Collection

Helping the public sector get innovative while saving money

Curated on July 8, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission Press Release: “Innovation procurement is a public procurement practice according to which public authorities request businesses to develop or buy innovative products or services that fit these organisations’ specific needs. For example, it could help hospitals use e-health tools allowing doctors to monitor their patients’ condition from a distance; it could allow local authorities to improve traffic management in their region, hence reducing congestion and pollution, improving road safety and using the road network effectively; it could also help cities better manage street lighting to make roads safer and more attractive, while increasing energy efficiency; it could help public administration improve efficiency through the use of cloud solutions. Public Procurement in Europe represents a 19% of GDP in Europe -or around € 2,400 billion a year. Innovation procurement also helps boost smaller, more innovative companies, as it means using public procurement funds to buy products or services also from smaller suppliers who are trying to find new ways of dealing with specific needs.

The European Assistance for Innovation Procurement (EAFIP) initiative will help those in charge of public procurement design and implement processes to access such services.

More specifically:

it will provide them with a toolkit to help in the procedure;
It will offer training: 9 workshops, each dedicated to a different subject area such as health or transport will be organised across Europe, providing participants with good practice approaches and hands-on support. Events will be announced on this page;
It will raise awareness around public procurement of ICT solutions through 3 EU-wide events, where new ideas and initiatives for EU-wide cooperation on public procurement will be discussed….(More)

The Digital Humanities

Curated on July 8, 2015November 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Eileen Gardiner: “The Digital Humanities is a comprehensive introduction and practical guide to how humanists use the digital to conduct research, organize materials, analyze, and publish findings. It summarizes the turn toward the digital that is reinventing every aspect of the humanities among scholars, libraries, publishers, administrators, and the public. Beginning with some definitions and a brief historical survey of the humanities, the book examines how humanists work, what they study, and how humanists and their research have been impacted by the digital and how, in turn, they shape it. It surveys digital humanities tools and their functions, the digital humanists’ environments, and the outcomes and reception of their work. The book pays particular attention to both theoretical underpinnings and practical considerations for embarking on digital humanities projects. It places the digital humanities firmly within the historical traditions of the humanities and in the contexts of current academic and scholarly life.

• Provides an examination of the digital humanities within the context of the traditional humanities dating from the Renaissance • Considers the theoretical and the meta-issues involved in digital humanities research • Provides practical information on available tools, humanities centers, an up-to-date bibliography and glossary, and serious consideration of the issues of academic career advantages and disadvantages plus funding and support for humanities and digital humanities research…(More)”

Creating Health in the 21st Century

Curated on July 8, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Leigh Carroll & Bridget B. Kelly at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “This series has explored what it means to create health, sketching a collective path to new systems that can contribute to health in the 21st century. The overarching message is that we in the health sector need to take community—people’s connections to each other and their places, and everything that arises from these connections—more seriously, and that all types of professionals can do this, whether in hospitals or philanthropies or grocery stores.

If we really take community and connectedness seriously, we will be vigilant about the extent to which we strengthen or disrupt it when developing health interventions. We will value the knowledge and assets that all people have to offer from their unique relationships with people and place. And ultimately, we will commit to building the power that communities have to create health themselves, beyond clinical services and public health interventions.

Unfortunately, the systems we have created, rather than the solutions we now need, often drive current approaches to improving health. We have garnered from contributors to the series a number of principles to guide us as we develop new ways of doing things, as well as concrete steps toward contributing to a culture that values connections and relationships as much as treatments and health campaigns.

GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Acknowledge that our success depends on each other. Creating health will happen among individuals and institutions, so we must set aside ego, trust others, and recognize that our individual knowledge is limited and our progress is collective.
Bring more voices to the table. It is vital to understand the dynamics and relationships within a given community. To do that, we must ensure that all who may be affected by and involved in carrying out an intervention have the opportunity to comfortably share their visions and concerns.
Expand what counts as knowledge. The insights that communities share often play second fiddle to what professionals and academics typically deem valuable. Putting them on a more equal footing influences what to implement, how to allocate resources, and conclusions about whether something “worked.”
Embrace emergence, including unpredictability. We must abandon the linear approach favored by traditional health care and embrace the unpredictable nature of community-driven interventions. We must learn and adapt in real time, and remember that unexpected outcomes are one way an intervention can succeed.
Value what people value. All too often we decide what to aim for and evaluate based on what we can easily measure. It is essential to flip this—to identify goals and then figure out ways of measuring progress toward them. …(More)

