city & municipal

Workplace innovation in the public sector

Curated on May 11, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Eurofound: “Innovative organisational practices in the workplace, which aim to make best use of human capital, are traditionally associated with the private sector. The nature of the public sector activities makes it more difficult to identify these types of internal innovation in publicly funded organisations.

It is widely thought that public sector organisations are neither dynamic nor creative and are typified by a high degree of inertia. Yet the necessity of innovation ought not to be dismissed. The public sector represents a quarter of total EU employment, and it is of critical importance as a provider and regulator of services. Improving how it performs has a knock-on effect not only for private sector growth but also for citizens’ satisfaction. Ultimately, this improves governance itself.

So how can innovative organisation practices help in dealing with the challenges faced by the public sector? Eurofound, as part of a project on workplace innovation in European companies, carried out case studies of both private and public sector organisations. The findings show a number of interesting practices and processes used.

Employee participation

The case studies from the public sector, some of which are described below, demonstrate the central role of employee participation in the implementation of workplace innovation and its impacts on organisation and employees. They indicate that innovative practices have resulted in enhanced organisational performance and quality of working life.

It is widely thought that changes in the public sector are initiated as a response to government policies. This is often true, but workplace innovation may also be introduced as a result of well-designed initiatives driven by external pressures (such as the need for a more competitive public service) or internal pressures (such as a need to update the skills map to better serve the public).

Case study findings

The state-owned Lithuanian energy company Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba (140 KB PDF) encourages employee participation by providing a structured framework for all employees to propose improvements. This has required a change in managerial approach and has spread a sense of ownership horizontally and vertically in the company. The Polish public transport company Jarosław City Transport (191 KB PDF), when faced with serious financial stability challenges, as well as implementing operational changes, set up ways for employees’ voices to be heard, which enabled a contributory dialogue and strengthened partnerships. Consultation, development of mutual trust, and common involvement ensured an effective combination of top-down and bottom-up initiatives.

The Lithuanian Post, AB Lietuvos Pastas (136 KB PDF) experienced a major organisation transformation in 2010 to improve efficiency and quality of service. Through a programme of ‘Loyalty day’ monthly visits, both top and middle management of the central administration visit any part of the company and work with colleagues in other units. Under budgetary pressure to ‘earn their money’, the Danish Vej and Park Bornholm (142 KB PDF) construction services in roads, parks and forests had to find innovative solutions to deal with a merger and privatisation. Their intervention had the characteristics of workplace partnership with a new set of organisational values set from the bottom up. Self-managing teams are essential for the operation of the company.

The world of education has provided new structures that provide better outcomes for students. The South West University of Bulgaria (214 KB PDF) also operates small self-managing teams responsible for employee scheduling. Weekly round-tables encourage participation in collectively finding solutions, creating a more effective environment in which to respond to the competitive demands of education provision.

In Poland, an initiative by the Pomeranian Library (185 KB PDF) improved employee–management dialogue and communication through increased participation. The initiative is a response to the new frameworks for open access to knowledge for users, with the library mirroring the user experience through its own work practices.

Through new dialogue, government advisory bodies have also developed employee-led improvement. Breaking away from a traditional hierarchy is considered important in achieving a more flexible work organisation. Under considerable pressure, the top-heavy management of the British Geological Survey (89 KB PDF) now operates a flexible matrix that promotes innovative and entrepreneurial ways of working. And in Germany, Niersverband (138 KB PDF), a publicly owned water-management company innovated through training, learning, reflection partnerships and workplace partnerships. New occupational profiles were developed to meet external demands. Based on dialogue concerning workplace experiences and competences, employees acquired new qualifications that allowed the company to be more competitive.

In the Funen Village Museum in Odense, Denmark, (143 KB PDF) innovation came about at the request of staff looking for more flexibility in how they work. Formerly most of their work was maintenance tasks, but now they can now engage more with visitors. Control of schedules has moved to the team rather than being the responsibility of a single manager. As a result, museum employees are now hosts as well as craftspeople. They no longer feel ‘forgotten’ and are happier in their work….(More)”

The report Workplace innovation in European companies provides a full analysis of the case studies.

