Collection

The Open (Data) Market

Curated on February 2, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean McDonald at Medium: “Open licensing privatizes technology and data usability. How does that effect equality and accessibility?…The open licensing movement(open data, open source software, etc.) predicates its value on increasing accessibility and transparency by removing legal and ownership restrictions on use. The groups that advocate for open data and open sourcecode, especially in government and publicly subsidized industries, often come from transparency, accountability, and freedom of information backgrounds. These efforts, however, significantly underestimate the costs of refining, maintaining, targeting, defining a value proposition, marketing, and presenting both data and products in ways that are effective and useful for the average person. Recent research suggests the primary beneficiaries of civic technologies — those specifically built on government data or services — are privileged populations. The World Banks recent World Development Report goes further to point out that public digitization can be a driver of inequality.

The dynamic of self-replicating privilege in both technology and openmarkets is not a new phenomenon. Social science research refers to it as the Matthew Effect, which says that in open or unregulated spaces, theprivileged tend to become more privileged, while the poor become poorer.While there’s no question the advent of technology brings massive potential,it is already creating significant access and achievement divides. Accordingto the Federal Communication Commission’s annual Broadband Progressreport in 2015, 42% of students in the U.S. struggle to do their homeworkbecause of web access — and 39% of rural communities don’t even have abroadband option. Internet access skews toward urban, wealthycommunities, with income, geography, and demographics all playing a rolein adoption. Even further, research suggests that the rich and poor use technology differently. This runs counter to narrative of Interneteventualism, which insist that it’s simply a (small) matter of time beforethese access (and skills) gaps close. Evidence suggests that for upper andmiddle income groups access is almost universal, but the gaps for lowincome groups are growing…(More)”

A Gargantuan Challenge for The Megalopolis: Mexico City calls citizens to help map its complex public bus system

Curated on February 2, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

“Mexico City, the largest and oldest urban agglomeration in the American continent. The city is home to an incredible diversity of people and cultures, and its size and its diversity also poses certain challenges. In a city with such big scale (the metropolitan area measures 4,887 mi2) transportation is one of its main problems. Finding ways to improve how people move within requires imagination and cooperation from decision makers and society alike.

The scale and dynamism of Mexico City’s public transport system represents a challenge to generate quality information. Processes for the generation of mobility data are time-consuming and expensive. Given this scenario, the best alternative for the city is to include transport users in generating this information.

The megalopolis lacks an updated, open database of its more than 1,500 bus routes. To tackle this problem, Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Mexico City’s experimental office and creative think-tank, reporting to the Mayor) partnered with 12 organizations that include NGOs and other government offices to develop Mapatón CDMX: a crowdsourcing and gamification experiment to map the city’s bus routes through civic collaboration and technology.

After one year of designing and testing a strategy, the team behind Mapatón CDMX is calling citizens to map the public transport system by participating on a city game from January 29th to February 14th 2016. The game’s goal is to map routes of licenced public transport (buses, minibuses and vans) from start to finish in order to score points, which is done through an app for Android devices that gathers GPS data from the user inside the bus.

The mappers will participate individually or in groups with friends and family for two weeks. As an incentive and once the mapping marathon is finished, those participants with higher scores will earn cash prizes and electronic devices. (A smart algorithm creates incentives to map the longest or most ignored routes, giving mappers extra points.) But what is most valuable: the data resulting will be openly available at the end of February 2016, much faster and cheaper than with traditional processes.

Mapatón CDMX is an innovative and effective way to generate updated and open information about transport routes as the game harnesses collective intelligence of the gargantuan city. Organisers consider that the open database may be used by anyone to create –for example– data driven policy, strategies for academic analysis, maps for users, applications, visualizations, among many other digital products….(More)”

Idea to retire: Leaders can’t take risks or experiment

Curated on February 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bray at TechTank: “Technology is rapidly changing our world. Traditionally, a nation’s physical borders could mark the beginning of their sovereign space, but in the early to mid-20^th century airplanes challenged this notion. Later on, space-based satellites began flying in space above all nations. By the early 21^st century, smartphone technologies costing $100 or so gave individuals computational capabilities that dwarfed the multi-million dollar computers operated by large nation-states just three decades earlier.

