4 reasons why businesses should be more open


Cobus De Swardt at WEF: “Many initiatives in recent years have extolled the virtues of governments becoming more open, but now the focus is turning to whether and how businesses will embrace openness.

Here are four reasons why I think businesses should take openness seriously.

1. Openness enhances stability and lowers risk

In a 2012 report, 70% of business executives said “their companies face extensive risk of corrupt activities when engaging agents/business partners in emerging markets and a significant number (46%) felt there was extensive risk when engaging suppliers”.

In the context of foreign bribery laws, companies need to know who they are doing business with – the real living, breathing individuals behind the companies with which they have relationships. ….

2. Openness reassures companies, consumers and citizens

How can citizens know that they are getting the best deal? Let’s take the way governments spend money by contracting the goods and services of companies. Spending this money at the right time, in the right place, for the right purpose is crucial for taxpayers, the people who stand to win or lose the most. So companies who win public contracts must be those with the best bid – not the best contacts book.

Some governments are moving towards more open contracting arrangements, but businesses should see the benefits too…

3. Openness lowers business costs

A growing number of cases show that when governments publish contracts, the quality and quantity of bids increase. Businesses have a better understanding of what is required; they can also make more targeted bids early on. It’s important to prove that there are no dodgy deals going on behind closed doors, which makes ensuring full transparency around who actually owns and controls the bidding companies crucial…

4. Openness demonstrates that businesses are part of the solution

Finally, being open to sharing more information and engaging with stakeholders in a more open manner helps demonstrate that companies can be part of the solution. Businesses are often seen, and sometimes deservedly so, as the perpetrators of corruption – but they can also be its victim. Responsible companies have a role to play in calling for higher standards, publishing information beyond the standards required of them, embracing openness and not fighting lawsuits to lock the information up….

So, how to open up?

It may take a while for the business world to see openness as something more than a compliance or administrative burden, but those that do so are sure to gain. Governments should find ways to incentivize companies to publish information such as their ownership and control structures. ….(More)

Opening Governance – Change, Continuity and Conceptual Ambiguity


Introduction to special issue of IDS Bulletin by Rosemary McGee and Duncan Edwards: “Open government and open data are new areas of research, advocacy and activism that have entered the governance field alongside the more established areas of transparency and accountability. This article reviews recent scholarship in these areas, pinpointing contributions to more open, transparent, accountable and responsive governance via improved practice, projects and programmes. The authors set the rest of the articles from this IDS Bulletin in the context of the ideas, relationships, processes, behaviours, policy frameworks and aid funding practices of the last five years, and critically discuss questions and weaknesses that limit the effectiveness and impact of this work. Identifying conceptual ambiguity as a key problem, they offer a series of definitions to help overcome the technical and political difficulties this causes. They also identify hype and euphemism, and offer a series of conclusions to help restore meaning and ideological content to work on open government and open data in transparent and accountable governance….(More)”

2015 Philip Meyer Award winners for data-driven investigation


From IRE: “First PlaceFailure Factories” | Tampa Bay Times
Cara Fitzpatrick, Michael LaForgia, Lisa Gartner, Nathaniel Lash and Connie Humburg

The team used statistical analysis and linear regression of data from dozens of records requests to document how steady resegregation of Pinellas County schools left black children to fail at increasingly higher rates than anywhere else in Florida. The series focused on failures of school district officials to give the schools the support necessary for success. The judges praised the reporters for dogged work on a project that took 18 months to report and write, and noted that the results underscored what decades of sociological research has shown happens in racially segregated schools.

Second Place: The Changing Face of America” | USA Today
Paul Overberg, Sarah Frostenson, Marisol Bello, Greg Toppo, and Jodi Upton 

The project was built around measurements across time of the racial and ethnic diversity of each of America’s more than 3,100 counties, going back to 1960 and projected ahead to 2060. The reporters used the results to reveal that high levels of diversity, once found only in a few Southern states and along the border with Mexico, had bloomed out into large areas of the upper Midwest and the Appalachians, for instance. Those results informed the assignments of reporters to find the local stories that illustrated those changes, with the results running in more than 100 Gannett papers and broadcast stations.

