Book edited by Staci M. Zavattaro and Thomas A. Bryer: “Social media is playing a growing role within public administration, and with it, there is an increasing need to understand the connection between social media research and what actually takes place in government agencies. Most of the existing books on the topic are scholarly in nature, often leaving out the vital theory-practice connection. This book joins theory with practice within the public sector, and explains how the effectiveness of social media can be maximized. The chapters are written by leading practitioners and span topics like how to manage employee use of social media sites, how emergency managers reach the public during a crisis situation, applying public record management methods to social media efforts, how to create a social media brand, how social media can help meet government objectives such as transparency while juggling privacy laws, and much more. For each topic, a collection of practitioner insights regarding the best practices and tools they have discovered are included. Social Media for Government responds to calls within the overall public administration discipline to enhance the theory-practice connection, giving practitioners space to tell academics what is happening in the field in order to encourage further meaningful research into social media use within government….(More)
Cities, Data, and Digital Innovation
Paper by Mark Kleinman: “Developments in digital innovation and the availability of large-scale data sets create opportunities for new economic activities and new ways of delivering city services while raising concerns about privacy. This paper defines the terms Big Data, Open Data, Open Government, and Smart Cities and uses two case studies – London (U.K.) and Toronto – to examine questions about using data to drive economic growth, improve the accountability of government to citizens, and offer more digitally enabled services. The paper notes that London has been one of a handful of cities at the forefront of the Open Data movement and has been successful in developing its high-tech sector, although it has so far been less innovative in the use of “smart city” technology to improve services and lower costs. Toronto has also made efforts to harness data, although it is behind London in promoting Open Data. Moreover, although Toronto has many assets that could contribute to innovation and economic growth, including a growing high-technology sector, world-class universities and research base, and its role as a leading financial centre, it lacks a clear narrative about how these assets could be used to promote the city. The paper draws some general conclusions about the links between data innovation and economic growth, and between open data and open government, as well as ways to use big data and technological innovation to ensure greater efficiency in the provision of city services…(More)“
From waterfall to agile: How a public-sector agency successfully changed its system-development approach to become digital
Martin Lundqvist and PeterBraad Olesen at McKinsey: “Government agencies around the world are under internal and external pressure to become more efficient by incorporating digital technologies and processes into their day-to-day operations. For a lot of public-sector organizations, however, the digital transformation has been bumpy. In many cases, agencies are trying to streamline and automate workflow and processes using antiquated systems-development approaches. Such methods make direct connections between citizens and governments over the Internet more difficult. They also prevent IT organizations from quickly adapting to ever-changing systems requirements or easily combining information from disparate systems. Despite the emergence, over the past decade, of a number of productivity-enhancing technologies, many government institutions continue to cling to old, familiar ways of developing new processes and systems. Nonetheless, a few have been able to change mind-sets internally, shed outdated approaches to improving processes and developing systems, and build new ones. Critically, they have embraced newer techniques, such as agile development, and succeeded in accelerating the digital transformation in core areas of their operations. The Danish Business Authority is one of those organizations.…(More)”
App turns smartphones into seismic monitors
Springwise: “MyShake is an app that enables anyone to contribute to a worldwide seismic network and help people prepare for earthquakes.
The sheer number of smartphones on the planet make them excellent tools for collecting scientific data. We have already seen citizen scientists use their devices to help crowdsource big data about jellyfish and pollution.Now, MyShake is an Android app from Berkeley University, which enables anyone to contribute to a worldwide seismic network and help reduce the effects of earthquakes.
To begin, users download the app and enable it to run silently in the background of their smartphone. The app monitors for movement that fits the vibrational profile of an earthquake and sends anonymous information to a central system whenever relevant. The crowdsourced data enables the system to confirm an impending quake and estimate its origin time, location and magnitude. Then, the app can send warnings to those in the network who are likely to be affected by the earthquake. MyShake makes use of on the fact that the average smartphone can record earthquakes larger than magnitude five and within 10 km.
MyShake is free to download and the team hopes to launch an iPhone version in the future….(More)”
Responsible Data reflection stories
Responsible Data Forum: “Through the various Responsible Data Forum events over the past couple of years, we’ve heard many anecdotes of responsible data challenges faced by people or organizations. These include potentially harmful data management practices, situations where people have experienced gut feelings that there is potential for harm, or workarounds that people have created to avoid those situations.
But we feel that trading in these “war stories” isn’t the most useful way for us to learn from these experiences as acommunity. Instead, we have worked with our communities to build a set of Reflection Stories: a structured, well-researched knowledge base on the unforeseen challenges and (sometimes) negative consequences of usingtechnology and data for social change.
We hope that this can offer opportunities for reflection and learning, as well as helping to develop innovativestrategies for engaging with technology and data in new and responsible ways….