The 51 case studies and the list of companies (PDF 119 KB) the case studies are based on are available for download.

Regulatory Transformations: An Introduction

Curated on May 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Bettina Lange and Fiona Haines in the book Regulatory Transformations: “Regulation is no longer the prerogative of either states or markets. Increasingly citizens in association with businesses catalyse regulation which marks the rise of a social sphere in regulation. Around the world, in San Francisco, Melbourne, Munich and Mexico City, citizens have sought to transform how and to what end economic transactions are conducted. For instance, ‘carrot mob’ initiatives use positive economic incentives, not provided by a state legal system, but by a collective of civil society actors in order to change business behaviour. In contrast to ‘negative’ consumer boycotts, ‘carrotmob’ events use ‘buycotts’. They harness competition between businesses as the lever for changing how and for what purpose business transactions are conducted. Through new social media ‘carrotmobs’ mobilize groups of citizens to purchase goods at a particular time in a specific shop. The business that promises to spend the greatest percentage of its takings on, for instance, environmental improvements, such as switching to a supplier of renewable energy, will be selected for an organized shopping spree and financially benefit from the extra income it receives from the ‘carrot mob’ event.’Carrot mob’ campaigns chime with other fundamental challenges to conventional economic activity, such as the shared use of consumer goods through citizens collective consumption which questions traditional conceptions of private property….(More; Other Chapters)”

New York City’s Digital Playbook

Curated on May 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: “…The New York City Digital Playbook outlines how we want residents to experience City services and how we will use digital tools to strengthen communities, online and off. The guidance within the Playbook will challenge all of our agencies and service providers to rethink the way they reach New Yorkers.

Our goal is to make our services more accessible, make our operations more transparent, and make it easy and fun to participate in government. In short — we aim to make New York the most user-friendly and innovative city in the world.

We believe that City government should be at New Yorkers’ fingertips and services should be just a swipe or a click away — just like so much of the technology in the rest of our lives. We also know that there are many people in New York City’s incomparable tech and design community who share this goal and want to lend expertise. So, another important goal of the Playbook is to make it easier for civically minded technologists to help us.

How to use the Playbook

This is an internal vision and strategy document that we will immediately begin to implement across government.

You may ask: if it’s an internal document, why share it publicly? A few reasons:

1. Transparency is a central tenet of our work;
2. This is a work in progress that we want to develop and update in the open.
3. We want to know how you think we can make it better.

The Playbook lives on nyc.gov/playbook.

Also, we’re giving a printed “strategy deck,” or set of cards, to staff across the city. Each card has a different principle or strategy printed on the front and key explanations and tips on the back. City leaders will use these cards to plan together and inspire each other when they’re designing new services, or thinking about how to make existing services better….(More)”

Can Crowdsourcing Help Make Life Easier For People With Disabilities?

Curated on May 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sean Captain at FastCompany: “These days GPS technology can get you as close as about 10 feet from your destination, close enough to see it—assuming you can see.

But those last few feet are a chasm for the blind (and GPS accuracy sometimes falls only within about 30 feet).

“Actually finding the bus stop, not the right street, but standing in the right place when the bus comes, is pretty hard,” says Dave Power, president and CEO of the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston. Helen Keller’s alma mater is developing a mobile app that will provide audio directions—contributed by volunteers—so that blind people can get close enough to the stop for the bus driver to notice them.

Perkins’s app is one of 29 projects that recently received a total of $20 million in funding from Google.org’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities awards. Several of the winning initiatives rely on crowdsourced information to help the disabled—be they blind, in a wheelchair, or cognitively impaired. It’s a commonsense approach to tackling big logistical projects in a world full of people who have snippets of downtime during which they might perform bite-size acts of kindness online. But moving these projects from being just clever concepts to extensive services, based on the goodwill of volunteers, is going to be quite a hurdle.

