How Big Data Could Open The Financial System For Millions Of People


But that’s changing as the poor start leaving data trails on the Internet and on their cell phones. Now that data can be mined for what it says about someone’s creditworthiness, likeliness to repay, and all that hardcore stuff lenders want to know.

“Every time these individuals make a phone call, send a text, browse the Internet, engage social media networks, or top up their prepaid cards, they deepen the digital footprints they are leaving behind,” says a new report from the Omidyar Network. “These digital footprints are helping to spark a new kind of revolution in lending.”

The report, called “Big Data, Small Credit,” looks at the potential to expand credit access by analyzing mobile and smartphone usage data, utility records, Internet browsing patters and social media behavior….

“In the last few years, a cluster of fast-emerging and innovative firms has begun to use highly predictive technologies and algorithms to interrogate and generate insights from these footprints,” the report says.

“Though these are early days, there is enough to suggest that hundreds of millions of mass-market consumers may not have to remain ‘invisible’ to formal, unsecured credit for much longer.”…(More)

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?


Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”

Using data to improve the environment


Sir Philip Dilley at the UK Environment Agency: “We live in a data rich world. As an engineer I know the power of data in the design and implementation of new urban spaces, iconic buildings and the infrastructure on which we all depend.

Data also is a powerful force in helping us to protect the environment and it can be mined from a variety of sources.

Since the Victorian times naturalists have collected data on the natural world. At the Environment Agency we continue to use local enthusiasts to track rainfall, which we use to feed into and support local projections of flood risk. But the advent of computing power and the Government’s move to open data means we can now all use data in a new and exciting way. The result is a more informed approach to improving the environment and protecting people.

For the last 17 years the Environment Agency has used lasers in planes to map and scan the English landscape from above to help us carry out work such as flood modelling (data now available for everyone to use). The same information has been used to track changing coastal habitats and to help us use the power of nature to adapt to a changing climate.

We’ve used our LIDAR height data together with aerial photography to inform the location and design of major coastal realignment sites. The award-winning Medmerry project, which created 183 hectares of new coastal habitat and protects 348 properties from flooding, was based on this data-led approach.

Those who live near rivers or who use them for sport and recreation know the importance of getting up to date information on river flows. We already provide online services to the public so they can see current warnings and river levels information, but opening our data means everyone can get bespoke information through one postcode or location search.

We are not the only ones seeing the power of environmental data. Data entrepreneurs know how to get accurate and easily accessible information to the public. And that means that we can all make informed choices.FloodAlerts provides a graphical representation of flood warnings and gives localised updates every 15 minutes and Flood Risk Finder app provides flood risk profiles on any property in England, both using data made available for public use by the Environment Agency.

Our bathing waters data directs those who like to swim, surf or paddle with vital information on water quality. The Safer Seas Service app alerts water users when water quality is reduced at beaches and our bathing water data is also used by the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Beach Guide….(More)”

What is Citizensourcing?


Citizensourcing is the crowdsourcing practice applied by governments with the goal of tapping into the collective intelligence of the citizens. Through citizensourcing, governments can collect ideas, suggestions and opinions from their citizens — thereby creating a permanent feedback loop of communication.

Cities are a powerhouse of collective intelligence. Thanks to modern technologies, time has come to unlock the wisdom of the crowd. Tweet: Cities are powerhouses of collective intelligence - time to unlock them. via @citizenlabco http://ctt.ec/7e6Q2+

Yesterday

The current means of engaging citizens in public policy are in place since the 18th century: town hall meetings, in-person visits, phone calls or bureaucratic forms that allowed you to submit an idea. All of those ways of engagement are time-consuming, ineffective and expensive.

Great ideas and valuable feedback get lost, because those forms of engagement take too much effort for both citizens and cities. And next to that, communication happens in private between city government and citizens. Citizens cannot communicate with each other about how they want to improve their city.

Today

Advances in technology have restructured the way societies are organised; we’re living a digital age in which citizens are connected over networks. This creates unseen opportunities for cities to get closer to their citizens and serve them better. In the last years, we’ve seen several cities trying to build a strong online presence on social media channels.

