networking. This project is part of Stanford’s Widescope Project to enable people to make political decisions on the budgets through data driven social networks.
The Participatory Budgeting simulation highlights the fourth annual Participatory Budgeting in Chicago’s 49th ward — the first place to implement PB in the U.S. This year $1 million, out of $1.3 million in Alderman capital funds, will be allocated through participatory budgeting.
One goal of the platform is to build consensus. The interactive geo-spatial mapping software enables citizens to more intuitively identify projects in a given area. Importantly, the platform forces users to make tough choices and balance competing priorities in real time.
The platform is an interesting example of a collaborative governance prototype that could be transformative in its ability to engage citizens with easily accessible mapping software.”
Open Data is a Civil Right
Yo Yoshida, Founder & CEO, Appallicious in GovTech: “As Americans, we expect a certain standardization of basic services, infrastructure and laws — no matter where we call home. When you live in Seattle and take a business trip to New York, the electric outlet in the hotel you’re staying in is always compatible with your computer charger. When you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I-5 doesn’t all-of-a-sudden turn into a dirt country road because some cities won’t cover maintenance costs. If you take a 10-minute bus ride from Boston to the city of Cambridge, you know the money in your wallet is still considered legal tender.
Intelligent Demand: Policy Rationale, Design and Potential Benefits
New OECD paper: “Policy interest in demand-side initiatives has grown in recent years. This may reflect an expectation that demand-side policy could be particularly effective in steering innovation to meet societal needs. In addition, owing to constrained public finances in most OECD countries, the possibility that demand-side policies might be less expensive than direct support measures is attractive. Interest may also reflect some degree of disappointment with the outcomes of traditional supply-side measures. This paper reviews demand-side innovation policies, their rationales and importance across countries, different approaches to their design, the challenges entailed in their implementation and evaluation, and good practices. Three main forms of demand-side policy are considered: innovation-oriented public procurement, innovation-oriented regulations, and standards. Emphasis is placed on innovation-oriented public procurement.”
Procurement and Civic Innovation
Derek Eder: “Have you ever used a government website and had a not-so-awesome experience? In our slick 2014 world of Google, Twitter and Facebook, why does government tech feel like it’s stuck in the 1990s?
The culprit: bad technology procurement.
Procurement is the procedure a government follows to buy something–letting suppliers know what they want, asking for proposals, restricting what kinds of proposal they will consider, limiting what kinds of firms they will do business with, and deciding if what they got what they paid for.
The City of Chicago buys technology about the same way that they buy health insurance, a bridge, or anything else in between. And that’s the problem.
Chicago’s government has a long history of corruption, nepotism and patronage. After each outrage, new rules are piled upon existing rules to prevent that crisis from happening again. Unfortunately, this accumulation of rules does not just protect against the bad guys, it also forms a huge barrier to entry for technology innovators.
So, the firms that end up building our city’s digital public services tend to be good at picking their way through the barriers of the procurement process, not at building good technology. Instead of making government tech contracting fair and competitive, procurement has unfortunately had the opposite effect.
So where does this leave us? Despite Chicago’s flourishing startup scene, and despite having one of the country’s largest community of civic technologists, the Windy City’s digital public services are still terribly designed and far too expensive to the taxpayer.
The Technology Gap
The best way to see the gap between Chicago’s volunteer civic tech community and the technology that the City pays is to look at an entire class of civic apps that are essentially facelifts on existing government websites….
You may have noticed an increase in quality and usability between these three civic apps and their official government counterparts.
Now consider this: all of the government sites took months to build and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Was My Car Towed, 2nd City Zoning and CrimeAround.us were all built by one to two people in a matter of days, for no money.
Think about that for a second. Consider how much the City is overpaying for websites its citizens can barely use. And imagine how much better our digital city services would be if the City worked with the very same tech startups they’re trying to nurture.
Why do these civic apps exist? Well, with the City of Chicago releasing hundreds of high quality datasets on their data portal over the past three years (for which they should be commended), a group of highly passionate and skilled technologists have started using their skills to develop these apps and many others.