People with limited mobility may have trouble traversing the last few feet between them and a wheelchair ramp, automatic doors, or other accommodations that aren’t easy to find (or may not even exist in some places).Wheelmap, based in Berlin, is trying to help by building online maps of accessible locations. Its website incorporates crowdsourced data. The site lets users type in a city and search for accessible amenities such as restaurants, hotels, and public transit.

Paris-based J’accede (which received 500,000 euros from Google, which is the equivalent of about $565,000) provides similar capabilities in both a website and an app, with a slicker design somewhat resembling TripAdvisor.

Both services have a long way to go. J’accede lists 374 accessible bars/restaurants in its hometown and a modest selection in other French cities like Marseille. “We still have a lot of work to do to cover France,” says J’accede’s president Damien Birambeau in an email. The goal is to go global though, and the site is available in English, German, and Spanish, in addition to French. Likewise, Wheelmap (which got 825,000 euros, or $933,000) performs best in the German capital of Berlin and cities like Hamburg, but is less useful in other places.

These sites face the same challenge as many other volunteer-based, crowdsourced projects: getting a big enough crowd to contribute information to the service. J’accede hopes to make the process easier. In June, it will connect itself with Google Places, so contributors will only need to supply details about accommodations at a site; information like the location’s address and phone number will be pulled in automatically. But both J’accede and Wheelmap recognize that crowdsourcing has its limits. They are now going beyond voluntary contributions, setting up automated systems to scrape information from other databases of accessible locations, such as those maintained by governments.

Wheelmap and J’accede are dwarfed by general-interest crowdsourced sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which offer some information about accessibility, too. For instance, among the many filters they offer users searching for restaurants—such as price range and cuisine type—TripAdvisor and Yelp both offer a Wheelchair Accessible checkbox. Applying that filter to Parisian establishments brings up about 1,000 restaurants on TripAdvisor and 2,800 in Yelp.

So what can Wheelmap and J’accede provide that the big players can’t? Details. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, will face different obstacles than a partially blind person or a person with cognitive disabilities,” says Birambeau. “These different needs and profiles means that we need highly detailed information about the accessibility of public places.”…(More)”

Four Steps to Enhanced Crowdsourcing

Curated on May 3, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kendra L. Smith and Lindsey Collins at Planetizen: “Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has grown to significance through crowdfunding, crowd collaboration, crowd voting, and crowd labor. The idea behind crowdsourcing is simple: decentralize decision-making by utilizing large groups of people to assist with solving problems, generating ideas, funding, generating data, and making decisions. We have seen crowdsourcing used in both the private and public sectors. In a previous article, “Empowered Design, By ‘the Crowd,'” we discuss the significant role crowdsourcing can play in urban planning through citizen engagement.

Crowdsourcing in the public sector represents a more inclusive form of governance that incorporates a multi-stakeholder approach; it goes beyond regular forms of community engagement and allows citizens to participate in decision-making. When citizens help inform decision-making, new opportunities are created for cities—opportunities that are beginning to unfold for planners. However, despite its obvious utility, planners underutilize crowdsourcing. A key reason for its underuse can be attributed to a lack of credibility and accountability in crowdsourcing endeavors.

Crowdsourcing credibility speaks to the capacity to trust a source and discern whether information is, indeed, true. While it can be difficult to know if any information is definitively true, indicators of fact or truth include where information was collected, how information was collected, and how rigorously it was fact-checking or peer reviewed. However, in the digital universe of today, individuals can make a habit of posting inaccurate, salacious, malicious, and flat-out false information. The realities of contemporary media make it more difficult to trust crowdsourced information for decision-making, especially for the public sector, where the use of inaccurate information can impact the lives of many and the trajectory of a city. As a result, there is a need to establish accountability measures to enhance crowdsourcing in urban planning.