Yet, they have discovered that communicating with their citizens over Twitter and Facebook is far from optimal. Messages get lost in the information overload that characterises those platforms, resulting in a lack of structured communication.

Tomorrow

Imagine that your town hall meetings could be held online… but then 24/7, accessible from every possible device. Citizensourcing on a dedicated platform is an inexpensive way for cities to get valuable input in the form of ideas, feedback and opinions from their citizens.

Whereas only a very small proportion of citizens engage in the time-consuming offline participation, an online platform allows you to multiply your reach by tenfolds. You reach an audience of citizens that you couldn’t reach before, which makes an online platform a well-needed complement for the already existing offline channels in every city.

When citizens can share their ideas in an easy and fun way and get rewarded for their valuable input, that’s when the wisdom of the crowd gets truly unlocked.

The most direct benefit for cities is clear: crowdsourcing new urban ideas drives superior innovations. At least as important as the fact that you offer a new channel for proposals, is that engagement leads to a better understanding of the different needs citizens have…..

There are several early success stories that show the gigantic potential though:

  • The Colombian city Medellín has its own crowdsourcing platform MiMedellín on which citizens share their urban solutions for problems the city faces. It turned out to be a big success: having collected more than 2,300 (!) posted ideas, the government is already developing policies with help from the creativity of citizens.
  • In the Icelandic capital, Reykjavik, the city council succeeded in having their citizensourcing website Better Reykjavik used by over 60% of the citizens. Since Reykjavik implemented their city platform, they have spent €1.9 million on developing more than 200 projectsbased on ideas from citizens..
  • Paris held a participatory budgeting process, called ‘Madame Mayor, I have an idea’, that brought forward wonderful proejcts. To name one, after having received well over 20,000 votes, the city government announced to invest €2 million in vertical garden projects. Other popular ideas included gardens in schools, neighbourhood recycling centers and co-working spaces for students and entrepreneurs….(More)”

Git for Law Revisited


Ari Hershowitz at Linked Legislation: “Laws change. Each time a new U.S. law is enacted, it enters a backdrop of approximately 22 million words of existing law. The new law may strike some text, add some text, and make other adjustments that trickle through the legal corpus. Seeing these changes in context would help lawmakers and the public better understand their impact.

To software engineers, this problem sounds like a perfect application for automated change management. Input an amendment, output tracked changes (see sample below). In the ideal system such changes could be seen as soon as the law is enacted — or even while a bill is being debated. We are now much closer to this ideal.

Changes to 16 U.S.C. 3835 by law 113-79

On Quora, on this blog, and elsewhere, I’ve discussed some of the challenges to using git, an automated change management system, to track laws. The biggest technical challenge has been that most laws, and most amendments to those laws, have not been structured in a computer friendly way. But that is changing.

The Law Revision Counsel (LRC) compiles the U.S. Code, through careful analysis of new laws, identifying the parts of existing law that will be changed (in a process called Classification), and making those changes by hand. The drafting and revision process takes great skill and legal expertise.

So, for example, the LRC makes changes to the current U.S. Code, following the language of a law such as this one:

Sample provision, 113-79 section 2006(a)

LRC attorneys identify the affected provisions of the U.S. Code and then carry out each of these instructions (strike “The Secretary”, insert “During fiscal year”…”). Since 2011, the LRC is using and publishing the final result of this analysis in XML format. One of the consequences of this format change is that it becomes feasible to automatically match the “before” to the “after” text, and produce a redlined version as seen above, showing the changes in context.

To produce this redlined version, I ran xml_diff, an open-source program written by Joshua Tauberer of govtrack.us, who also works with my company, Xcential, on modernization projects for the U.S. House. The results can be remarkably accurate. As a pre-requisite, it is necessary to have a “before” and “after” version in XML format and a small enough stretch of text to make the comparison manageable….(More)”

Simpler, smarter and innovative public services


Northern Future Forum: “How can governments deliver services better and more efficiently? This is one of the key questions governments all over the world are constantly dealing with. In recent years countries have had to cut back government spending at the same time as demand from citizens for more high quality service is increasing. Public institutions, just as companies, must adapt and develop over time. Rapid technological advancements and societal changes have forced the public sector to reform the way it operates and delivers services. The public sector needs to innovate to adapt and advance in the 21st century.
There are a number of reasons why public sector innovation matters (Potts and Kastelle 2010):

  • The size of the public sector in terms of percentages of GDP makes public sectors large components of the macro economy in many countries. Public sector innovation can affect productivity growth by reducing costs of inputs, better organisation and increasing the value of outputs.
  • The need for evolving policy to match evolving economies.
  • The public sector sets the rules of the game for private sector innovation.

