Collection

India asks its citizens: please digitise our files

Curated on May 11, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Chambers in FutureGov: “India has asked its citizens to help digitise records so that it can move away from paper processes.

Using its crowdsourcing web site MyGov, the government wrote that “we cannot talk of Digital India and transforming India into a knowledge society if most of the transactions continue to be physical.”

It is “essential” that paper records are converted into machine readable digital versions, the government added, but “the cost of such digitisation is very large and existing budgetary constraints of government and many other organisations do not allow such lavish digitisation effort.”

Consequently, the government is asking citizens for advice on how to build a cheap content management system and tools that will allow it to crowdsource records transcriptions. Citizens would be rewarded for every word that they transcribe through a points system, which can then be recouped into cash prizes.

“The proposed platform will create earning and income generation opportunities for our literate rural and urban citizens, develop digital literacy and IT skills and include them in the making of Digital India,” the government added.

The announcement also noted the importance of privacy, suggesting that documents are split so that no portion gives any clue regarded the overall content of the document.

Instead, two people will be given the same words to transcribe, and the software will compare their statements to ensure accuracy. Only successful transcription will be rewarded with points….(More)”

Data for Development

Curated on May 10, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate: “The data revolution is rapidly transforming every part of society. Elections are managed with biometrics, forests are monitored by satellite imagery, banking has migrated from branch offices to smartphones, and medical x-rays are examined halfway around the world. With a bit of investment and foresight, spelled out in a new report, prepared by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), on Data for Development, the data revolution can drive a sustainable development revolution, and accelerate progress toward ending poverty, promoting social inclusion, and protecting the environment.
The world’s governments will adopt the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at a special United Nations summit on September 25. The occasion will likely be the largest gathering of world leaders in history, as some 170 heads of state and government adopt shared goals that will guide global development efforts until 2030. Of course, goals are easier to adopt than to achieve. So we will need new tools, including new data systems, to turn the SDGs into reality by 2030. In developing these new data systems, governments, businesses, and civil-society groups should promote four distinct purposes.

The first, and most important, is data for service delivery. The data revolution gives governments and businesses new and greatly improved ways to deliver services, fight corruption, cut red tape, and guarantee access in previously isolated places. Information technology is already revolutionizing the delivery of health care, education, governance, infrastructure (for example, prepaid electricity), banking, emergency response, and much more.
The second purpose is data for public management. Officials can now maintain real-time dashboards informing them of the current state of government facilities, transport networks, emergency relief operations, public health surveillance, violent crimes, and much more. Citizen feedback can also improve functioning, such as by crowd-sourcing traffic information from drivers. Geographic information systems (GIS) allow for real-time monitoring across local governments and districts in far-flung regions.
The third purpose is data for accountability of governments and businesses. It is a truism that government bureaucracies cut corners, hide gaps in service delivery, exaggerate performance, or, in the worst cases, simply steal when they can get away with it. Many businesses are no better. The data revolution can help to ensure that verifiable data are accessible to the general public and the intended recipients of public and private services. When services do not arrive on schedule (owing to, say, a bottleneck in construction or corruption in the supply chain), the data system will enable the public to pinpoint problems and hold governments and businesses to account.
Finally, the data revolution should enable the public to know whether or not a global goal or target has actually been achieved. The Millennium Development Goals, which were set in the year 2000, established quantitative targets for the year 2015. But, although we are now in the MDGs’ final year, we still lack precise knowledge of whether certain MDG targets have been achieved, owing to the absence of high-quality, timely data. Some of the most important MDG targets are reported with a lag of several years. The World Bank, for example, has not published detailed poverty data since 2010…..(More)”

More Kirk than Spock

Curated on May 10, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “Behavioural economics has made headway, but still has a long way to go… CAB drivers have good days and bad days, depending on the weather or special events such as a convention. If they were rational, they would work hardest on the good days (to maximise their take) but give up early when fares are few and far between. In fact, they do the opposite. It seems they have a mental target for their desired daily income and they work long enough to reach it, even though that means working longer on slow days and going home early when fares are plentiful.

Human beings are not always logical. We treat windfall gains differently from our monthly salary. We value things that we already own more highly than equivalent things we could easily buy. Our responses to questions depends very much on how the issue is framed: we think surcharges on credit-card payments are unfair, but believe a discount for paying with cash is reasonable.

None of these foibles will be a surprise to, well, humans. But they are not allowed for in many macroeconomic models, which tend to assume people actually come from the planet Vulcan, all coolly maximising their utility at every stage. Over the past 30-40 years, in contrast, behavioural economists have explored the way that individuals actually make decisions, and have concluded that we are more Kirk than Spock.

In his new book “Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics”, Richard Thaler describes his struggles to persuade mainstream economists of all this. The results of behavioural research were at first dismissed as trivial, or the consequences of unrealistic laboratory experiments. It was argued that in the real world, ordinary people might not always think straight but that the professionals who make the big decisions would. Mr Thaler shows neatly, however, that the coaches and owners of professional American football teams, for instance, make consistent errors in the yearly “draft” to pick new players, placing far too much emphasis on their first choices….(More)”