Government at a Glance 2015

Curated on July 8, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New report and dataset by the OECD: “Government at a Glance provides readers with a dashboard of key indicators assembled with the goal of contributing to the analysis and international comparison of public sector performance. Indicators on government revenues, expenditures, and employment are provided alongside key output and outcome data in the sectors of education, health and justice. Government at a Glance also includes indicators on key governance and public management issues, such as transparency in governance, regulatory governance, public procurement and the implementation of employment and remuneration reforms since 2008. While measuring government performance has long been recognized as playing an important role in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public administration, following the economic crisis and fiscal tightening in many member countries, good indicators are needed more than ever to help governments make informed decisions regarding tough choices and help restore confidence in government institutions… (More)”

Want to Invest in Your City? Try the New Kickstarter for Municipal Bonds

Curated on July 7, 2015October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kyle Chayka’ in Pacific Standard Magazine:“… The San Francisco-based Neighborly launched in 2013 as a kind of community-based Kickstarter, helping users fund projects close to home. But the site recently pivoted toward presenting a better interface for municipal bonds, highlighting investment opportunities with a slick, Silicon Valley-style interface that makes supporting a local infrastructure project as cool as backing a new model of wrist-wearable computer. It’s bringing innovation to a dusty, though increasingly popular, sector. “You’d be shocked to find how much of the [municipal bonds] process is still being done by email and phone calls,” says Rodrigo Davies, Neighborly’s chief product officer. “This market is really not as modern as you would think.”….Neighborly enters into a gray space between crowdfunding and crowd-investing. The former is what we associate with Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which lump together many small donations into totals that can reach into the millions. In crowdfunding, donations are often made for no guaranteed return. Contrary to what it might suggest, Kickstarter isn’t selling any products; it’s just giving users the opportunity to freely give away money for a legally non-binding promise of a reward, often in the form of a theoretical product. …

Crowd-investing, in contrast, exchanges money for equity in a company, or in Neighborly’s case, a city. Shares of stock or debt purchased through crowd-investing ideally result in profit for the holder, though they can hold as much risk as any vaporware crowdfunding project. But crowd-investing remains largely illegal, despite President Obama’s passing of the JOBS Act in early 2012 that was supposed to clear its path to legitimacy.

The obstacle is that the government’s job is to mitigate the financial risks its citizens can take. That’s why Quire, a start-up that allows fans of popular tech businesses to invest in them themselves, is still only open to “accredited investors,” defined by the government as someone “with income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years” or who has an individual net worth of over $1 million. Legally, a large investment is categorized as too much risk for anyone under that threshold.

That’s exactly the demographic Neighborly is targeting for municipal bonds, which start in minimum denominations of $5,000. “Bond brokers wouldn’t even look at you unless you have $50-100,000 to invest,” Davies says. The new platform, however, doesn’t discriminate. “We’re looking at people who live in the cities where the projects are happening … in their mid-20s to early 40s, who have some money that they want to invest for the future,” he says. “They put it in a bank savings account or invest it in some funds that they don’t necessarily understand. They should be investing to earn better returns, but they’re not necessarily experienced with financial markets. Those people could benefit a ton from investing in their cities.”…(More)

Why Protecting Data Privacy Matters, and When

Curated on July 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Russell at Data Science Central: “It’s official. Public concerns over the privacy of data used in digital approaches have reached an apex. Worried about the safety of digital networks, consumers want to gain control over what they increasingly sense as a loss of power over how their data is used. It’s not hard to wonder why. Look at the extent of coverage on the U.S. Government data breach last month and the sheer growth in the number of attacks against government and others overall. Then there is the increasing coverage on the inherent security flaws built into the internet, through which most of our data flows. The costs of data breaches to individuals, industries, and government are adding up. And users are taking note…..
If you’re not sure whether the data fueling your approach will raise privacy and security flags, consider the following. When it comes to data privacy and security, not all data is going to be of equal concern. Much depends on the level of detail in data content, data type, data structure, volume, and velocity, and indeed how the data itself will be used and released.

First there is the data where security and privacy has always mattered and for which there is already an existing and well galvanized body of law in place. Foremost among these is classified or national security data where data usage is highly regulated and enforced. Other data for which there exists a considerable body of international and national law regulating usage includes:

Proprietary Data – specifically the data that makes up the intellectual capital of individual businesses and gives them their competitive economic advantage over others, including data protected under copyright, patent, or trade secret laws and the sensitive, protected data that companies collect on behalf of its customers;

Infrastructure Data – data from the physical facilities and systems – such as roads, electrical systems, communications services, etc. – that enable local, regional, national, and international economic activity; and

Controlled Technical Data – technical, biological, chemical, and military-related data and research that could be considered of national interest and be under foreign export restrictions….