It’s mostly for fun, learning, and a sense of civic duty, but it demonstrates there’s no shortage of highly skilled developers who are interested in using technology to make their city a better place to live in…
Two years ago, in the Fall of 2011, I learned about procurement in Chicago for the first time. An awesome group of developers, designers and I had just built ChicagoLobbyists.org – our very first civic app – for the City of Chicago’s first open data hackathon….
Since then, the City has often cited ChicagoLobbyists.org as evidence of the innovation-sparking potential of open data.
Shortly after our site launched, a Request For Proposals, or RFP, was issued by the City for an ‘Online Lobbyist Disclosure System.’
Hey! We just built one of those! Sure, we would need to make some updates to it—adding a way for lobbyists to log in and submit their info—but we had a solid start. So, our scrappy group of tech volunteers decided to respond to the RFP.
After reading all 152 pages of the document, we realized we had no chance of getting the bid. It was impossible for the ChicagoLobbyists.org group to meet the legal requirements (as it would have been for any small software shop):
- audited financial statements for the past 3 years
- an economic disclosure statement (EDS) and affidavit
- proof of $500k workers compensation and employers liability
- proof of $2 million in professional liability insurance”
Making digital government better
An McKinsey Insight interview with Mike Bracken (UK): “When it comes to the digital world, governments have traditionally placed political, policy, and system needs ahead of the people who require services. Mike Bracken, the executive director of the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service, is attempting to reverse that paradigm by empowering citizens—and, in the process, improve the delivery of services and save money. In this video interview, Bracken discusses the philosophy behind the digital transformation of public services in the United Kingdom, some early successes, and next steps.
Interview transcript
Putting users first
Government around the world is pretty good at thinking about its own needs. Government puts its own needs first—they often put their political needs followed by the policy needs. The actual machine of government comes second. The third need then generally becomes the system needs, so the IT or whatever system’s driving it. And then out of those four, the user comes a poor fourth, really.
And we’ve inverted that. So let me give you an example. At the moment, if you want to know about tax in the UK , you’re probably going to know that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs is a part of government that deals with tax. You’re probably going to know that because you pay tax, right?
But why should you have to know that? Because, really, it’s OK to know that, for that one—but we’ve got 300 agencies, more than that; we’ve got 24 parts of government. If you want to know about, say, gangs, is that a health issue or is that a local issue? Is it a police issue? Is it a social issue, an education issue? Well, actually it’s all of those issues. But you shouldn’t have to know how government is constructed to know what each bit of government is doing about an esoteric issue like gangs.
What we’ve done with gov.uk, and what we’re doing with our transactions, is to make them consistent at the point of user need. Because there’s only one real user need of government digitally, and that’s to recognize that at the point of need, users need to deal with the government. Not a department name or an agency name, they’re dealing with the government. And when they do that, they need it to be consistent, and they need it to be easy to find. Ninety-five percent of our journeys digitally start with a search.
And so our elegantly constructed and expensively constructed front doors are often completely routed around. We’ve got to recognize that and construct our digital services based on user needs….”
A Brief History of Databases
Stephen Fortune: “Databases are mundane, the epitome of the everyday in digital society. Despite the enthusiasm and curiosity that such a ubiquitous and important item merits, arguably the only people to discuss them are those with curiosity enough to thumb through the dry and technical literature that chronicles the database’s ascension.
Which is a shame, because the use of databases actually illuminates so much about how we come to terms with the world around us. The history of databases is a tale of experts at different times attempting to make sense of complexity. As a result, the first information explosions of the early computer era left an enduring impact on how we think about structuring information. The practices, frameworks, and uses of databases, so pioneering at the time, have since become intrinsic to how organizations manage data. If we are facing another data deluge (for there have been many), it ’s different in kind to the ones that preceded it. The speed of today’s data production is precipitated not from a sudden appearance of entirely new technologies but because the demand and accessibility has steadily risen through the strata of society as databases become more and more ubiquitous and essential to aspects of our daily lives. And turns out we’re not drowning in data; we instead appear to have made a sort of unspoken peace with it, just as the Venetians and Dutch before us. We’ve built edifices to house the data and, witnessing that this did little to stem the flow, have subsequently created our enterprises atop and around them. Surveying the history of databases illuminates a lot about how we come to terms with the world around us, and how organizations have come to terms with us.