As pointed out there is clearly an imperative to innovate. However, public sector innovation can be difficult, as public services deal with complex problems that have contradictory and diverse demands, need to respond quickly, whilst being transparent and accountable. Public sector innovation has a part to play to grow future economies, but also to develop the solutions to the biggest challenges facing most western nations today. These problems won’t be solved without strong leadership from the public sector and governments of the future. These issues are (Pollitt 2013):

  • Demographic change. The effects ageing of the general population will have on public services.
  • Climate change.
  • Economic trajectories, especially the effects of the current period of austerity.
  • Technological developments.
  • Public trust in government.
  • The changing nature of politics, with declining party loyalty, personalisation of politics, new parties, more media coverage etc.

According to the publications of national governments, the OECD, World Bank and the big international management consultancies, these issues will have major long-term impacts and implications (Pollitt 2013).
The essence of this background paper is to look at how governments can use innovation to help grow the economies and solve some of the biggest challenges of this generation and determine what the essentials to make it happen are. Firstly, a difficult economic environment in many countries tends to constrain the capacity of governments to deliver quality public services. Fiscal pressures, demographic changes, and diverse public and private demands all challenge traditional approaches and call for a rethinking of the way governments operate. There is a growing recognition that the complexity of the challenges facing the public sector cannot be solved by public sector institutions working alone, and that innovative solutions to public challenges require improved internal collaboration, as well as the involvement of external stakeholders partnering with public sector organisations (OECD 2015 a).
Willingness to solve some of these problems is not enough. The system that most western countries have created is in many ways a barrier to innovation. For instance, the public sector can lack innovative leaders and champions (Bason 2010, European Commission 2013), the way money is allocated, and reward and incentive systems can often hinder innovative performance (Kohli and Mulgan 2010), there may be limited knowledge of how to apply innovation processes and methods (European Commission 2013), and departmental silos can create significant challenges to ‘joined up’ problem solving (Carstensen and Bason 2012, Queensland Public Service Commission 2009).
There is not an established definition of innovation in the public sector. However some common elements have emerged from national and international research projects. The OECD has identified the following characteristics of public sector innovation:

  • Novelty: Innovations introduce new approaches, relative to the context where they are introduced.
  • Implementation: Innovations must be implemented, not just an idea.
  • Impact: Innovations aim to result in better public results including efficiency, effectiveness, and user or employee satisfaction.

Public sector innovation does not happen in a vacuum: problems need to be identified; ideas translated into projects which can be tested and then scaled up. For this to happen public sector organisations need to identify the processes and structures which can support and accelerate the innovation activity.
 Figure 1. Key components for successful public sector innovation.
Figure 1. Key components for successful public sector innovation.
The barriers to public sector innovation are in many ways the key to its success. In this background paper four key components for public sector innovation success will be discussed and ways to change them from barriers to supporters of innovation. The framework and the policy levers can play a key role in enabling and sustaining the innovation process:
These levers are:

  • Institutions. Innovation is likely to emerge from the interactions between different bodies.
  • Human Resources. Create ability, motivate and give the right opportunities.
  • Funding. Increase flexibility in allocating and managing financial resources.
  • Regulations. Processes need to be shortened and made more efficient.

