Collection

Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement

Curated on March 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Worldbank/DEET: “With growing demand for transparency, accountability and citizen participation in policy making and service provision, engagement between citizens and government, as well as with donors and the private sector that deliver government services, is increasingly important.1 Within this, the rapid proliferation of digital tools is opening up a new era of Digital Citizen Engagement (DCE). Initiatives such as online participatory budgeting, SMS voting and the use of handheld digital devices for beneficiary feedback are growing in use. Increased use of technology brings both opportunities and challenges to citizen engagement processes, including opportunities for collecting, analyzing and evaluating data about these processes.

This guide offers a means of assessing the extent to which digital tools have contributed to citizen engagement2 and to help understand the impacts—positive or negative, intended or unintended—that the introduction of technology has had on the engagement processes. It addresses specific questions: Does adding digital technology to the citizen engagement process really provide quicker, cheaper, easier ways for citizens to engage with the state or other service providers? Can digital technologies lower interaction costs for governments and deliver improved, more targeted development outcomes? What risks come with this new technology—have certain citizens been excluded (intentionally or unintentionally) from the engagement process? Has the way in which people engage and communicate altered, for better or for worse? Has the technology affected the previously existing groups and institutions that were intermediating engagement processes before the technology was introduced? The guide is designed to help people understand when the use of DCE is appropriate and under what circumstances, how to use it more effectively and what to expect from its use. It introduces the key issues relating to Digital Citizen Engagement and offers advice and guidance on how to evaluate it— including methods, indicators, challenges and course corrections that apply to the digital aspect of citizen engagement….(More)”

How Google Optimized Healthy Office Snacks

Curated on March 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Zoe Chance, Ravi Dhar, Michelle Hatzis and Michiel Bakker at Harvard Business Review: “Employers need simple, low-cost ways of helping employees make healthy choices. The effects of poor health and obesity cost U.S. companies $225 billion every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and this number is quickly rising. Although some employer-sponsored wellness programs have yielded high returns — Johnson & Johnson reported a 170% return on wellness spending in the 2000s — the employee wellness industry as a whole has struggled to prove its value.

Wellness initiatives often fail because they rely on outdated methods of engagement, placing too much emphasis on providing information. Extensive evidence from behavioral economics has shown that information rarely succeeds in changing behavior or building new habits for fitness and food choices. Telling people why and how to improve their health fails to elicit behavior changes because behavior often diverges from intentions. This is particularly true for food choices because our self-control is taxed by any type of depletion, including hunger. And the necessity of making food decisions many times a day means we can’t devote much processing power to each choice, so our eating behaviors tend to be habit- and instinct-driven. With a clearer understanding of the influences on choice — context and impulsivity, for instance — companies can design environments that reinforce employees’ healthy choices, limit potential lapses, and save on health care costs.

Jointly, the Google Food Team and the Yale Center for Customer Insights have been studying how behavioral economics can improve employee health choices. We’ve run multiple field experiments to understand how small “tweaks” can nudge behavior toward desirable outcomes and yield outsized benefits. To guide these interventions, we distilled scattered findings from behavioral science into a simple framework, the four Ps of behavior change:

Process
Persuasion
Possibilities
Person

The framework helped us structure a portfolio of strategies for making healthy choices easier and more enticing and making unhealthy choices harder and less tempting. Below, we present a brief example of each point of intervention….(More)”

Missing Maps

Curated on March 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

About Missing Maps: “Objectives:

To map the most vulnerable places in the developing world, in order that international and local NGOs and individuals can use the maps and data to better respond to crises affecting the areas.
To support OpenStreetMap, specifically the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), in developing technologies, skills, workflows, and communities.

Ethics

Using OpenStreetMap ensures that all data gathered under the project banner will be free, open, and available for use under OpenStreetMap’s open license.
All ‘in country’ activities, i.e. local mapping and data collection, will be carried out in collaboration with local people and in a respectful manner at all times.
When working locally, people come before the data. Meaning if the goal is to map a city there needs to be a plan in place to ensure access to technology and training for those living in that community to continue using the maps after project completion.
Members of Missing Maps actively contribute to Missing Map’s objectives, the OpenStreetMap repository and benefitting communities, both local and international.
Missing Maps activities emphasize building, and leaving behind, local capacity and access. We are cautious about rapid data collection without significant local participation, and always make efforts to ensure local access.
Missing Maps activities are designed to be accessible and open for participation for individuals who want to contribute towards the project objectives.

