Measuring results from open contracting in Ukraine

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathrin Frauscher, Karolis Granickas and Leigh Manasco at the Open Contracting Partnership: “…Ukraine is one of our Showcase and Learning (S&L) projects, and we’ve already shared several stories about the success of Prozorro. Each S&L project tests specific theories of change and use cases. Through the Prozorro platform, Ukraine is revolutionizing procurement by digitizing the process and unlocking data to make it available to citizens, CSOs, government, and business. The theory of change for this S&L project hypothesizes that transparency and the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, promotion and monitoring of the procurement system, is having an impact on value for money, fairness and integrity.

The reform introduced other innovations, including electronic reverse auctions and a centralized procurement database that integrates with private commercial platforms. We co-created a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plan with our project partners to quantify and measure specific progress and impact indicators, while understanding that it is hard to attribute impacts to distinct aspects of the reform. The indicators featured in this blog are particularly related to our theory of change.

We are at a crucial moment in this S&L project as our first round of comprehensive MEL baseline and progress data are coming in. It’s a good time to reflect on key takeaways and challenges that arose when defining and analyzing these data, and how we are using them to inform the Prozorro reform.

Openness can result in more competition and competition saves money.

One of the benefits of open contracting appears to be improving market opportunity and efficiency. Market opportunity focuses on companies being able to compete for business on a level playing field.

From January 2015 to March 2017, the average number of bids per tender lot rose by 15%, demonstrating an increase in competition. Even more notable, the average number of unique suppliers during that same time grew by 45% for each procuring entity, meaning that agencies are now procuring from more and more diverse suppliers….

High levels of responsiveness can benefit procuring entities.

Those agencies that leverage their opportunities to interact with business and citizens throughout the contracting cycle, by actively responding to questions and complaints via the online platform, tend to conduct procurement more smoothly, without high levels of amendments or cancellations, than those who don’t. Tenders with a 100% response rate to feedback have a 66% success rate, while those with no response, show a 52% success rate. The portal provides procuring entities with the resources needed to address questions and problems, saving time, effort and money throughout the contracting process.

People are beginning to trust the public procurement process and data more.

According to a survey of 300 entrepreneurs conducted by USAID, most respondents believed that Prozorro significantly (27%) or partially (53%) reduces corruption. Additionally, fewer respondents who participated in procurement said they faced corruption when using the new platform (29%) compared to the old system (54%). These numbers only tell a part of the story, as we do not know what those outside of the procurement system think, but they are a necessary first step towards measuring increased levels of trust for the public procurement process. We will continue looking at trust as one of the proxies for health of an open procurement process.

Citizens are actively seeking out procurement information.

Google search hits grew from 680 in the month of January 2015 to more than 191,000 in the month of February 2017 (tracking 43 related keywords). This means the environment is shifting to one where people are recognizing that this data has value; that there is interest and demand for it. Implementing open contracting processes is just one part of what we want to see happen. We also strive to nurture an environment where open contracting data is seen as something that is worthwhile and necessary.

The newly established www.dozorro.org monitoring platform also shows promising results…..

The main one is feedback loops. We see that procuring entities’ responsiveness to general questions results in better quality procurement. We also see that only one out of three claims (request to a procuring entity to amend, cancel or modify a tender in question) is successfully resolved. In addition, there are some good individual examples, such as the ones in Dnypro and Kiev. While we do not know if these numbers and instances are sufficient for an effective institutional response mechanism, we do know that business and citizens have to trust redress mechanisms before using them. We will continue trying to identify the ideal level of institutional response to secure trust and develop better metrics to capture that….(More)”.