Third Place: The Echo Chamber” | Thomson Reuters
Joan Biskupic, Janet Roberts and John Shiffman

The Reuters team analyzed the characteristics of more than 14,400 U.S. Supreme Court records from nine years worth of petitions seeking review by the Court. The analysis showed that 43% of cases eventually heard by the court came from a tiny pool of a few dozen lawyers who represent less than 1% of the more than 17,000 lawyers seeking such review. Further reporting showed that these elite lawyers, mostly representing large corporations, had strong personal connections with the justices, with about half of them having served as clerks to the justices….(More)”

What a Million Syllabuses Can Teach Us


College course syllabuses are curious documents. They represent the best efforts by faculty and instructors to distill human knowledge on a given subject into 14-week chunks. They structure the main activity of colleges and universities. And then, for the most part, they disappear….

Until now. Over the past two years, we and our partners at the Open Syllabus Project (based at the American Assembly at Columbia) have collected more than a million syllabuses from university websites. We have also begun to extract some of their key components — their metadata — starting with their dates, their schools, their fields of study and the texts that they assign.

This past week, we made available online a beta version of our Syllabus Explorer, which allows this database to be searched. Our hope and expectation is that this tool will enable people to learn new things about teaching, publishing and intellectual history.

At present, the Syllabus Explorer is mostly a tool for counting how often texts are assigned over the past decade. There is something for everyone here. The traditional Western canon dominates the top 100, with Plato’s “Republic” at No. 2, “The Communist Manifesto” at No. 3, and “Frankenstein” at No. 5, followed by Aristotle’s “Ethics,” Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” “Oedipus” and “Hamlet.”….

Top articles? Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” and Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History.” And so on. Altogether, the Syllabus Explorer tracks about 933,000 works. Nearly half of these are assigned only once.

Such data has many uses. For academics, for example, it offers a window onto something they generally know very little about: how widely their work is read.

It also allows us to introduce a new publication metric based on the frequency with which works are taught, which we call the “teaching score.” The score is derived from the ranking order of the text, not the raw number of citations, such that a book or article that is used in four or five classes gets a score of 1, while “The Republic,” which is assigned 3,500 times, gets a score of 100….

Because of a complex mix of privacy and copyright issues concerning syllabuses, the Open Syllabus Project publishes only metadata, not the underlying documents or any personally identifying material (even though these documents can be viewed on university websites). But we think that it is important for schools to move toward a more open approach to curriculums. As universities face growing pressure to justify their teaching and research missions, we doubt that curricular obscurity is helpful.

We think that the Syllabus Explorer demonstrates how more open strategies can support teaching, diversify evaluation practices and offer new perspectives on publishing, scholarship and intellectual traditions. But as with any newly published work, that judgment now passes out of our hands and into yours…(More)”

Passive Philanthropy


PSFK: “What if you could cure cancer in your sleep? What if throwing out food meant feeding more people? What if helping coffee farmers in developing nations was as easy as a retweet? Today, businesses pay big money in order to reach the same audience as some viral tweets, and the same strategy is being applied to the reach and impact of social good campaigns. Nonprofits have also begun to leverage creative opportunities to spread awareness and raise funds to harness socially-aware citizens and rethink how social good is spread and executed. Take, for instance, an app that tracks exercise and donates to the charity of choice based on distance….

The DreamLab is a free app that turns smartphones into a research tool for cancer researchers in the Garvan Institute in Australia when their users are sleeping. Developed in conjunction with Vodaphone, the app uses the processing power of idle phones as an alternative to supercomputers which can be difficult to access. After downloading the app, participants simply open it and charge their phone. Once the phone reaches 95 percent charge, it gets to work, acting as a networked processor alongside other users with the app. Each phone solves a small piece of a larger puzzle and sends it back to Garvan.

If 1,000 people are using the app, cancer puzzles can be solved 30x faster.

As DreamLab researchers work toward finding a cure for cancer, Feeding Forward is working toward ending hunger. In America, hunger is not a problem of supply, but rather of distribution. Feeding Forward aims to solves this by connecting restaurants, grocery stores, caterers, or other businesses that are forced to throw away perishable food products with those in need.