Membership

Membership of the Missing Maps Project is open to any NGO, educational establishment or civil society group willing to contribute to the goals, and abide by the ethics, stated above. Approval of membership is the responsibility of the current member organisations….(More)”

How tech is forcing firms to be better global citizens

Curated on March 8, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Lawson at the BBC: “…technology is forcing companies to up their game and interact with communities more directly and effectively….

Platforms such as Kritical Mass have certainly given a fillip to the idea of crowd-supported philanthropy, attracting individuals and corporate sponsors to its projects, whether that’s saving vultures in Kenya or bringing solar power to rural communities in west Africa.

Sponsors can offer funding, volunteers, expertise or marketing. So rather than imposing corporate ideas of “do-gooding” on communities in a patronising manner, firms can simply respond to demand.

HelpfulPeeps has pushed its volunteering platform into more than 40 countries worldwide, connecting people who want to share their time, knowledge and skills with each other for free.

In the UK, online platform Neighbourly connects community projects and charities with companies and people willing to volunteer their resources. For example, Starbucks has pledged 2,500 days of volunteering and has so far backed 70 community projects….

Judging by the strong public appetite for supporting good causes and campaigning against injustice on sites such as Change.org, Avaaz.org, JustGiving andGoFundMe, his assessment appears to be correct.

And LinkedIn says millions of members have signalled on their profiles that they want to serve on a non-profit board or use their skills to volunteer….

Tech companies in particular are offering expertise and skills to good causes as way of making a tangible difference.

For example, in January, Microsoft announced that through its new organisation,Microsoft Philanthropies, it will donate $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to serve non-profits and university researchers over the next three years…

And data analytics specialist Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) has offered its data-crunching skills to help the Capital Area Food Bank charity distribute food more efficiently to hungry people around the Washington DC area.

APT used data to develop a “hunger heat map” to help CAFB target resources and plan for future demand better.

In another project, APT helped The Cara Program – a Chicago-based charity providing training and job placements to people affected by homelessness or poverty – evaluate what made its students more employable….

And Launch, an open platform jointly founded by Nasa, Nike, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of State aims to provide support for start-ups and “inspire innovation”.

In the age of internet transparency, it seems corporates no longer have anywhere to hide – a spot of CSR whitewashing is not going to cut it anymore….(More)”.

Research and Evaluation of Participatory Budgeting in the U.S. and Canada

Curated on March 8, 2016October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Public Agenda: “Communities across the country are experimenting with participatory budgeting (PB), a democratic process in which residents decide together how to spend part of a public budget. Learning more about how these community efforts are implemented and with what results will help improve and expand successful forms of participatory budgeting across the U.S. and Canada.

Public Agenda is supporting local evaluation efforts and sharing research on participatory budgeting. Specifically, we are:

Building a community of practice among PB evaluators and researchers.
Working with evaluators and researchers to make data and research findings comparable across communities that use participatory budgeting.
Developing key metrics and research tools to help evaluate participatory budgeting (download these documents here).
Publishing a “Year in Participatory Budgeting Research” review based on data, findings, experiences and challenges from sites in the U.S. and Canada.
Conducting original, independent research on elected officials’ views of and experiences with participatory budgeting.
Convening the North American Participatory Budgeting Research Board.

…Below, you will find evaluation tools and resources we developed in close collaboration with PB evaluators and researchers in the U.S. and Canada. We also included the local evaluation reports from communities around the U.S. and Canada using PB in budget decisions.

To be the first to hear about new PB resources and news, join our email list. We also invite you to email us to join our listserv and participate in discussion about evaluation and research of participatory budgeting in the U.S. and Canada.

New to PB and looking to introduce it to your community? You should start here instead! Once your PB effort is under way, come back to this page for tools to evaluate how you’re doing.

15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting: A Toolkit for Evaluators and Implementers

Evaluation is a critical component of any PB effort. Systematic and formal evaluation can help people who introduce, implement, participate in or otherwise have a stake in PB understand how participatory budgeting is growing, what its reach is, and how it’s impacting the community and beyond.

We developed the 15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting toolkit for people interested in evaluating PB efforts in their communities. It is meant to encourage and support some common research goals across PB sites and meaningfully inform local and national discussions about PB in the U.S. and Canada. It is the first iteration of such a toolkit and especially focused on providing practical and realistic guidance for the evaluation of new and relatively new PB processes.

Anyone involved in public engagement or participation efforts other than participatory budgeting may also be interested in reviewing the toolkit for research and evaluation ideas.

The toolkit requires registration before you can download.