How Can Digital Technologies Improve Public Services and Governance?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nagy K. Hanna: “This book considers the opportunities and challenges of harnessing digital technologies for improved public services and governance. It focuses on the challenges of applying digital technologies in developing countries, where dramatic results can be realized. It addresses questions like these: How can digital technologies help enhance transparency, accountability, and participation to improve service design and delivery? Where are the opportunities to enhance key areas of governance and public service delivery? What are the promising practices to strengthen supply and mobilize demand for good governance and service delivery? What are the emerging lessons from recent experience? The author explains with real cases how ICT can be deployed to improve public sector efficiency and accountability for resource management; improve access and quality of public services for citizens; enhance transparency and reduce costs of government-business transactions, support entrepreneurship, attract private investment, and reduce the burden of regulation; and enhance the effectiveness of political oversight and policy institutions. This book details the importance of understanding the social, political, and institutional contexts and the policies that might scale up ICT for governance and public service improvement….(More)”

Why are America’s Tax Forms Still so Horribly Designed?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Meg Miller at Co.Design: “If there’s one issue that this divided nation can agree upon, it’s a common hatred of the federal government’s dizzying, overly complicated tax forms. Show me one person who enjoys digging up last year’s return and embarking on a byzantine quest through tax credits, deductions, exemptions, and withholdings, all for a measly return, and I’ll show you a masochist. Surely, simplifying the forms and the process—shifting the burden from individual taxpayers to the tax specialists at the Internal Revenue Service—is a bipartisan issue that we can all get behind.

Alas, it is not.

Since the government already has all of the information that we put on our tax forms, it would be completely feasible for the IRS to hand us prefilled tax forms that we could review and modify if needed—eliminating most of the headache of filing. Countries like Sweden, Finland, and Spain do it already. Yet in the U.S., some moneyed third-party tax preparers oppose government tax preparation—because, according to Propublica, it poses a risk to their business. The nonprofit news organization, which has covered this topic for years, reports that big private tax companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which owns TurboTax, have been lobbying against simplifying the filing process for nearly a decade. (For its part, Intuit denies that these assertions are factually accurate.)

Regardless, all of this means that taxpayers in the U.S. are faced with a choice: file online through a tax preparer service like TurboTax or H&R Block At Home, hire an accountant, or try to navigate this mess on your own.

In fact, each year, consulting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers ranks 189 countries by the complexity of their taxes—and this year, the U.S. came in 35th….

Another indicator of a tax process that doesn’t disproportionately put the onus on the filer is the design of the tax form itself….

For example, Finland’s tax forms are divided neatly into columns and each section is boxed off for clarity. The portions the filer needs to fill are highlighted in a faint baby blue. It’s seven pages of clear language and guiding visual signifiers.

Oh and also—it’s filled out for you, so that all you need to do is review and approve or modify. That’s true user-friendly design.

The true indicator of a simple tax form, then, isn’t the graphic design of the form—this is very clearly a UX problem. The forms I found online varied from clearly legible to impossible to understand, regardless of the country. In that way, tax policy is what would benefit most from a redesign, especially given that the users, in this case, are tax-paying citizens….(More)”

What do we know about when data does/doesn’t influence policy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Powell at Oxfam Blog: “While development actors are now creating more data than ever, examples of impactful use are anecdotal and scant. Put bluntly, despite this supply-side push for more data, we are far from realizing an evidence-based utopia filled with data-driven decisions.

One of the key shortcomings of our work on development data has been failing to develop realistic models for how data can fit into existing institutional policy/program processes. The political economy – institutional structures, individual (dis)incentives, policy constraints – of data use in government and development agencies remains largely unknown to “data people” like me, who work on creating tools and methods for using development data.

We’ve documented several preconditions for getting data to be used, which could be thought of in a cycle:
Josh Powell 1While broadly helpful, I think we also need more specific theories of change (ToCs) to guide data initiatives in different institutional contexts. Borrowing from a host of theories on systems thinking and adaptive learning, I gave this a try with a simple 2×2 model. The x-axis can be thought of as the level of institutional buy-in, while the y-axis reflects whether available data suggest a (reasonably) “clear” policy approach. Different data strategies are likely to be effective in each of these four quadrants.

So what does this look like in the real world? Let’s tackle these with some examples we’ve come across:

Josh Powell 2.…(More).

Intelligence and Information Gathering through Deliberative Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Benjamin Y. Clark, Nicholas Zingale, Joseph Logan in the Journal of Public and NonProfit Affairs: “The hollowing of the state has added new challenges for administrators attending to the competing values of the administration. This article examines how the wisdom of the crowds can be used in a deliberative manner to extract new knowledge through crowdsourcing. We will specifically examine cases of intelligence and information gathering through the analysis of a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria and the use of the crowd in mapping unknown or rapidly changing environments. Through case analysis, this article seeks to understand if crowdsourcing can offer a potential opportunity for public managers to reduce transactions costs while engaging the crowd in a form of deliberative governance to understand and potentially solve public problems. Our approach involves applying the seven lessons of deliberative governance (Scott, Adams, & Wechsler, 2004) to our cases in order to produce five administrative concepts for creating mini-publics for deliberative crowdsourcing….(More)”.