In this period of exponential change, all of us across the public sector must work together, enabling more inclusive work across government workers, citizen-led contributions, and public-private partnerships. Institutions must empower positive change agents on the inside of public service to pioneer new ways of delivering superior results. Institutions must also open their data for greater public interaction, citizen-led remixing, and discussions.

All together, these actions will transform public service to truly be “We the (mobile, data-enabled, collaborative) People” working to improve our world. These actions all begin creating creative spaces that allow public service professionals the opportunities to experiment and explore new ways of delivering superior results to the public.

21st Century Reality #1: Public service must include workspaces for those who want to experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.

The world we face now is dramatically different then the world of 50, 100, or 200 years ago. More technological change is expected to occur in the next five years than the last 15 years combined. Advances in technology have blurred what traditionally was considered government, and consequentially we must experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.

21st Century Reality #2: Public service agencies need, within reason, to be allowed to have things fail, and be allowed to take risks.

The words “expertise” and “experiments” have the same etymological root, which is “exper,” meaning “out of danger.” Whereas the motto in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs around the world might be “fail fast and fail often,” such a model is not going to work for public service, where certain endeavors absolutely must succeed and cannot waste taxpayer funds.

The only way public sector technologists will gain the expertise needed to respond to and take advantage of the digital disruptions occurring globally will be to do “dangerous experiments” as positive change agents akin to what entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley also do….

21st Century Reality #3: Public service cannot be done solely by government professionals in a top-down fashion.

With the communication capabilities provided by smartphones, social media, and freely available apps, individual members of the public can voluntarily access, analyze, remix, and choose to contribute data and insights to better inform public service. Recognizing this shift from top-down to bottom-up activities represents the first step to the resiliency of our legacy institutions….

Putting a cultural shift into practice

Senior executives need to shift from managing those who report to them to championing and creating spaces for creativity within their organizations. Within any organization, change agents should be able to approach an executive, pitch new ideas, bring data to support these ideas, and if a venture is approved move forward with speed to transform public service away from our legacy approaches….

The work of public service also can be done by public-private partnerships acting beyond their own corporate interests to benefit the nation and local communities. Historically the U.S. has lagged other nations, like Singapore or the U.K., in exploring new innovative forms of public-private partnerships. This could change by examining the pressing issues of the day and considering how the private sector might solve challenging issues, or complement the efforts of government professionals. This could include rotations of both government and private sector professionals as part of public-private partnerships to do public service that now might be done more collaboratively, effectively, and innovatively using alternative forms of organizational design and delivery.

If public service returns to first principles – namely, what “We the People” choose to do together – new forms of organizing, collaborating, incentivizing, and delivering results will emerge. Our exponential era requires such transformational partnerships for the future ahead….(More)”

Direct democracy may be key to a happier American democracy

Curated on January 30, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Benjamin Radcliff and Michael Krassa in the Conversation: “Is American democracy still “by the people, for the people?” According to recent research, it may not be. Martin Gilens at Princeton University confirms that the wishes of the American working and middle class play essentially no role in our nation’s policy making. A BBC story rightly summarized this with the headline: US Is an Oligarchy, Not a Democracy.

However new research by Benjamin Radcliff and Gregory Shufeldt suggests a ray of hope.

Ballot initiatives, they argue, may better serve the interests of ordinary Americans than laws passed by elected officials….

Today, 24 states allow citizens to directly vote on policy matters.

This year, more than 42 initiatives already are approved for the ballot in 18 states.

Voters in California will decide diverse questions including banning plastic bags, voter approval of state expenses greater than US$2 billion dollars, improving school funding, and the future of bilingual education.

The people of Colorado will vote on replacing their current medical insurance programs with a single payer system, and in Massachusetts people may consider legalizing recreational marijuana….

However, many have pointed to problems with direct democracy in the form of ballot initiatives.

Maxwell Sterns at the University of Maryland, for example, writes that legislatures are better because initiatives are the tools of special interests and minorities. In the end, initiatives are voted upon by an unrepresentative subset of the population, Sterns concludes.

Others like Richard Ellis of Willamette University argue that the time-consuming process of gathering signatures introduces a bias toward moneyed interests. Some suggest this has damaged direct democracy in California, where professional petition writers andpaid signature gatherers dominate the process. Moneyed interests also enjoy a natural advantage in having the resources that ordinary people lack to mount media campaigns to support their narrow interests.

