Paper by Flyverbom, Mikkel and Madsen, Anders Klinkby and Rasche, Andreas: “This paper conceptualizes how large-scale data and algorithms condition and reshape knowledge production when addressing international development challenges. The concept of governmentality and four dimensions of an analytics of government are proposed as a theoretical framework to examine how big data is constituted as an aspiration to improve the data and knowledge underpinning development efforts. Based on this framework, we argue that big data’s impact on how relevant problems are governed is enabled by (1) new techniques of visualizing development issues, (2) linking aspects of international development agendas to algorithms that synthesize large-scale data, (3) novel ways of rationalizing knowledge claims that underlie development efforts, and (4) shifts in professional and organizational identities of those concerned with producing and processing data for development. Our discussion shows that big data problematizes selected aspects of traditional ways to collect and analyze data for development (e.g. via household surveys). We also demonstrate that using big data analyses to address development challenges raises a number of questions that can deteriorate its impact….(More)
Open Data, Privacy, and Fair Information Principles: Towards a Balancing Framework
Paper by Zuiderveen Borgesius, Frederik J. and van Eechoud, Mireille and Gray, Jonathan: “Open data are held to contribute to a wide variety of social and political goals, including strengthening transparency, public participation and democratic accountability, promoting economic growth and innovation, and enabling greater public sector efficiency and cost savings. However, releasing government data that contain personal information may threaten privacy and related rights and interests. In this paper we ask how these privacy interests can be respected, without unduly hampering benefits from disclosing public sector information. We propose a balancing framework to help public authorities address this question in different contexts. The framework takes into account different levels of privacy risks for different types of data. It also separates decisions about access and re-use, and highlights a range of different disclosure routes. A circumstance catalogue lists factors that might be considered when assessing whether, under which conditions, and how a dataset can be released. While open data remains an important route for the publication of government information, we conclude that it is not the only route, and there must be clear and robust public interest arguments in order to justify the disclosure of personal information as open data….(More)
For people, by people
Geeta Padmanabhan at the Hindu: “Ippodhu, a mobile app, is all about crowd-sourced civic participation for good governance…Last week, a passer-by noticed how the large hoardings outside Vivekanandar Illam, facing Marina Beach, blocked the view of the iconic building. Enraged, he whipped out his smartphone, logged on to Ippodhu and wrote: “How is this allowed? The banners are in the walking space and we can’t see the historic building!” Ippodhu.com carried the story with pictures.
“On Ippodhu, a community information mobile application, the person complaining has the option to do more,” says Peer Mohamed, the team leader of the app/website. “He could have registered a complaint with the police, the Corporation or a relevant NGO, using the ‘Act’ option. This facility makes Ippodhu a valuable tool for beleaguered citizens to complain and puts it above other social media avenues.”
Users can choose between Tamil and English, and read the latest posts just as they would in a Twitter feed. While posting, your location is geo-tagged automatically; if you find that intrusive, you can post anonymously. There is no word limit and one can enlarge the font, write an essay, a note or a rant and post it under one of 15 categories. I decided to check out the app and created an account. My post went live in less than a minute. Then I moved to Ippodhu’s USP. I clicked‘Act’, chose ‘civic issue’ as the category, and posted a note about flooding in my locality. “It’s on Apple and Android as just text now, but expect picture and video features soon when the circulation hits the target,” says Peer. “My team of 12 journalists curates the feeds 24/7, allowing no commercials, ads or abusive language. We want to keep it non-controversial and people-friendly.” It’s crowd-sourced citizen journalism and civic participation for good governance….(More)”
Decoding the Future for National Security
George I. Seffers at Signal: “U.S. intelligence agencies are in the business of predicting the future, but no one has systematically evaluated the accuracy of those predictions—until now. The intelligence community’s cutting-edge research and development agency uses a handful of predictive analytics programs to measure and improve the ability to forecast major events, including political upheavals, disease outbreaks, insider threats and cyber attacks.
The Office for Anticipating Surprise at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is a place where crystal balls come in the form of software, tournaments and throngs of people. The office sponsors eight programs designed to improve predictive analytics, which uses a variety of data to forecast events. The programs all focus on incidents outside of the United States, and the information is anonymized to protect privacy. The programs are in different stages, some having recently ended as others are preparing to award contracts.