These Refugees Created Their Own Aid Agency Within Their Resettlement Camp

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Thomas at FastCompany: “…“In the refugee camps, we have two things: people and time,” Jackl explained. He and his friends decided that they would organize people to improve the camp. The idea was to solve two problems at once: Give refugees purpose, and make life in the camp better for everyone….

It began with repurposing shipping material. The men noticed that every day, dozens of shipments of food, medicine, and other aid came to their camp. But once the supplies were unloaded, aid workers would throw the pallets away. Meanwhile, people were sleeping in tents that would flood when it rained. So Jackl led an effort to break the pallets down and use the wood to create platforms on which the tents could sit.

Shortly afterwards, they used scrap wood and torn pieces of fabric to build a school, and eventually found a refugee who was a teacher to lead classes. The philosophy was simple and powerful: Use resources that would otherwise go to waste to improve life in their camp. As word spread of their work on social media, Jackl began to receive offers from people who wanted to donate money to his then unofficial cause. “All these people began asking me ‘What can I do? Can I give you money?’ And I’d tell them, ‘Give me materials,’” he said.

“People think that refugees are weak. But they survived war, smugglers, and the camps,” Jackl explains. His mission is to change the refugee image from one of weakness to one of resilience and strength. Core to that is the idea that refugees can help one another instead of relying on aid workers and NGOs, a philosophy that he adopted from an NGO called Jafra that he worked for in Syria…(More)”

Unpaywall

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Announcement by Heather Piwowar and Jason Priem: “Today we’re launching a new tool to help people read research literature, instead of getting stuck behind paywalls. It’s an extension for Chrome and Firefox that links you to free full-text as you browse research articles. Hit a paywall? No problem: click the green tab and read it free!

The extension is called Unpaywall, and it’s powered by an open index of more than ten million legally-uploaded, open access resources. Reports from our pre-release are great: “Unpaywall found a full-text copy 53% of the time,” reports librarian, Lydia Thorne. Fisheries researcher Lachlan Fetterplace used Unpaywall to find “about 60% of the articles I tested. This one is a great tool and I suspect it will only get better.” And indeed it has! We’re now getting full-text on 85% of 2016’s most-covered research papers.

Unpaywall doesn’t just help researchers, but also people outside academia who don’t enjoy the expensive subscription benefits of institutional libraries. “As someone who runs a non-profit organisation in a developing country this extension is GOLD!” says Nikita Shiel-Rolle. It helps journalists, high school students, practitioners, and, crucially, policymakers, who don’t usually have subscription access to the fact-based research literature. There has never been a time when unlocking facts has been so important. So we’re thrilled that more than 10,000 people from 143 countries have installed the extension already.

The best part is it’s powered by fully legal, free, open access uploads by the authors themselves. More and more funders and universities are requiring authors to upload copies of their papers to institutional and subject repositories. This has created a deep resource of legal open access papers, ripe for building upon….

This month is a great time to appreciate this; there’s amazing OA news everywhere you look:

A How-to Book for Wielding Civic Power

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Interview by David Bornstein at the New York Times: “Last year, the RAND Survey Research Group asked 3,037 Americans about their political preferences and found that the factor that best predicted support for Donald Trump wasn’t age, race, gender, income, educational attainment or attitudes toward Muslims or undocumented immigrants. It was whether respondents agreed with the statement “People like me don’t have any say about what the government does.”

A feeling of disenfranchisement, or powerlessness, runs deep in the country — and it’s understandable. For most Americans, wages have been flat for 40 years, while incomes have soared for the superrich. Researchers have found, unsurprisingly, that the preferences of wealthy people have a much bigger influence on policy than those of poor or middle-income people.