The second group of data that raises privacy and security concerns is personal data. Commonly referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), it is any data that distinguishes individuals from each other. It is also the data that an increasing number of digital approaches rely on, and the data whose use tends to raise the most public ire. …

A third category of data needing privacy consideration is the data related to good people working in difficult or dangerous places. Activists, journalists, politicians, whistle-blowers, business owners, and others working in contentious areas and conflict zones need secure means to communicate and share data without fear of retribution and personal harm. That there are parts of the world where individuals can be in mortal danger for speaking out is one of the reason that TOR (The Onion Router) has received substantial funding from multiple government and philanthropic groups, even at the high risk of enabling anonymized criminal behavior. Indeed, in the absence of alternate secure networks on which to pass data, many would be in grave danger, including those such as the organizers of the Arab Spring in 2010 as well as dissidents in Syria and elsewhere….(More)”

From Mechanism to Virtue: Evaluating Nudge-Theory

Curated on July 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by van der Heijden, Jeroen and Kosters, Mark: “Ever since Thaler and Sunstein published their influential Nudge, the book and the theory it presents have received great praise and opposition. Nudge-theory, and more particularly, nudging may be considered an additional strategy providing some novel instruments to the already rich governance toolbox. But what is its value? The current debates on Nudge-theory are often highly normative or ideologically driven and pay limited attention to more practical aspects of the theory: Whether and how is nudging evaluable as a theory and a practice? Whether there is solid evidence available of nudge success over other governance interventions? What is to be considered a nudge success at all? What data and evaluative techniques may assist in evaluating nudging beyond individual cases? The current article seeks to explore these questions… (More)”

The regulator of tomorrow

Curated on July 6, 2015October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shrupti Shah, Rachel Brody, & Nick Olson at Deloitte: “…Disruptive trends are making it difficult for regulators to achieve their missions. But what if this changing business landscape presented opportunities to help regulators overcome the challenges they face? In the balance of this report, we explore the potential for regulators to embrace the opportunities presented by technical and business model innovation, the increasingly digital nature of their constituents, and industries’ and consumers’ changing attitudes and behaviors to help them meet key challenges across their two main functions: rulemaking (part one) and oversight and enforcement (part two).

PART ONE: RULEMAKING

Regulators are often the agencies responsible for implementing policy mandates. These mandates can vary from being highly prescriptive to giving regulators great freedom to determine how to implement a policy. In some cases, regulatory agencies have been granted authority by Congress to monitor entire industries, with discretion as to determining how to protect citizens and fair markets.

The business of rulemaking is governed by its own laws and regulations, from the Administrative Procedures Act to approvals of proposed rules by the Office of Management and Budget. All of these processes are designed as a safeguard to protect our citizens while not unduly burdening the regulated businesses or entities.

The process of formal and informal rulemaking is well defined,¹¹incorporates input from citizens and industry, and can take time. Given the challenges previously described, it becomes essential for regulators to think creatively about their rulemaking activities to meet their policy objectives. In this section, we explore several rulemaking opportunities for the regulator of tomorrow:

Rethinking outreach
Sensing
Guidelines and statements versus regulations
Tomorrow’s talent
Consultation 2.0…

PART TWO: OVERSIGHT AND ENFORCEMENT

In addition to rulemaking, regulators oversee compliance with the published rules, taking enforcement action when violations occur. Today’s regulators have access to significant amounts of data. Larger data sets combined with increasingly sophisticated analytical tools and the power of the crowd can help regulators better utilize limited resources and reduce the burden of compliance on citizens and business.

This section will explore several oversight and enforcement opportunities for the regulator of tomorrow:

Correlate to predict
Citizen as regulator
Open data
Collaborative regulating
Retrospective review…(More)”

Understanding the smart city Domain: A Literature Review

Curated on July 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Leonidas G. Anthopoulos: “Smart Cities appeared in literature in late ‘90s and various approaches have been developed so far. Until today, smart city does not describe a city with particular attributes but it is used to describe different cases in urban spaces: web portals that virtualize cities or city guides; knowledge bases that address local needs; agglomerations with Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure that attract business relocation; metropolitan-wide ICT infrastructures that deliver e-services to the citizens; ubiquitous environments; and recently ICT infrastructure for ecological use. Researchers, practicians, businessmen and policy makers consider smart city from different perspectives and most of them agree on a model that measures urban economy, mobility, environment, living, people and governance. On the other hand, ICT and construction industries stress to capitalize smart city and a new market seems to be generated in this domain. This chapter aims to perform a literature review, discover and classify the particular schools of thought, universities and research centres as well as companies that deal with smart city domain and discover alternative approaches, models, architecture and frameworks with this regard….(More)