But they all have one more thing in common: They use tournaments to advance the state of the predictive analytic arts. “We decided to run a series of forecasting tournaments in which people from around the world generate forecasts about, now, thousands of real-world events,” says Jason Matheny, IARPA’s new director. “All of our programs on predictive analytics do use this tournament style of funding and evaluating research.” The Open Source Indicators program used a crowdsourcing technique in which people across the globe offered their predictions on such events as political uprisings, disease outbreaks and elections.
The data analyzed included social media trends, Web search queries and even cancelled dinner reservations—an indication that people are sick. “The methods applied to this were all automated. They used machine learning to comb through billions of pieces of data to look for that signal, that leading indicator, that an event was about to happen,” Matheny explains. “And they made amazing progress. They were able to predict disease outbreaks weeks earlier than traditional reporting.” The recently completed Aggregative Contingent Estimation (ACE) program also used a crowdsourcing competition in which people predicted events, including whether weapons would be tested, treaties would be signed or armed conflict would break out along certain borders. Volunteers were asked to provide information about their own background and what sources they used. IARPA also tested participants’ cognitive reasoning abilities. Volunteers provided their forecasts every day, and IARPA personnel kept score. Interestingly, they discovered the “deep domain” experts were not the best at predicting events. Instead, people with a certain style of thinking came out the winners. “They read a lot, not just from one source, but from multiple sources that come from different viewpoints. They have different sources of data, and they revise their judgments when presented with new information. They don’t stick to their guns,” Matheny reveals. …
The ACE research also contributed to a recently released book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, according to the IARPA director. The book was co-authored, along with Dan Gardner, by Philip Tetlock, the Annenberg University professor of psychology and management at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a principal investigator for the ACE program. Like ACE, the Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation program uses the forecasting tournament format, but it also requires participants to explain and defend their reasoning. The initiative aims to improve analytic thinking by combining structured reasoning techniques with crowdsourcing.
Meanwhile, the Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (FUSE) program forecasts science and technology breakthroughs….(More)”
Tinned food donations reduce parking fines
Springwise: “The Food For Fines scheme enables Lexington residents to trade cans of food for a reduction on their unpaid parking ticket fine. In 2014, 14 percent of US households had unstable food resources, so it is no wonder that we have seen a number of initiatives that help distribute food among the hungry. In Minneapolis, for example, the police department are distributing healthy food boxes with nutrition advice during their patrol. Now, the Lexington Parking Authority has launched the Food For Finesscheme, during which residents can trade cans of food for a reduction on their unpaid parking ticket fine.
The drive is being run in collaboration with local food bank God’s Pantry. To participate, anyone who has an outstanding or past parking citation from LEXPARK or the Lexington Police Department, can receive a USD 15 reduction in exchange for 10 cans of food….(More)”
Artificial Intelligence Aims to Make Wikipedia Friendlier and Better
One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy (see “The Decline of Wikipedia”).
Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation who helped diagnose that problem, is now leading the project trying to fight it, which relies on algorithms with a sense for human fallibility. His ORES system, for “Objective Revision Evaluation Service,” can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not….
ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Halfaker. “I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they’re making judgments really fast and they’re not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person,” he says. “This enables a tool to say, ‘If you’re going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.’”
..Earlier efforts to make Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers have been stymied by the very community that’s supposed to benefit. Wikipedians rose up in 2013 when Wikimedia made a word-processor-style editing interface the default, forcing the foundation to make it opt-in instead. To this day, the default editor uses a complicated markup language called Wikitext…(More)”
Biases in collective platforms: Wikipedia, GitHub and crowdmapping
Stefana Broadbent at Nesta: “Many of the collaboratively developed knowledge platforms we discussed at our recent conference, At The Roots of Collective Intelligence, suffer from a well-known “contributors’ bias”.
More than 85% of Wikipedia’s entries have been written by men
OpenStack, as with most other Open Source projects, has seen the emergence of a small group of developers who author the majority of the projects. In fact 80% of the commits have been authored by slightly less than 8% of the authors, while 90% of the commits correspond to about 17% of all the authors.
GitHub’s Be Social function allows users to “follow” other participants and receive notification of their activity. The most popular contributors tend therefore to attract other users to the projects they are working on. And Open Street Map has 1.2 million registered users, but less than 15% of them have produced the majority of the 13 million elements of information.
Research by Quattrone, Capra, De Meo (2015) showed that while the content mapped was not different between active and occasional mappers, the social composition of the power users led to a geographical bias, with less affluent areas remaining unmapped more frequently than urban centres.