Establishing Accountability Measures

For urban planners considering crowdsourcing, establishing a system of accountability measures might seem like more effort than it is worth. However, that is simply not true. Recent evidence has proven traditional community engagement (e.g., town halls, forums, city council meetings) is lower than ever. Current engagement also tends to focus on problems in the community rather than the development of the community. Crowdsourcing offers new opportunities for ongoing and sustainable engagement with the community. It can be simple as well.

The following four methods can be used separately or together (we hope they are used together) to help establish accountability and credibility in the crowdsourcing process:

Agenda setting
Growing a crowdsourcing community
Facilitators/subject matter experts (SME)
Microtasking

In addition to boosting credibility, building a framework of accountability measures can help planners and crowdsourcing communities clearly define their work, engage the community, sustain community engagement, acquire help with tasks, obtain diverse opinions, and become more inclusive….(More)”

mySidewalk

Curated on May 3, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “With vast amounts of data now publicly available, the answers to many questions lie buried in the numbers, and we already saw a publishing platform helping entrepreneurs visualize government data. For an organization as passionate about civic engagement asmySidewalk, this open data is a treasure trove of compelling stories.

mySidewalk was founded by city planners who recognized the potential force for change contained in local communities. Yet without a compelling reason to get involved, many individuals remain ‘interested bystanders’ — something mySidewalk is determined to change.

Using the latest available data, mySidewalk creates dashboards that are customized for every project to help local public officials make the most informed decisions possible. The dashboards present visualizations of a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic datasets, as well as provide local, regional and national comparisons, all of which help to tell the stories behind the numbers.

It is those stories that mySidewalk believes will provide enough motivation for the ‘interested bystanders’ to get involved. As it says on the mySidewalk website, “Share your ideas. Shape your community.” Organizations of all types have taken notice of the power of data, with businesses using geo-tagging to analyze social media content, and real-time information sharing helping humanitarians in crises….(More)”

A Political Economy Framework for the Urban Data Revolution

Curated on April 30, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Report by Ben Edwards, Solomon Greene and G. Thomas Kingsley: “With cities growing rapidly throughout much of the developing world, the global development community increasingly recognizes the need to build the capacities of local leaders to analyze and apply data to improve urban policymaking and service delivery. Civil society leaders, development advocates, and local governments are calling for an “urban data revolution” to accompany the new UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a revolution that would provide city leaders new tools and resources for data-driven governance. The need for improved data and analytic capacity in rapidly growing cities is clear, as is the exponential increase in the volume and types of data available for policymaking. However, the institutional arrangements that will allow city leaders to use data effectively remain incompletely theorized and poorly articulated.

This paper begins to fill that gap with a political economy framework that introduces three new concepts: permission, incentive, and institutionalization. We argue that without addressing the permission constraints and competing incentives that local government officials face in using data, investments in improved data collection at the local level will fail to achieve smarter urban policies. Granting permission and aligning incentives are also necessary to institutionalize data-driven governance at the local level and create a culture of evidence-based decisionmaking that outlives individual political administrations. Lastly, we suggest how the SDGs could support a truly transformative urban data revolution in which city leaders are empowered and incentivized to use data to drive decisionmaking for sustainable development…(More)”

UN-Habitat Urban Data Portal

Curated on April 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Driven Journalism: “UN-Habitat has launched a new web portal featuring a wealth of city data based on its repository of research on urban trends.

Launched during the 25th Governing Council, the Urban Data Portal allows users to explore data from 741 cities in 220 countries, and compare these for 103 indicators such as slum prevalence and city prosperity.

Image: A comparison of share in national urban population and average annual rate of urban population change for San Salvador, El Salvador, and Asuncion, Paraguay.

The urban indicators data available are analyzed, compiled and published by UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory, which supports governments, local authorities and civil society organizations to develop urban indicators, data and statistics.

Leveraging GIS technology, the Observatory collects data by taking aerial photographs, zooming into particular areas, and then sending in survey teams to answer any remaining questions about the area’s urban development.