What we learned from the stories
New spaces, new challenges
Moving into new digital spaces is bringing new challenges, and social media is one such space where these challengesare proving very difficult to navigate. This seems to stem from a number of key points:
- organisations with low levels of technical literacy and experience in tech- or data-driven projects, deciding toengage suddenly with a certain tool or technology without realising what this entails. For some, this seems to stemfrom funders being more willing to support ‘innovative’ tech projects.
- organisations wishing to engage more with social media while not being aware of more nuanced understandingsof public/private spaces online, and how different communities engage with social media. (see story #2)
unpredictability and different levels of visibility: due to how privacy settings on Twitter are currently set, visibilityof users can be increased hugely by the actions of others – and once that happens, a user actually has very littleagency to change or reverse that. Sadly, being more visible on, for example, Twitter disproportionately affectswomen and minority groups in a negative way – so while ‘signal boosting’ to raise someone’s profile might be well-meant, the consequences are hard to predict, and almost impossible to reverse manually. (see story #4) - consent: related to the above point, “giving consent” can mean many different things when it comes to digitalspaces, especially if the person in question has little experience or understanding of using the technology inquestion (see stories #4 and #5).
Grey areas of responsible data
In almost all of the cases we looked at, very few decisions were concretely “right” or “wrong”. There are many, manygrey areas here, which need to be addressed on a case by case basis. In some cases, people involved really did thinkthrough their actions, and approached their problems thoughtfully and responsibly – but consequences they had notimagined, happened (see story #8).
Additionally, given the quickly moving nature of the space, challenges can arise that simply would not have beenpossible at the start.
….Despite the very varying settings of the stories collected, the shared mitigation strategies indicate that there areindeed a few key principles that can be kept in mind throughout the development of a new tech- or data-drivenproject.
The most stark of these – and one key aspect that is underlying many of these challenges – is a fundamental lack of technical literacy among advocacy organisations. This affects the way they interact with technical partners, the decisions they make around the project, the level to which they can have meaningful input, and more. Perhaps more crucially, it also affects the ability to know what to ask for help about – ie, to ‘know the unknowns’.
Building an organisation’s technical literacy might not mean being able to answer all technical questions in-house, but rather knowing what to ask and what to expect in an answer, from others. For advocacy organisations who don’t (yet)have this, it becomes all too easy to outsource not just the actual technical work but the contextual decisions too, which should be a collaborative process, benefiting from both sets of expertise.
There seems to be a lot of scope to expand this set of stories both in terms of collecting more from other advocacy organisations, and into other sectors, too. Ultimately, we hope that sharing our collective intelligence around lessonslearned from responsible data challenges faced in projects, will contribute to a greater understanding for all of us….Read all the stories here
Building an Enterprise Government
IBM Center for the Business of Government: “In January 2017, the next administration will begin the hard work of implementing the President’s priorities. Regardless of the specific policies, implementation in many cases will require working across agency boundaries. By taking an “enterprise government” approach – starting in the transition and continuing into the White House – the next administration can deliver on their promises more effectively. In a new report, Jane Fountain lays out recommendations and a framework for how the new administration can build an enterprise government.
Learn more about our Management Roadmap for the Next Administration, which includes highlights of our transition roundtables, blogs on transition topics, and reports that include recommendations and next steps….(Full report: Building An Enterprise Government.pdf)
Political Behavior and Big Data
Special issue of the International Journal of Sociology: “Interest in the use of “big data” in the social sciences is growing dramatically. Yet, adequate methodological research on what constitutes such data, and about their validity, is lacking. Scholars face both opportunities and challenges inherent in this new era of unprecedented quantification of information, including that related to political actions and attitudes. This special issue of the International Journal of Sociology addresses recent uses of “big data,” its multiple meanings, and the potential that this may have in building a stronger understanding of political behavior. We present a working definition of “big data” and summarize the major issues involved in their use. While the papers in this volume deal with various problems – how to integrate “big data” sources with cross-national survey research, the methodological challenges involved in building cross-national longitudinal network data of country memberships in international nongovernmental organizations, methods of detecting and correcting for source selection bias in event data derived from news and other online sources, the challenges and solutions to ex post harmonization of international social survey data – they share a common viewpoint. To make good on the substantive promise of “big data,” scholars need to engage with their inherent methodological problems. At this date, scholars are only beginning to identify and solve them….(More)”
Nudging voters
John Hasnas and Annette Hasnas at the Hill: “A perennial complaint about our democracy is that too large a portion of the electorate is poorly informed about important political issues. This is the problem of the ignorant voter. Especially this year, with its multiplicity of candidates, keeping track of the candidates’ various, and often shifting, policy positions can be extraordinarily difficult. As a result, many of those voting in the presidential primaries will cast their ballots with little idea of where the candidates stand on several important issues.