To curb this kind of problem, bans on paying people per signature are proposed in many states, but have not yet passed any legislature. However, because Californians like direct democracy in principle, they have recently amended the process to allow for a review and revision, and they require mandatory disclosures about the funding and origins of ballot initiatives.

Finally, some say initiatives can be confusing for voters, like the two recent Ohio propositions concerning marijuana, where one ballot proposition essentially canceled out the other. Similarly, Mississippi’s Initiative 42 required marking the ballot in two places for approval but only one for disapproval, resulting in numerous nullified “yes” votes.

Routes to happiness

Despite these flaws, our research shows that direct democracy might improve happiness in two ways.

One is through its psychological effect on voters, making them feel they have a direct impact on policy outcomes. This holds even if they may not like, and thus vote against, a particular proposition. The second is that it may indeed produce policies more consistent with human well being.

The psychological benefits are obvious. By allowing people literally to be the government, just as in ancient Athens, people develop higher levels of political efficacy. In short, they may feel they have some control over their lives. Direct democracy can give people political capital because it offers a means by which citizens may place issues on the ballot for popular vote, giving them an opportunity both to set the agenda and to vote on the outcome.

We think this is important today given America’s declining faith in government. Overall today only 19 percent believe the government is run for all citizens. The same percentage trusts government to mostly do what is right. The poor and working classes are even more alienated….(More)”

Open Data Is Changing the World in Four Ways…

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab Blog: “New repository of case studies documents the impact of open data globally: odimpact.org.

Despite global commitments to and increasing enthusiasm for open data, little is actually known about its use and impact. What kinds of social and economic transformation has open data brought about, and what is its future potential? How—and under what circumstances—has it been most effective? How have open data practitioners mitigated risks and maximized social good?

Even as proponents of open data extol its virtues, the field continues to suffer from a paucity of empiricalevidence. This limits our understanding of open data and its impact.

Over the last few months, The GovLab (@thegovlab), in collaboration with Omidyar Network(@OmidyarNetwork), has worked to address these shortcomings by developing 19 detailed open data case studies from around the world. The case studies have been selected for their sectoral and geographic representativeness. They are built in part from secondary sources (“desk research”), and also from more than60 first-hand interviews with important players and key stakeholders. In a related collaboration withOmidyar Network, Becky Hogge(@barefoot_techie), an independent researcher, has developed an additional six open data case studies, all focused on the United Kingdom. Together, these case studies, seek to provide a more nuanced understanding of the various processes and factors underlying the demand, supply, release, use and impact of open data.

Today, after receiving and integrating comments from dozens of peer reviewers through a unique open process, we are delighted to share an initial batch of 10 case studies, as well three of Hogge’s UK-based stories. These are being made available at a new custom-built repository, Open Data’s Impact (http://odimpact.org), that will eventually house all the case studies, key findings across the studies, and additional resources related to the impact of open data. All this information will be stored in machine-readable HTML and PDF format, and will be searchable by area of impact, sector and region….(More)

Design-Led Innovation in the Public Sector

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Manuel Sosa at INSEAD Knowledge: “When entering a government permit office, virtually everyone would prepare themselves for a certain amount of boredom and confusion. But resignation may well turn to surprise or even shock, if that office is Singapore’s Employment Pass Service Centre (EPSC), where foreign professionals go to receive their visa to work in the city-state. The ambience more closely resembles a luxury hotel lobby than a grim government agency, an impression reinforced by the roaming reception managers who greet arriving applicants, directing them to a waiting area with upholstered chairs and skyline views.

In a new case study, “Designing the Employment Pass Service Centre for the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore”, Prof. Michael Pich and I explore how even public organizations are beginning to use design to find and tap into innovation opportunities where few have thought to look. In the case of Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM), a design-led transformation of a single facility was the starting point of a drastic reconsideration of what a government agency could be.