Businesses simply need post their excess food on the platform and a driver will come pick it up to deliver to a food bank in need. Donors receive profiles of the people they helped and can also write off the donation as a charitable contribution for tax purposes. Since their launch in 2013, Feeding Forward has achieved a pick up rate of 99 percent, distributing 780,000 pounds of food saving business $3.9 million.

DreamLab and Feeding Forward are putting activities people are already going to do to use, while One Big Tweet harnesses the power of people’s social media accounts as a fundraising strategy. Cafédirect Producers’ Foundation are getting people to donate their Twitter followings for charity, asking people to sign up to post an automated tweet from a corporate sponsor who purchased the privilege at an auction for social good. The more people who donate their accounts, the higher the value of the tweet at auction. After four months, over 700 people with a collective reach of 3.2 mil followers, signed up to help make the One Big Tweet worth $49,000. While the charity is still in search of a buyer, Cafédirect promises the tweet that will be sent out through participants’ accounts will only happen once and be “safe enough for your Gran to read.” All money from the sale will go directly to continuing the work they do with coffee and tea farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America…(MoreMore)

The power of crowds


Pietro Michelucci and Janis L. Dickinson in Science: “Human computation, a term introduced by Luis von Ahn, refers to distributed systems that combine the strengths of humans and computers to accomplish tasks that neither can do alone. The seminal example is reCAPTCHA, a Web widget used by 100 million people a day when they transcribe distorted text into a box to prove they are human. This free cognitive labor provides users with access to Web content and keeps websites safe from spam attacks, while feeding into a massive, crowd-powered transcription engine that has digitized 13 million articles from The New York Times archives. But perhaps the best known example of human computation is Wikipedia. Despite initial concerns about accuracy, it has become the key resource for all kinds of basic information. Information science has begun to build on these early successes, demonstrating the potential to evolve human computation systems that can model and address wicked problems (those that defy traditional problem-solving methods) at the intersection of economic, environmental, and sociopolitical systems….(More)”

What Is Citizen Science? – A Scientometric Meta-Analysis


Christopher Kullenberg and Dick Kasperowski at PLOS One: “The concept of citizen science (CS) is currently referred to by many actors inside and outside science and research. Several descriptions of this purportedly new approach of science are often heard in connection with large datasets and the possibilities of mobilizing crowds outside science to assists with observations and classifications. However, other accounts refer to CS as a way of democratizing science, aiding concerned communities in creating data to influence policy and as a way of promoting political decision processes involving environment and health.

Objective

In this study we analyse two datasets (N = 1935, N = 633) retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) with the aim of giving a scientometric description of what the concept of CS entails. We account for its development over time, and what strands of research that has adopted CS and give an assessment of what scientific output has been achieved in CS-related projects. To attain this, scientometric methods have been combined with qualitative approaches to render more precise search terms.

Results

Results indicate that there are three main focal points of CS. The largest is composed of research on biology, conservation and ecology, and utilizes CS mainly as a methodology of collecting and classifying data. A second strand of research has emerged through geographic information research, where citizens participate in the collection of geographic data. Thirdly, there is a line of research relating to the social sciences and epidemiology, which studies and facilitates public participation in relation to environmental issues and health. In terms of scientific output, the largest body of articles are to be found in biology and conservation research. In absolute numbers, the amount of publications generated by CS is low (N = 1935), but over the past decade a new and very productive line of CS based on digital platforms has emerged for the collection and classification of data….(More)”

When is your problem a ‘Challenge’?


Ed Parkes at NESTA: “More NGOs, Government Departments and city governments are using challenge prizes to help develop new products and services which ‘solve’ a problem they have identified. There have been several high profile prizes (for instance, Nesta’s Longitude Prize or the recently announced $7 million ocean floor Xprize) and a growing number of platforms for running them (such as Challenge.gov or OpenIdeo). Due to this increased profile, challenge prizes are more often seen by public sector strategists and policy owners as holding the potential to solve their tricky strategic issues.