The Portal also contains data collected by national statistics authorities, via household surveys and censuses, with analysis conducted by leading urbanists in UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities and the Global Report on Human Settlements report series.

For the first time, these datasets are available for use under an open licence agreement, and can be downloaded in straightforward database formats like CSV and JSON….(More)

Mexico City is crowdsourcing its new constitution using Change.org in a democracy experiment

Curated on April 25, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Campoy at Quartz: “Mexico City just launched a massive experiment in digital democracy. It is asking its nearly 9 million residents to help draft a new constitution through social media. The crowdsourcing exercise is unprecedented in Mexico—and pretty much everywhere else.

as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link inSpanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitution drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to GoogleDocs.

The idea, in the words of the mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is to“bestow the constitution project (Spanish) with a democratic,progressive, inclusive, civic and plural character.”

There’s a big catch, however. The constitutional assembly—the body that has the final word on the new city’s basic law—is under no obligation to consider any of the citizen input. And then there are the practical difficulties of collecting and summarizing the myriad of views dispersed throughout one of the world’s largest cities.

That makes Mexico City’s public-consultation experiment a big test for the people’s digital power, one being watched around the world.Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.

Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.
For decades, city officials had fought to get out from under the thumb of the federal government, which had the final word on decisions such as who should be the city’s chief of police. This year, finally, they won a legal change that turns the Distrito Federal (federal district), similar to the US’s District of Columbia, into Ciudad de México (Mexico City), a more autonomous entity, more akin to a state. (Confusingly, it’s just part of the larger urban area also colloquially known as Mexico City, which spills into neighboring states.)

However, trying to retain some control, the Mexican congress decided that only 60% of the delegates to the city’s constitutional assembly would be elected by popular vote. The rest will be assigned by the president, congress, and Mancera, the mayor. Mancera is also the only one who can submit a draft constitution to the assembly.

Mancera’s response was to create a committee of some 30 citizens(Spanish), including politicians, human-rights advocates, journalists,and even a Paralympic gold medalist, to write his draft. He also calledfor the development of mechanisms to gather citizens’ “aspirations,values, and longing for freedom and justice” so they can beincorporated into the final document.

The mechanisms, embedded in an online platform (Spanish) that offersvarious ways to weigh in, were launched at the end of March and willcollect inputs until September 1. The drafting group has until themiddle of that month to file its text with the assembly, which has toapprove the new constitution by the end of January.

An experiment with few precedents

Mexico City didn’t have a lot of examples to draw on, since not a lot ofplaces have experience with crowdsourcing laws. In the US, a few locallawmakers have used Wiki pages and GitHub to draft bills, says MarilynBautista, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who has researched thepractice. Iceland—with a population some 27 times smaller than MexicoCity’s—famously had its citizens contribute to its constitution withinput from social media. The effort failed after the new constitution gotstuck in parliament.

In Mexico City, where many citizens already feel left out, the first bighurdle is to convince them it’s worth participating….

Then comes the task of making sense of the cacophony that will likelyemerge. Some of the input can be very easily organized—the results ofthe survey, for example, are being graphed in real time. But there could be thousands of documents and comments on the Change.org petitionsand the editing platform.

Ideas are grouped into 18 topics, such as direct democracy,transparency and economic rights. They are prioritized based on theamount of support they’ve garnered and how relevant they are, saidBernardo Rivera, an adviser for the city. Drafters get a weekly deliveryof summarized citizen petitions….

An essay about human rights on the PubPub platform.(PubPub)

The most elaborate part of the system is PubPub, an open publishing platform similar to Google Docs, which is based on a project originally developed by MIT’s Media Lab. The drafters are supposed to post essays on how to address constitutional issues, and potentially, the constitution draft itself, once there is one. Only they—or whoever they authorize—will be able to reword the original document.

User comments and edits are recorded on a side panel, with links to the portion of text they refer to. Another screen records every change, so everyone can track which suggestions have made it into the text. Members of the public can also vote comments up or down, or post their own essays….(More).