Efficiency is not enough

Prior to opening the EPSC in July 2009, MOM’s Work Pass Division (WPD) had developed hyper-efficient methods to process work permits for foreign workers, who comprise approximately 40 percent of Singapore’s workforce. In fact, it was generally considered the most efficient department of its kind in the world. After 9/11, a mandatory-fingerprinting policy for white-collar workers was introduced, necessitating a standalone centre. The agency saw this as an opportunity to raise the efficiency bar even further.

Giving careful consideration to every aspect of the permit-granting process, the project team worked with a local vendor to overhaul the existing model. The proposal they ultimately presented to MOM assured almost unheard-of waiting times, as well as a more aesthetically pleasing look and feel….

Most public-sector organisations’ prickly interactions with the public can be explained with the simple fact that they lack competition. Government bodies are generally monopolies dispensing necessities, so on the whole they don’t feel compelled to agonise over their public face.

MOM and the Singapore government had a different idea. Aware that they were competing with other countries for top global talent, they recognised that the permit-granting process, in a very real sense, set the tone for foreign professionals’ entire experience of Singapore. Expats would be unlikely to remember precisely how long it took to get processed, but the quality of the service received would resonate in their minds and affect their impression of the country as a whole.

IDEO typically begins by concentrating on the user experience. In this case, in addition to observing and identifying what goes through the mind of a typical applicant during his or her journey in the existing system, the observation stage included talking to foreigners who were arriving in Singapore about their experience. IDEO discovered that professionals newly arrived in Singapore were embarking on an entirely new chapter of their lives, with all the expected stresses. The last thing they needed was more stress when receiving their permit. Hence, the EPSC entry hall is airy and free of clutter to create a sense of calm. The ESPC provides toys to keep kids entertained while their parents meet with agents and register for work passes. Visitors are always called by name, not number. Intimidating interview rooms were done away with in favour of open cabanas….In its initial customer satisfaction survey in 2010, the EPSC scored an average rating of 5.7 out of 6….(More)”

Big-data analytics: the power of prediction

Curated on January 28, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Willcox in Public Finance: “The ability to anticipate demands will improve planning and financial efficiency, and collecting and analysing data will enable the public sector to look ahead…

Hospitals around the country are well accustomed to huge annual rises in patient numbers as winter demand hits accident and emergency departments. But Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) had to rethink service planning after unprecedented A&E demand during a sunny July 2014, which saw ambulances queuing outside the hospital. The trust now employs computer analysis to help predict and prepare for peaks in demand.

As public sector organisations grapple with ever-tighter savings targets, analysis of a broad range of historical data – big data analytics – offers an opportunity to pre-empt service requirements and so help the public sector manage demand more effectively and target scarce resources better. However, working with data to gain insight and save money is not without its challenges.

At WWL, a partnership with business support provider NHS Shared Business Services – a 50:50 joint venture between the Department of Health and technology firm Sopra Steria – resulted in a project that uses an analysis of historical data and complex algorithms to predict the most likely scenarios. In September, the partners launched HealthIntell, a suite of data reporting tools for A&E, procurement and finance.

The suite includes an application designed to help hospitals better cope with A&E pressures and meet waiting time targets. HealthIntell presents real-time data on attendances at A&E departments to doctors and other decision makers. It can predict demand on a daily and hourly basis, and allows trusts to use their own data to identify peaks and troughs – for example, the likely rise in attendances due to bad weather or major sporting events – to help deploy the right people with the right expertise at the right time….

Rikke Duus, a senior teaching fellow at University College London’s School of Management, agrees strongly that an evidence-based approach to providing services is key to efficiency gains, using data that is already available. Although the use of big data across the public sector is trailing well behind that in the private sector, pressure is mounting for it to catch up. Consumers’ experiences with private sector organisations – in particular the growing personalisation of services – is raising expectations about the sort of public services people expect to receive.

Transparency, openness and integration can benefit consumers, Duus says. “It’s about reinventing the business model to cut costs and improve efficiency. We have to use data to predict and prevent. The public-sector mindset is getting there and the huge repositories of data held across the public sector offer a great starting point, but often they don’t know how to get into it and skills are an issue,” Duus says.

Burgeoning demand for analytics expertise in retail, banking and finance has created a severe skills shortage that is allowing big-data professionals to command an average salary of £55,000 – 31% higher than the average IT position, according to a report published in November 2014 by the Tech Partnership employers’ network and business analytics company SAS. More than three quarters of posts were considered “fairly” or “very” difficult to fill, and the situation is unlikely to have eased in the interim.