To characterise, the starting point is often “If only we could somehow get new, smart, digitally-informed organisations to solve the underfunded, awkward strategic issues we’ve been grappling with, wouldn’t it be great?”.

This approach is especially tantalising for public sector organisations as it means they can be seen to take action on an issue through ‘market shaping’, rather than resorting to developing policy or intervening with regulation or legislation.

Having worked on a series of challenge prizes on open data over the last couple of years, as well as subsequently working with organisations on how our design principles could be applied to their objectives, I’ve spent some time thinking about when it’s appropriate to run a challenge prize. The design and practicalities of running a successful challenge prize are not always straightforward. Thankfully there has already been some useful broad guidance on this from Nesta’s Centre for Challenge Prizes in their Challenge Prize Practice Guide and McKinsey and Deloitte have also published guides.

Nevertheless despite this high quality guidance, like many things in life, the most difficult part is knowing where to start. Organisations struggle to understand whether they have the right problem in the first place. In many instances running a challenge prize is not the appropriate organisational response to an issue and it’s best to discover this early on. From my experience, there are two key questions which are worth asking when you’re trying to work out if your problem is suitable:

1. Is your problem an issue for anyone other than your own organisation?…

2. Will other people see solving this problem as an investment opportunity or worth funding?…

These two considerations come down to one thing – incentive. Firstly, does anyone other than your organisation care about this issue and secondly, do they care enough about it to pay to solve it…..(More)’

Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century


Updated book by Dennis W. Johnson: “In view of the 2016 US election season, the second edition of this book analyzes the way political campaigns have been traditionally run and the extraordinary changes that have occurred since 2012. Dennis W. Johnson looks at the most sophisticated techniques of modern campaigning—micro-targeting, online fundraising, digital communication, the new media—and examines what has changed, how those changes have dramatically transformed campaigning, and what has remained fundamentally the same despite new technologies and communications.

Campaigns are becoming more open and free-wheeling, with greater involvement of activists (especially through social media) and average voters alike. At the same time, they have become more professionalized, and the author has experience managing and marketing the process. Campaigning in the Twenty-First Century illustrates the daunting challenges for candidates and professional consultants as they try to get their messages out to voters. Ironically, the more open and robust campaigns become, the greater is the need for seasoned, flexible, and imaginative professional consultants… (More)”

How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers


Robert M. Wachter at the New York Times: “Two of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.

Through the 20th century, we adopted a hands-off approach, assuming that the pros knew best. Most experts believed that the ideal “products” — healthy patients and well-educated kids — were too strongly influenced by uncontrollable variables (the sickness of the patient, the intellectual capacity of the student) and were too complex to be judged by the measures we use for other industries.

By the early 2000s, as evidence mounted that both fields were producing mediocre outcomes at unsustainable costs, the pressure for measurement became irresistible. In health care, we saw hundreds of thousands of deaths from medical errors, poor coordination of care and backbreaking costs. In education, it became clear that our schools were lagging behind those in other countries.

So in came the consultants and out came the yardsticks. In health care, we applied metrics to outcomes and processes. Did the doctor document that she gave the patient a flu shot? That she counseled the patient about smoking? In education, of course, the preoccupation became student test scores.

All of this began innocently enough. But the measurement fad has spun out of control. There are so many different hospital ratings that more than 1,600 medical centers can now lay claim to being included on a “top 100,” “honor roll,” grade “A” or “best” hospitals list. Burnout rates for doctors top 50 percent, far higher than other professions. A 2013 study found that the electronic health record was a dominant culprit. Another 2013 study found that emergency room doctors clicked a mouse 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift. The computer systems have become the dark force behind quality measures.

Education is experiencing its own version of measurement fatigue. Educators complain that the focus on student test performance comes at the expense of learning. Art, music and physical education have withered, because, really,why bother if they’re not on the test?…

Thoughtful and limited assessment can be effective in motivating improvements and innovations, and in weeding out the rare but disproportionately destructive bad apples.

But in creating a measurement and accountability system, we need to tone down the fervor and think harder about the unanticipated consequences….(More)”