Realising the potential of innovation means understanding which factors are most effective in creating the conditions for innovation to flourish, and assessing their relative impact on the capacity and performance of public sector organisations….(More). PDF: Simpler, smarter and innovative public services

Anyone can help with crowdsourcing future antibiotics


Springwise: “We’ve seen examples of researchers utilizing crowdsourcing to expand their datasets, such as a free mobile app where users help find data patterns in cancer research by playing games. Now a pop-up home lab is harnessing the power of citizen scientists to find future antibiotics in their backyards.
By developing a small home lab, UK-based Post/Biotics is encouraging anyone, including school children, to help find solutions to the growing antibiotics resistance crisis. Post/Biotics is a citizen’s science platform, which provides the toolkit, knowledge and science network so anyone can support antibiotic development. Participants can test samples of basically anything they find in natural areas, from soil to mushrooms, and if their sample has antibacterial properties, their tool will change color. They can then send results, along with a photo and GPS location to an online database. When the database notices a submission that may be interesting, it alerts researchers, who can then ask for samples. An open-source library of potential antimicrobials is then established, and users simultaneously benefit from learning how to conduct microbiology experiments.
Post/Biotics are using the power of an unlimited amount of citizen scientists to increase the research potential of antibiotic discovery….(More)”

Can Human-Centered Design “Fix” Humanitarian Aid?


Carnegie Council: “Design thinking has emerged as a new tool in humanitarianism. Proponents of the trend believe it can solve the problem long plaguing the aid community: that great ideas fail to be adopted in poor communities because they don’t always take context into account. But are design’s more inclusive methods still a kind of neo-imperialism? Is there a different way?

In this episode of Carnegie Council’s podcast Impact: Where Business and Ethics Meet, host Julia Taylor-Kennedy interviews Debbie Aung Din Taylor,Bruce Nussbaum, Susan Eve Oguya, and Jocelyn Wyatt….

With the rise of social enterprise and corporate social responsibility in the business world, and more efficiency and impact measurements in the non-profit world, one of the trends we’re tracking on the podcast is how global business and global society borrow ideas and methods from one another. This week, we’re looking at an approach that was developed in the business world that’s proving hugely effective in humanitarian work. It’s called human-centered design. And some say it might work even better in the social sector than it did in large corporations. We’ll get back to that later….(More)”

 

Toward a manifesto for the ‘public understanding of big data’


Mike Michael and Deborah Lupton in Public Understanding of Science: “….we sketch a ‘manifesto’ for the ‘public understanding of big data’. On the one hand, this entails such public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology–tinged questions as follows: How, when and where are people exposed to, or do they engage with, big data? Who are regarded as big data’s trustworthy sources, or credible commentators and critics? What are the mechanisms by which big data systems are opened to public scrutiny? On the other hand, big data generate many challenges for public understanding of science and public engagement with science and technology: How do we address publics that are simultaneously the informant, the informed and the information of big data? What counts as understanding of, or engagement with, big data, when big data themselves are multiplying, fluid and recursive? As part of our manifesto, we propose a range of empirical, conceptual and methodological exhortations. We also provide Appendix 1 that outlines three novel methods for addressing some of the issues raised in the article….(More)”

Setting Government Procurement Data Free


Colin Wood in GovTech: “A new website may help drive down government procurement costs and make it easier for startups to sell their goods and services.

The website, called Open Procure, launched earlier this month and is the latest side project of Alan Mond, CEO and co-founder ofMunirent, the inter-jurisdictional equipment sharing service. Mond says the website is an experiment that he hopes will start conversations about procurement and ultimately prove beneficial for government and startups alike.

The website is simply a list of procurement thresholds for local and state government agencies nationwide. As of two weeks after launch, the website features thresholds for 59 agencies, many of which provide links to the original data sources. Users can see that in Boston, for instance, the city’s discretionary procurement threshold is $5,000 and the formal threshold is $25,000. So any startup wanting to sell goods or services to Boston — but avoid a public competitive bid process — can see that they need to keep their cost under $25,000. If they want to avoid competition altogether, they need to keep it under $5,000.

The website also creates a broader discussion around threshold inconsistency. In Philadelphia, for instance, the discretionary threshold is $32,000, compared to Boston’s $5,000, which means Philadelphia can procure without taking multiple bids on considerably larger projects. This is useful information for businesses, Mond pointed out, but also a conversation starter for the public sector. Do these disparities between different states, cities and counties exist for a good reason, or are they decided somewhat arbitrarily and left in the municipal code to rot?…(More)”