The Quiet Power of Indicators: Measuring Governance, Corruption, and Rule of Law

Curated on May 9, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Sally Engle Merry, Kevin Davis, and Benedict Kingsbury: “Using a power-knowledge framework, this volume critically investigates how major global indicators of legal governance are produced, disseminated and used, and to what effect. Original case studies include Freedom House’s Freedom in the World indicator, the Global Reporting Initiative’s structure for measuring and reporting on corporate social responsibility, the World Justice Project’s measurement of the rule of law, the World Bank’s Doing Business index, the World Bank-supported Worldwide Governance Indicators, the World Bank’s Country Performance Institutional Assessment (CPIA), and the Transparency International Corruption (Perceptions) index. Also examined is the use of performance indicators by the European Union for accession countries and by the US Millennium Challenge Corporation in allocating US aid funds…(More)”

Enhancing Social Accountability Through ICT: Success Factors and Challenges

Curated on May 9, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Wakabi, Wairagala and Grönlund, Åke for the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government 2015: “This paper examines the state of citizen participation in public accountability processes via Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). It draws on three projects that use ICT to report public service delivery failures in Uganda, mainly in the education, public health and the roads sectors. While presenting common factors hampering meaningful use of ICT for citizens’ monitoring of public services and eParticipation in general, the paper studies the factors that enabled successful whistle blowing using toll free calling, blogging, radio talk shows, SMS texting, and e-mailing. The paper displays examples of the positive impacts of whistle-blowing mechanisms and draws up a list of success factors applicable to these projects. It also outlines common challenges and drawbacks to initiatives that use ICT to enable citizen participation in social accountability. The paper provides pathways that could give ICT-for-participation and for-accountability initiatives in countries with characteristics similar to Uganda a good chance of achieving success. While focusing on Uganda, the paper may be of practical value to policy makers, development practitioners and academics in countries with similar socio-economic standings….(More)”

Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change

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

AidData: “Despite considerable time, money and effort expended by donors, international organizations, and NGOs to influence policy change in low and middle income countries, there is a lack of understanding about how they can most effectively influence reform efforts on the ground. In a new report launched in April 2015, AidData draws upon the firsthand experiences and observations of nearly 6,750 policymakers and practitioners in 126 countries to answer these critical questions.

The Marketplace of Ideas for Policy Change report examines the influence of over 100 external assessments of government performance — from cross-country benchmarking exercises and watchlists to country-specific diagnostics and conditional aid programs — on the policymaking process of low and middle income countries. Participants in the survey identified the specific sources of external analysis and advice that were used by key government decision-makers between 2004 and 2013 — and why. Survey respondents also provided detailed information about reform processes within their own countries, such who has advocated for reform in different sectors and who actively obstructed reform efforts….(More)”

Principles for Digital Development

Curated on May 8, 2015August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“The Principles for Digital Development are “living” guidelines that can help development practitioners integrate established best practices into technology-enabled programs. They are written by and for international development donors and their implementing partners, and are freely available for use by all. The Principles are intended to serve as guidance rather than edict, and to be updated and refined over time.

The Principles find their roots in the efforts of individuals, development organizations, and donors alike who have called for a more concerted effort by donors and implementing partners to institutionalize the many hard lessons learned in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in development projects.

Donor organizations have been discussing how to surface and spread best practice in the use of ICT tools as part of development programming for at least a decade. These discussions culminated in the UNICEF Innovation Principles of 2009, the Greentree Principles of 2010, and the UK Design Principles, among others….(More)”

Toward a Research Agenda on Opening Governance

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

Members of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance at Medium: “Society is confronted by a number of increasingly complex problems — inequality, climate change, access to affordable healthcare — that often seem intractable. Existing societal institutions, including government agencies, corporations and NGOs, have repeatedly proven themselves unable to tackle these problems in their current composition. Unsurprisingly, trust in existing institutions is at an all-time low.

At the same time, advances in technology and sciences offer a unique opportunity to redesign and reinvent our institutions. Increased access to data may radically transform how we identify problems and measure progress. Our capacity to connect with citizens could greatly increase the knowledge and expertise available to solve big public problems. We are witnessing, in effect, the birth of a new paradigm of governance — labeled “open governance” — where institutions share and leverage data, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and partner with citizens to make better decisions. All of these developments offer a potential solution to the crisis of trust and legitimacy confronting existing institutions.

But for the promise of open governance, we actually know very little about its true impact, and about the conditions and contingencies required for institutional innovation to really work. Even less is known about the capabilities that institutions must develop in order to be able to take advantage of new technologies and innovative practices. The lack of evidence is holding back positive change. It is limiting our ability to improve people’s lives.

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance seeks to address these shortcomings. Convened and organized by the GovLab, and made possible by a three-year, $5 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Network seeks to build an empirical foundation that will help us understand how democratic institutions are being (and should be) redesigned, and how this in turn influences governance. At its broadest level, the Network seeks to create a new science of institutional innovation.

In what follows, we outline a research agenda and a set of deliverables for the coming years that can deepen our understanding of “open governance.” More specifically the below seeks:

to frame and contextualize the areas of common focus among the members;
to guide the targeted advancement of Network activities;
to catalyze opportunities for further collaboration and knowledge exchange between Network members and those working in the field at large.

A core objective of the Network is to conduct research based on, and that has relevance for, real-world institutions. Any research that is solely undertaken in the lab, far from the actual happenings the Network seeks to influence and study, is deemed to be insufficient. As such, the Network is actively developing flexible, scalable methodologies to help analyze the impact of opening governance. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity and openness that defines the Network, these methodologies are being developed collaboratively with partners from diverse disciplines.

The below seeks to provide a framework for those outside the Network — including those who would not necessarily characterize their research as falling under the banner of opening governance — to undertake empirical, agile research into the redesign and innovation of governance processes and the solving of public problems….(More)”