These well-known biases in crowdsourcing information, also known as the ‘power users’ effect, were discussed by Professor Licia Capra from the Department of Engineering at UCL. Watch the video of her talk here.
In essence, despite the fact that crowd-sourcing platforms are inclusive and open to anyone willing to dedicate the time and effort, there is a process of self-selection. Different factors can explain why there are certain gender and socio economic groups that are drawn to specific activities, but it is clear that there is a progressive reduction of the diversity of contributors over time.
The effect is more extreme where there is the need for continuous contributions. As the Humanitarian Open StreetMap Team project data showed, humanitarian crises attract many users who contribute intensely for a short time, but only very few participants contribute regularly for a long time. Only a small proportion of power users continue editing or adding code for sustained periods. This effect begs two important questions: does the editing job of the active few skew the information made available, and what can be done to avoid this type of concentration?….
The issue of how to attract more volunteers and editors is more complex and is a constant challenge for any crowdsourcing platform. We can look back at when Wikipedia started losing contributors, which coincided with a period of tighter restrictions to the editing process. This suggests that alongside designing the interface in a way to make contributions easy to be created and shared, it is also necessary to design practices and social norms that are immediately and continuously inclusive. – (More)”
How to build customer-focused government
GCN: “What: A report on improving government responsiveness, “A Customer-Centric Upgrade for California Government,” from the state’s Little Hoover Commission, an independent state agency charged with recommending ways to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of state programs…..The Commission believes state agencies can improve the public’s trust and confidence in government by that focusing on the customer. Delivering fast and convenient services when residents apply for benefits, pay utility bills, register their vehicles and view taxes and all from one personalized log-in account, could be a step towards becoming more customer focused.
Among the Commission’s recommendations:
- Create a digital services team to recruit top technologists, engineers and designers into public service for the state.
- Research customer experiences for continuous improvement and use the data to refine how agencies deliver services
- Build multiple service pathways, including mail, email, telephone, fax, in person, online or on a mobile device.
- Move beyond mobile apps with the goal of offering the most options for Californians to conveniently access government services whatever the platform they choose to use (including in-person and on paper).
- Unlock the promise of government data to improve transparency and inform decision making.
- Leverage data resources by ensuring information is available in formats that can be leveraged by others to get information to Californians where they already go to seek it.
- Connect the state’s technology sector with state government leaders and welcome innovators to help address some of the state’s most pressing challenges.
Takeaway: The Commission believes engaging with the public in a way that makes sense in the 21st century will improve each Californian’s interactions with government, which will in turn improve residents’ trust in the state and the efficiency of government processes. Read the full report here.”
Government’s innovative approach to skills sharing
Nicole Blake Johnson at GovLoop: “For both managers and employees, it often seems there aren’t enough hours in the day to tackle every priority project.
But what if there was another option — a way for federal managers to get the skills they need internally and for employees to work on projects they’re interested in but unaware of?
Maybe you’re the employee who is really into data analytics or social media, but that’s not a part of your regular job duties. What if you had the support of your supervisor to help out on an analytics project down the hall or in a field office across the country?
I’m not making up hypothetical scenarios. These types of initiatives are actually taking shape at federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and Commerce departments.
Many agencies are in the pilot phase of rolling out their programs, which are versions of a governmentwide initiative called GovConnect. The initiative was inspired by an EPA program called Skills Marketplace that dates back to 2011.(Read more about GovConnect here.)
“We felt like we had something really promising at EPA, and we wanted to share it with other government agencies,” said Noha Gaber, EPA’s Director of Internal Communications. “So we actually pitched it to OPM and several other agencies, and that ended up becoming GovConnect.”
“The goal of GovConnect is to develop federal workforce skills through cross-agency collaboration and teamwork, to enable more agile response to mission demands without being unnecessarily limited by organizational silos,” said Melissa Kline Lee, who serves as Program Manager of GovConnect at the Office of Personnel Management. “As part of the President’s Management Agenda, the Office of Personnel Management and Environmental Protection Agency are using the GovConnect pilot to help agencies test and scale new approaches to workforce development.”…
Managers post projects or tasks in the online marketplace, which was developed using the agency’s existing SharePoint environment. Projects include clear tasks that employees can accomplish using up to 20 percent of their workweek or less. Projects cannot be open-ended and should not exceed one year.