The toolkit includes the following sections:

15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting: 15 indicators (“metrics”) that capture important elements of each community-based PB process and the PB movement in North America overall. Click here for a brief description of these metrics….(More)”

Opening Up Government: Citizen Innovation and New Modes of Collaboration

Curated on March 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Stefan Etzelstorfer, Thomas Gegenhuber and, Dennis Hilgers in Open Tourism: Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation Challenging the Tourism Industry: “Companies use crowdsourcing to solve problems by using a widely dispersed and large group of individuals. Crowdsourcing and open innovation are not restricted to businesses. Governments also increasingly rely on open innovation principles to harness the expert knowledge of citizens and use citizens’ contributions to the public value creation process. While a large body of literature has examined the open government paradigm at the national level, we still know relatively little about how open government initiatives play out at the local level. Even less is known about whether open government initiatives may create positive spill overs, for example by having a trickle-down effect onto local tourism sectors. In this article, we present the City of Linz’s open government activities. More specifically, we review how the public administration implemented the interactive mapping and reporting application “Schau auf Linz“ (“Look at Linz“). Through our analysis of this case study, we show what role the local context and prior policies play in implementing open government initiatives on a local level. In addition, we discuss how this initiative, like others, leads to positive spill overs for the tourism sector….(More)”

The Opportunity Project: Utilizing Open Data to Build Stronger Ladders of Opportunity for All

Curated on March 7, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Factsheet: “In the lead up to the President’s historic visit to SxSW, today the Administration is announcing the launch of “The Opportunity Project,” a new open data effort to improve economic mobility for all Americans. As the President said in his State of the Union address, we must harness 21st century technology and innovation to expand access to opportunity and tackle our greatest challenges.

The Opportunity Project will put data and tools in the hands of civic leaders, community organizations, and families to help them navigate information about critical resources such as access to jobs, housing, transportation, schools, and other neighborhood amenities. This project is about unleashing the power of data to help our children and our children’s children access the resources they need to thrive. Today, the Administration is releasing a unique package of Federal and local datasets in an easy-to-use format and accelerating a new way for the federal government to collaborate with local leaders, technologists, and community members to use data and technology to tackle inequities and strengthen their communities.

Key components of this announcement include:

· The launch of “The Opportunity Project” and Opportunity.Census.gov to provide easy access to the new package of Opportunity Project data, a combination of Federal and local data, on key assets that determine access to opportunity at the neighborhood level. This data can now be used by technologists, community groups, and local governments in order to help families find affordable housing, help businesses identify services they need, and help policymakers see inequities in their communities and make investments to expand fair housing and increase economic mobility.

· The release of a dozen new private sector and non-profit digital tools that were built in collaboration with eight cities and using the Opportunity Project data to help families, local leaders, advocates, and the media navigate information about access to jobs, housing, transportation, schools, neighborhood amenities, and other critical resources. Participating cities include Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, MO, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as well as organizations and companies such as Redfin, Zillow, GreatSchools, PolicyLink andStreetwyze.

· More than thirty additional non-profits, community organizations, coding boot camps, academic institutions, and local governments have already committed to use the Opportunity Project data to build stronger ladders of opportunity in communities across the country.

· The Administration is issuing a Call to Action to the public to develop new tools, offer additional sources of data, deepen community engagement through the use of the data, and other actions. We want to hear about what new steps you are taking or programs you are implementing to address these topics.

This project represents an important continuation of how the Federal government is working with communities and technologists to enhance the power of open data by making it more accessible to a wide variety of users across the country, and by facilitating collaborations between software developers and community members to build digital tools that make it easier for communities and families to solve their greatest challenges….(More)”

Encouraging and Sustaining Innovation in Government for the New Administration

Curated on March 7, 2016October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Dan Chenok and Alan Howze at the IBM Center for The Business of Government: “The IBM Center for The Business of Government and the Partnership for Public Service recently co-hosted a Roundtable to discuss how agency leaders can continue to bring innovation into government, in a way that integrates with agency activities to drive successful outcomes for the next Presidential term. An exceptional group of current and former senior officials from Administrations of both parties, leaders from Capitol Hill, as well as experts from academia and the private and non-profit sectors participated in a robust discussion. The focus of the session was how the next administration can use innovation to spark progress on the administration’s goals/priorities, and in-turn, how transition teams and incoming leaders should incorporate innovation into how government carries out key missions.

The meeting was the fourth of six planned Roundtables in our “Management Roadmap” series, part of a multi-pronged Ready to Govern (#Ready2Govern) initiative, through which the Partnership seeks to improve the transfer of power and knowledge between administrations[1]These Roundtables addressed the critical importance of strong leadership (along with the related report on Executive Talent), the need for agency-specific and governmentwide approaches, and the challenge of decision-making in a time of transition.