Isn’t there some way to nudge the voters into making more informed choices? Well, actually, yes, there is. But in making this claim, we use the word nudge advisedly.
Among contemporary policy analysts, “nudge” is a term of art. It refers to creating a context within which people make choices–a “choice architecture”–that makes it more likely that people will select one option rather than another. The typical example of a nudge is a school cafeteria in which fruits and vegetables are placed in front in easy to reach locations and less healthy fare is placed in less visible and harder to reach locations. No one is forced to select the fruit or vegetables, but the choice architecture makes it more likely that people will.
The key feature of a nudge is that it is not coercive. It is an effort to influence choice, not to impose it. People are always able to “opt out” of the nudge. Thus, to nudge is to design the context in which individuals make decisions so as to influence their choice without eliminating any options.
We think that nudging can be employed to help voters make more informed decisions in the voting booth.
Imagine the following scenario. A bipartisan good government group creates a list of the most significant contemporary policy issues. It then invites all candidates to state their positions on the issues. In the current campaign, candidates could be invited to state where they stand on gay marriage, immigration, intervention in Syria, climate change, tax reform, the minimum wage, gun control, income inequality, etc. This information would be collected and fed into the relevant election commission computer. When voters enter the voting booth, they would have the option of electronically recording their policy preferences on the same form that the candidates completed. The computer would display a ranking of the candidates on the basis of how closely their positions aligned with the voter’s. After receiving this information, voters would cast their ballots.
Our proposal is a nudge. It is completely non-coercive. No candidate would be required to complete the list of his or her policy positions, although refusing to do so might be viewed negatively by voters. No voter would be required to utilize the option. All would remain free to simply walk into the booth and cast their vote. Even those who utilize the option remain free to disregard its results and vote for whomever they please. The proposal simply alters the choice architecture of voting to build in access to a source of information about the candidates. Yet, it makes it more likely that citizens will cast more informed votes than they do at present….(More)”
Academics can change the world – if they stop talking only to their peers
Research and creative thinking can change the world. This means that academics have enormous power. But, as academics Asit Biswas and Julian Kirchherr have warned, the overwhelming majority are not shaping today’s public debates.
Instead, their work is largely sitting in academic journals that are read almost exclusively by their peers. Biswas and Kirchherr estimate that an average journal article is “read completely by no more than ten people”. They write:
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities – 82% of articles published in humanities [journals] are not even cited once.
This suggests that a lot of great thinking and many potentially world altering ideas are not getting into the public domain. Why, then, are academics not doing more to share their work with the broader public?
The answer appears to be threefold: a narrow idea of what academics should or shouldn’t do; a lack of incentives from universities or governments; and a lack of training in the art of explaining complex concepts to a lay audience….
Academics need to start playing a more prominent role in society instead of largely remaining observers who write about the world from within ivory towers and publish their findings in journals hidden behind expensive digital paywalls.
Government and university policies need to become more prescriptive in what they expect from academics. Publishing research in peer-reviewed journals is and will remain highly important. But incentives should be added to encourage academics to share their research with the general public.
Doing this sort of work ought to count towards promotions and should yield rewards for both universities and individual academics.
Quality academic research and innovation are crucial. It is equally important, though, to get ideas out into the world beyond academia. It could make a real difference in people’s lives….(More)”
UN statistics commission agrees starting point for SDG oversight
Emma Rumney at Public Finance: “The United Nations Statistical Commission agreed on a set of 230 preliminary indicators to measure progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals published last September.
Wu Hongbo, under secretary general of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, of which the UKSC is part, said “completing the indicator framework is not the end of the story – on the contrary, it is the beginning”.
Hongbo said it was necessary to acknowledge that developing a high-quality set of indicators is a technical and necessarily continuous process, “with refinements and improvements” made as “knowledge improves and new data sources become available”.
One challenge will entail the effective disaggregation of data, by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and more, to allow coverage of specific sectors of the population.
This will be essential if the SDGs are to be implemented successfully.
Hongbo said this will require “an unprecedented amount of data to be produced and analysed”, posing a significant challenge to national statistics systems in both the developing and developed world.
National and regional authorities will also have to develop their own indicators for regional, national and sub-national monitoring, as the global indicators won’t be able to account for different realities, capacities and levels of development.
The statistical commission will now submit its initial global indicator framework to the UN’s Economic and Social Council and General Assembly for adoption….(More)
See also:
- Metadata for the Proposed Global Indicators (as of 4 March 2016)
- Report of the IAEG-SDGs to the 47th session of the UN Statistical Commission (includes SDGs indicators framework)”