From there, any employee can view the projects, evaluate what skills or competencies are needed and apply for the position. Managers review the applications and conduct interviews before selecting a candidate. Here are the latest stats for Skills Marketplace as of November 2015:
- Managers posted 358 projects in the marketplace
- Employees submitted 577 applications
- More than 750 people have created profiles for the marketplace
Gaber shared one example involving an employee from the Office of Pesticide Programs and staff from the Office of Environmental Information (OEI), which is the main IT office at EPA. The employee brought to the team technical expertise and skills in geographic information systems to support OEI’s Toxic Release Inventory Program, which tracks data on toxic chemicals being produced by different facilities.
The benefits were twofold: The employee established new connections in a different part of the agency, and his home office benefited from the experiences and knowledge he gleaned while working on the project….(More)
Innovation Behaviours for the Public Service
Alex Roberts at Public Sector Innovation Unit (Australia): “If we want to encourage innovation, then we need to encourage and support the behaviours that will lead to innovative thinking and doing.
As part of the work supporting the Innovation Champions Group, we sought suggestions and advice about the behaviours that people who are doing new things need to demonstrate (or avoid). We also wanted to know what the behaviours were that were needed to be shown (or avoided) by leaders. In response we received a number of suggestions and some suggested writing or research relating to the topic – thank you to everyone who contributed.
So what did we find?
Well, there is research about the characteristics of what makes an innovator – for instance being able to connect fields and ideas that others find unrelated, questioning, and being an intense observer.
There is research that describes the key considerations for organisations seeking to innovate – such as aspiring and setting innovation targets, choosing which ideas to support and scale, the ability to accelerate and extend.
There is research that shows that trust is very important for innovation – particularly to have trust in colleagues that they have genuine care and concern as innovation is about making yourself, your ideas and your position, vulnerable.
There is work by the Canadian Conference Board on the skills you need to contribute to an organisation’s innovation performance – including looking for new ways to create value; rethinking the way things are done; assessing and managing risk; engaging others; listening to valuing diverse opinions and perspectives; and accepting feedback.
And there is extensive literature on innovative organisations, the process of innovation and about ideas and innovators. There’s also much written with advice for government innovators, including one of my favourites, the ‘Paradoxical Commandments of Government’ (“Your ideas will at best make someone else look good and at worst get you ostracized by your co-workers. Share your ideas anyway.”).
These all include some very pertinent points. However if we want to limit ourselves to a small number of behaviours, ones that might reflect the broader spread – gateway behaviours – which do we choose? What are some simple behaviours that people can adopt – the things that they can do, as opposed to descriptors of who or what they are?
The below is the ‘alpha’ version of behaviours for innovators and those supporting or leading innovation, as endorsed by the Innovation Champions Group.
For Innovators – people seeking to do something innovative
- Ask questions – of others and of yourself Innovation is about changing our behaviour, the way we do things, and how we understand problems and solutions. When you question some aspect of the status quo, you open yourself to seeing different options and ways of doing things. Question assumptions, question how and why things are done the way they are, question whether there might be a better way, ask whether there might be a different way of looking at things or whether there might be others who can add insight. Use answers to those questions to build a richer understanding of the current situation, what the problems are and what might be done.
- Try things – experiment a little (or a lot) Innovation is uncertain – if you knew exactly what was going to happen, then it wouldn’t be innovative. To reduce that uncertainty, you have to experiment in some way, to test the idea and how it works. The easiest way to experiment is to make the idea real or tangible in some form, such as a mock-up, a prototype or a rehearsal. This can be done quickly and at low cost, at least initially. As with an experiment, there should be openness to results that may not be what was expected or wanted, including failure, criticism or no reaction.
- (Help) Tell a story – who does this matter to and why? ….
For leaders – people wanting others to do something innovative
- Tell people where innovation is most needed One of the easiest ways to empower others to innovate is to let them know where it is most needed. This can help ensure that ideas that come forward will more likely fit with strategic needs and aims.
- Invite in the outliers – demonstrate that diversity is valued Innovation involves new ways of looking at things, and that requires tapping into different networks and groups and experiences, different ways of working and thinking, and allowing and encouraging constructive debate. One way to foster an environment that values diversity is to actively invite in those with different perspectives, from outside and inside your organisation. Who are the outliers that represent new or different ways of understanding your world? Invite them into the conversation and show that you are open to very different insights…..(More)”