“I don’t think people are wrong to feel that the game has been rigged,” says Eric Liu, the author of “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” an engaging and extremely timely book published last week. “But we’re in a period where across the political spectrum — from the libertarian Tea Party right to the Occupy and Black Lives Matter left — people are pushing back and recognizing that the only remedy is to convert this feeling of ‘not having a say’ into ‘demanding a say.’ ”

Liu, who founded Citizen University, a nonprofit citizen participation organization in Seattle, teaches citizens to do just that. He has also traveled the country, searching across the partisan divide for places where citizens are making democracy work better. In his new book, he has assembled stories of citizen action and distilled them into powerful insights and strategies….

Can you explain the three “core laws of power” you outline in the book?

L. No. 1: Power compounds, as does powerlessness. The rich get richer, and people with clout get more clout.

No. 2: Power justifies itself. In a hundred different ways — propaganda, conventional wisdom, just-so stories — people at the top of the hierarchy tell narratives about why it should be so.

If the world stopped with laws No. 1 and 2, we would be stuck in this doom loop that would tip us toward monopoly and tyranny.

What saves us is law No. 3: Power is infinite. I don’t mean we are all equally powerful. I mean simply and quite literally that we can generate power out of thin air. We do that by organizing….(More)”

Ten simple rules for responsible big data research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Zook et al in PLOS Computational Biology: “The use of big data research methods has grown tremendously over the past five years in both academia and industry. As the size and complexity of available datasets has grown, so too have the ethical questions raised by big data research. These questions become increasingly urgent as data and research agendas move well beyond those typical of the computational and natural sciences, to more directly address sensitive aspects of human behavior, interaction, and health. The tools of big data research are increasingly woven into our daily lives, including mining digital medical records for scientific and economic insights, mapping relationships via social media, capturing individuals’ speech and action via sensors, tracking movement across space, shaping police and security policy via “predictive policing,” and much more.

The beneficial possibilities for big data in science and industry are tempered by new challenges facing researchers that often lie outside their training and comfort zone. Social scientists now grapple with data structures and cloud computing, while computer scientists must contend with human subject protocols and institutional review boards (IRBs). While the connection between individual datum and actual human beings can appear quite abstract, the scope, scale, and complexity of many forms of big data creates a rich ecosystem in which human participants and their communities are deeply embedded and susceptible to harm. This complexity challenges any normative set of rules and makes devising universal guidelines difficult.

Nevertheless, the need for direction in responsible big data research is evident, and this article provides a set of “ten simple rules” for addressing the complex ethical issues that will inevitably arise. Modeled on PLOS Computational Biology’s ongoing collection of rules, the recommendations we outline involve more nuance than the words “simple” and “rules” suggest. This nuance is inevitably tied to our paper’s starting premise: all big data research on social, medical, psychological, and economic phenomena engages with human subjects, and researchers have the ethical responsibility to minimize potential harm….

  1. Acknowledge that data are people and can do harm
  2. Recognize that privacy is more than a binary value
  3. Guard against the reidentification of your data
  4. Practice ethical data sharing
  5. Consider the strengths and limitations of your data; big does not automatically mean better
  6. Debate the tough, ethical choices
  7. Develop a code of conduct for your organization, research community, or industry
  8. Design your data and systems for auditability
  9. Engage with the broader consequences of data and analysis practices
  10. Know when to break these rules…(More)”

Big Data and the Well-Being of Women and Girls: Applications on the Social Scientific Frontier

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Bapu Vaitla et al for Data2X: “Conventional forms of data—household surveys, national economic accounts, institutional records, and so on—struggle to capture detailed information on the lives of women and girls. The many forms of big data, from geospatial information to digital transaction logs to records of internet activity, can help close the global gender data gap. This report profiles several big data projects that quantify the economic, social, and health status of women and girls…

This report illustrates the potential of big data in filling the global gender data gap. The rise of big data, however, does not mean that traditional sources of data will become less important. On the contrary, the successful implementation of big data approaches requires investment in proven methods of social scientific research, especially for validation and bias correction of big datasets. More broadly, the invisibility of women and girls in national and international data systems is a political, not solely a technical, problem. In the best case, the current “data revolution” will be reimagined as a step towards better “data governance”: a process through which novel types of information catalyze the creation of new partnerships to advocate for scientific, policy, and political reforms that include women and girls in all spheres of social and economic life….(More)”.