Professor Robert Fildes, director of the Lancaster Centre for Forecasting, part of Lancaster University Management School, warns that public sector organisations are at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to competing for such sought-after skills.

The centre has worked on a number of public sector forecasting projects, including a Department of Health initiative to predict pay drift for its non-medical workforce and a scheme commissioned by NHS Blackpool to forecast patient activity.

“The other constraint is data,” Fildes observes. “People talk about data as if it is a uniform value. But the Department of Health doesn’t have any real data on the demand for, say, hip operations. They only have data on the operations they’ve done. The data required for analysis isn’t good enough,” he says….

Despite the challenges, projects are reaping rewards across a variety of public sector organisations. Since 2008, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) has been using software from SAS to prioritise the allocation of fire prevention resources, even pinpointing specific households most at risk of fire. The software brings together around 60 data inputs including demographic information, geographical locations, historical data, land use and deprivation levels to create lifestyle profiles for London households.

Deaths caused by fire in the capital fell by almost 50% between 2010 and 2015, according to the LFB. It attributes much of the reduction to better targeting of around 90,000 home visits the brigade carries out each year, to advise on fire safety….(More)”

Understanding Participatory Governance

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

An analysis of “Participants’ Motives for Participation” by Per Gustafson and Nils Hertting: “Despite the growing body of literature on participatory and collaborative governance, little is known about citizens’ motives for participation in such new governance arrangements. The present article argues that knowledge about these motives is essential for understanding the quality and nature of participatory governance and its potential contribution to the overall political and administrative system.

Survey data were used to explore participants’ motives for participating in a large-scale urban renewal program in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was neighborhood-based, characterized by self-selected and repeated participation, and designed to influence local decisions on the use of public resources.

Three types of motives were identified among the participants: (a) Common good motives concerned improving the neighborhood in general and contributing knowledge and competence. (b) Self-interest motives reflected a desire to improve one’s own political efficacy and to promote the interest of one’s own group or family. (c) Professional competence motives represented a largely apolitical type of motive, often based on a professional role. Different motives were expressed by different categories of participants and were also associated with different perceptions concerning program outcomes.

Further analysis suggested that participatory governance may represent both an opportunity for marginalized groups to empower themselves and an opportunity for more privileged groups to act as local “citizen representatives” and articulate the interests of their neighborhoods. These findings call for a more complex understanding of the role and potential benefits of participatory governance…(More).”

Core Concepts: Computational social science

Curated on January 28, 2016October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Adam Mann at PNAS: “Cell phone tower data predicts which parts of London can expect a spike in crime (1). Google searches for polling place information on the day of an election reveal the consequences of different voter registration laws (2). Mathematical models explain how interactions among financial investors produce better yields, and even how they generate economic bubbles (3).

Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, researchers classified people in San Francisco into “tribal networks,” clustering them according to their behavioral patterns. Student’s, tourists, and businesspeople all travel through the city in various ways, congregating and socializing in different neighborhoods. Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

Where people hail from in the Mexico City area, here indicated by different colors, feeds into a crime-prediction model devised by Alex Pentland and colleagues (6). Image courtesy of Alex Pentland (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA).

These are just a few examples of how a suite of technologies is helping bring sociology, political science, and economics into the digital age. Such social science fields have historically relied on interviews and survey data, as well as censuses and other government databases, to answer important questions about human behavior. These tools often produce results based on individuals—showing, for example, that a wealthy, well-educated, white person is statistically more likely to vote (4)—but struggle to deal with complex situations involving the interactions of many different people.

A growing field called “computational social science” is now using digital tools to analyze the rich and interactive lives we lead. The discipline uses powerful computer simulations of networks, data collected from cell phones and online social networks, and online experiments involving hundreds of thousands of individuals to answer questions that were previously impossible to investigate. Humans are fundamentally social creatures and these new tools and huge datasets are giving social scientists insights into exactly how connections among people create societal trends or heretofore undetected patterns, related to everything from crime to economic fortunes to political persuasions. Although the field provides powerful ways to study the world, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that researchers collect and store the requisite information safely, and that they and others use that information ethically….(More)”