Unit Records & Punch Card Databases
The history of data processing is punctuated with many high water marks of data abundance. Each successive wave has been incrementally greater in volume, but all are united by the trope that data production exceeds what tabulators (whether machine or human) can handle. The growing amount of data gathered by the 1880 US Census (which took human tabulators 8 of the 10 years before the next census to compute) saw Herman Hollerith kickstart the data processing industry. He devised “Hollerith cards” (his personal brand of punchcard) and the keypunch, sorter, and tabulator unit record machines. The latter three machines were built for the sole purpose of crunching numbers, with the data represented by holes on the punch cards. Hollerith’s Tabulating Machine Company was later merged with three other companies into International Business Machines (IBM), an enterprise that casts a long shadow over this history of databases….”
The Challenges of Challenge.Gov: Adopting Private Sector Business Innovations in the Federal Government
I Mergel, SI Bretschneider, C Louis, J Smith at the HICSS ’14 Proceedings of the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: “As part of the Open Government Initiative in the U.S. federal government, the White House has introduced a new policy instrument called “Challenges and Prizes”, implemented as Challenge.gov that allows federal departments to run Open Innovation (OI) contests. This initiative was motivated by similar OI initiatives in the private sector and to enhance innovativeness and performance among federal agencies. Here we first define the underlying theoretical concepts of OI, crowd sourcing and contests and apply them to the existing theory of public ness and the creation of public goods. We then analyze over 200 crowd sourcing contests on CHALLENGE.GOV and conclude that federal departments and agencies use this policy instrument for four different purpose: awareness, service, knowledge and technical solutions. We conclude that Challenge.gov is currently used as an innovative format to inform and educate the public about public management problems and less frequently to solicit complex technological solutions from problem solvers.”
A Framework for Benchmarking Open Government Data Efforts
DS Sayogo, TA Pardo, M Cook in the HICSS ’14 Proceedings of the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences: “This paper presents a preliminary exploration on the status of open government data worldwide as well as in-depth evaluation of selected open government data portals. Using web content analysis of the open government data portals from 35 countries, this study outlines the progress of open government data efforts at the national government level. This paper also conducted in-depth evaluation of selected cases to justify the application of a proposed framework for understanding the status of open government data initiatives. This paper suggest that findings of this exploration offer a new-level of understanding of the depth, breath, and impact of current open government data efforts. The review results also point to the different stages of open government data portal development in term of data content, data manipulation capability and participatory and engagement capability. This finding suggests that development of open government portal follows an incremental approach similar to those of e-government development stages in general. Subsequently, this paper offers several observations in terms of policy and practical implication of open government data portal development drawn from the application of the proposed framework”
Social media effects on fostering online civic engagement and building citizen trust and trust in institutions
Anne Marie Warren, Ainin Sulaiman and Noor Ismawati Jaafar in Government Information Quaterly: “This paper tests the extent to which social media is shaping civic engagement initiatives to build trust among people and increase trust in their institutions, particularly the government, police and justice systems. A survey of 502 citizens showed that using social media for civic engagement has a significant positive impact on trust propensity and that this trust had led to an increase in trust towards institutions. Interestingly, while group incentives encouraged citizens to engage online for civic matters, it is civic publications through postings on social media that intensify the urge of citizens for civic action to address social issues. Post-hoc analysis via ten interviews with social activists was conducted to further examine their perceptions on trust towards institutions. The overall findings suggest that institutions, in their effort to promote a meaningful and trusting citizen engagement, need to enhance trust among the public by fostering social capital via online civic engagement and closing the public–police disengagement gap”
Loomio: The world needs a better way to make decisions together.
Loomio: “Real democracy is about collaboration: groups of people getting together and making decisions that work for everyone….Loomio is free and open software for anyone, anywhere, to participate in decisions that affect them…
We’ve taken all the learning from thousands of groups using our beta prototype and designed a whole new platform for truly inclusive decision-making: Loomio 1.0″