The IBM Center is pleased to collaborate with the Partnership to help the next Administration get off to a strong start, and build sustained management excellence thereafter. We are grateful for the many distinguished leaders who contributed their time and insights to the Enterprise Government session, and to Steve Goldsmith, Director of the Innovations Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and former Deputy Mayor of New York and Mayor of Indianapolis, for his expert facilitation of the session.

Background

Under the current Administration, agencies have prioritized innovation in many different ways. The administration pioneered business model innovations such as the U.S. Digital Service, the GSA Office of Citizen Services and Innovative Technologies and 18F, and a new GSA Unified Shared Services Management (USSM) governance model. Challenge.gov and “idea labs” such as those at HHS and OPM brought new approaches to program delivery and government operations. There has also been innovation in talent acquisition such as the introduction of the Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIFs).

When the next President takes office in 2017, a new administration will have the opportunity to embark on their own innovation agenda, building upon past efforts and setting new goals. How can new agency leaders drive and sustain innovation? How can the next administration enhance customer experience, and support empowerment of citizens and businesses? These and other questions served to frame a rich discussion at the Innovation Roundtable.

The discussion highlighted that innovation is the means to an end – and not an end-goal per se. Roundtable participants focused on three desired objectives for how innovation can improve outcomes:

Improving Efficiency and Effectiveness –utilizing technology to improve government operations.
Customer Experience – enhancing customer service and improving the user experience.
Engagement–empowering citizens and businesses to participate in the development of government policies and programs.

In each of these areas, innovators in and for government must address the challenges of leadership and talent, process, and scale in order to sustain and grow an innovation culture. The roundtable noted that meeting these challenges can be facilitated by a focus on innovation goals and governance – how to set outcome goals and establish governance structures – at the agency and governmentwide levels. Specific challenges discussed follow….(More). See also: Part II.

Community Engagement Matters (Now More Than Ever)

Curated on March 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Melody Barnes & Paul Schmitz at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…Data-driven and evidence-based practices present new opportunities for public and social sector leaders to increase impact while reducing inefficiency. But in adopting such approaches, leaders must avoid the temptation to act in a top-down manner. Instead, they should design and implement programs in ways that engage community members directly in the work of social change. …

Under the sponsorship of an organization called Results for America, we recently undertook a research project that focused on how leaders can and should pursue data-driven social change efforts. For the project, we interviewed roughly 30 city administrators, philanthropists, nonprofit leaders, researchers, and community builders from across the United States. We began this research with a simple premise: Social change leaders now have an unprecedented ability to draw on data-driven insight about which programs actually lead to better results.

Leaders today know that babies born to mothers enrolled in certain home visiting programs have healthier birth outcomes. (The Nurse-Family Partnership, which matches first-time mothers with registered nurses, is a prime example of this type of intervention.³) They know that students in certain reading programs reach higher literacy levels. (Reading Partners, for instance, has shown impressive results with a program that provides one-on-one reading instruction to struggling elementary school students.⁴) They know that criminal offenders who enter job-training and support programs when they leave prison are less likely to re-offend and more likely to succeed in gaining employment. (The Center for Employment Opportunities has achieved such outcomes by offering life-skills education, short-term paid transitional employment, full-time job placement, and post-placement services.⁵)

Results for America, which launched in 2012, seeks to enable governments at all levels to apply data-driven approaches to issues related to education, health, and economic opportunity. In 2014, the organization published a book called Moneyball for Government. (The title is a nod to Moneyball, a book by Michael Lewis that details how the Oakland A’s baseball club used data analytics to build championship teams despite having a limited budget for player salaries.) The book features contributions by a wide range of policymakers and thought leaders (including Melody Barnes, a co-author of this article). The editors of Moneyball for Government, Jim Nussle and Peter Orszag, outline three principles that public officials should follow as they pursue social change:

“Build evidence about the practices, policies, and programs that will achieve the most effective and efficient results so that policymakers can make better decisions.
“Invest limited taxpayer dollars in practices, policies, and programs that use data, evidence, and evaluation to demonstrate they work.
“Direct funds away from practices, policies, and programs that consistently fail to achieve measurable outcomes.”⁶

These concepts sound simple. Indeed, they have the ring of common sense. Yet they do not correspond to the current norms of practice in the public and nonprofit sectors. According to one estimate, less than 1 percent of federal nondefense discretionary spending goes toward programs that are backed by evidence. In a 2014 report, Lisbeth Schorr and Frank Farrow note that the influence of evidence on decision-making—“especially when compared to the influence of ideology, politics, history, and even anecdotes”—has been weak among policymakers and social service providers. (Schorr is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Policy, and Farrow is director of the center.)

That needs to change. There is both an economic and a moral imperative for adopting data-driven approaches. Given persistently limited budgets, public and nonprofit leaders must direct funds to programs and initiatives that use data to show that they are achieving impact. Even if unlimited funds were available, moreover, leaders would have a responsibility to design programs that will deliver the best results for beneficiaries….

The Need for “Patient Urgency”

The inclination to move fast in creating and implementing data-driven programs and practices is understandable. After all, the problems that communities face today are serious and immediate. People’s lives are at stake. If there is evidence that a particular intervention can (for example) help more children get a healthy start in life—or help them read at grade level, or help them develop marketable skills—then setting that intervention in motion is pressingly urgent.

But acting too quickly in this arena entails a significant risk. All too easily, the urge to initiate programs expeditiously translates into a preference for top-down forms of management. Leaders, not unreasonably, are apt to assume that bottom-up methods will only slow the implementation of programs that have a record of delivering positive results.

A former director of data and analytics for a US city offers a cautionary tale that illustrates this idea. “We thought if we got better results for people, they would demand more of it,” she explains. “Our mayor communicated in a paternal way: ‘I know better than you what you need. I will make things better for you. Trust me.’ The problem is that they didn’t trust us. Relationships matter. Not enough was done to ask people what they wanted, to honor what they see and experience. Many of our initiatives died—not because they didn’t work but because they didn’t have community support.”

To win such support, policymakers and other leaders must treat community members as active partners. “Doing to us, not with us, is a recipe for failure,” says Fuller, who has deep experience in building community-led coalitions. “If we engage communities, then we have a solution and we have the leadership necessary to demand that solution and hold people accountable for it.” Engaging a community is not an activity that leaders can check off on a list. It’s a continuous process that aims to generate the support necessary for long-term change. The goal is to encourage intended beneficiaries not just to participate in a social change initiative but also to champion it.

“This work takes patient urgency,” Fuller argues. “If you aren’t patient, you only get illusory change. Lasting change is not possible without community. You may be gone in 5 or 10 years, but the community will still be there. You need a sense of urgency to push the process forward and maintain momentum.” The tension between urgency and patience is a productive tension. Navigating that tension allows leaders and community members to achieve the right level of engagement.

Rich Harwood, president of the Harwood Institute for Public Innovation, makes this point in a post on his website: “Understanding and strengthening a community’s civic culture is as important to collective efforts as using data, metrics and measuring outcomes. … A weak civic culture undermines the best intentions and the most rigorous of analyses and plans. For change to happen, trust and community ownership must form, people need to engage with one another, and we need to create the right underlying conditions and capabilities for change to take root and spread.”…(More)

Visualizing Potential Outbreaks of the Zika Virus

Curated on March 7, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Google’s Official Blog: “The recent Zika virus outbreak has caused concern around the world. We’ve seen more than a 3,000 percent increase in global search interest since November, and last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a Public Health Emergency. The possible correlation with Zika, microcephaly and other birth defects is particularly alarming.

But unlike many other global pandemics, the spread of Zika has been harder to identify, map and contain. It’s believed that 4 in 5 people with the virus don’t show any symptoms, and the primary transmitter for the disease, the Aedes mosquito species, is both widespread and challenging to eliminate. That means that fighting Zika requires raising awareness on how people can protect themselves, as well as supporting organizations who can help drive the development of rapid diagnostics and vaccines. We also have to find better ways to visualize the threat so that public health officials and NGO’s can support communities at risk….

A volunteer team of Google engineers, designers, and data scientists is helping UNICEF build a platform to process data from different sources (i.e., weather and travel patterns) in order to visualize potential outbreaks. Ultimately, the goal of this open source platform is to identify the risk of Zika transmission for different regions and help UNICEF, governments and NGO’s decide how and where to focus their time and resources. This set of tools is being prototyped for the Zika response, but will also be applicable to future emergencies….

We already include robust information for 900+ health conditions directly on Search for people in the U.S. We’ve now also added extensive information about Zika globally in 16 languages, with an overview of the virus, symptom information, and Public Health Alerts from that can be updated with new information as it becomes available.

We’re also working with popular YouTube creators across Latin America, including Sesame Street and Brazilian physician Drauzio Varella, to raise awareness about Zika prevention via their channels.