Latin America is fighting corruption by opening up government data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anoush Darabi in apolitical: “Hardly a country in Latin America has been untouched by corruption scandals; this was just one of the more bizarre episodes. In response, using a variety of open online platforms, both city and national governments are working to lift the lid on government activity, finding new ways to tackle corruption with technology….

In Buenos Aires, government is dealing with the problem by making the details of all its public works projects completely transparent. With BA Obras, an online platform, the city maps projects across the city, and lists detailed information on their cost, progress towards completion and the names of the contractors.

“We allocate an enormous amount of money,” said Alvaro Herrero, Under Secretary for Strategic Management and Institutional Quality for the government of Buenos Aires, who helped to build the tool. “We need to be accountable to citizens in terms of what are we doing with that money.”

The portal is designed to be accessible to the average user. Citizens can filter the map to focus on their neighbourhood, revealing information on existing projects with the click of a mouse.

“A journalist called our communications team a couple of weeks ago,” said Herrero. “He said: ‘I want all the information on all the infrastructure projects that the government has, and I want the documentation.’ Our guy’s answer was, ‘OK, I will send you all the information in ten seconds.’ All he had to do was send a link to the platform.”

Since launching in October 2017 with 80 public works projects, the platform now features over 850. It has had 75,000 unique views, the majority coming in the month after launching.

Making people aware and encouraging them to use it is key. “The main challenge is not the platform itself, but getting residents to use it,” said Herrero. “We’re still in that process.”

Brazil’s public spending checkers

Brazil is using big data analysis to scrutinise its spending via its Public Expenditure Observatory (ODP).

The ODP was founded in 2008 to help monitor spending across government departments systematically. In such a large country, spending data is difficult to pull together, and its volume makes it difficult to analyse. The ODP pulls together disparate information from government databases across the country into a central location, puts it into a consistent format and analyses it for inconsistency. Alongside analysis, the ODP also makes the data public.

For example, in 2010 the ODP analysed expenses made on credit cards by federal government officers. They discovered that 11% of all transactions that year were suspicious, requiring further investigation. After the data was published, credit card expenditure dropped by 25%….(More)”.

Do Delivery Units Deliver?: Assessing Government Innovations

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Technical note by Lafuente, Mariano and González, Sebastián prepared as part of the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) agenda on Center of Government: “… analyzes how delivery units (DU) have been adapted by Latin American and Caribbean governments, the degree to which they have contributed to meeting governments’ priority goals between 2007 and 2018, and the lessons learned along the way. The analysis, which draws lessons from 14 governments in the region, shows that the implementation of the DU model has varied as it has been tailored to each country’s context and that, under certain preconditions, has contributed to: (i) improved management using specific tools in contexts where institutional development is low; and (ii) attaining results that have a direct impact on citizens. The objective of this document is to serve as a guide for governments interested in applying similar management models as well as to set out an agenda for the future of DU in the region….(More)“.

Why Collaborations Fail

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Jon Huggett at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “…power is the secret sauce of nonprofit collaborations. Great collaborations between organizations achieve more than either organization could achieve by itself. But when nonprofit collaborations don’t talk about power and address the implications of power imbalances openly, each party runs the risk of stumbling into (or contributing to) an ugly, counterproductive situation. This is true on an organizational level and a personal level, as relationships naturally grow and evolve over time. Sometimes, organizational and personal issues are one and the same. And sometimes the breakdown is irrevocable, and each party regretfully—and usually wrongly—walks away thinking the other was ultimately too uncollaborative.

The true nature of the problem

Over the past year, I have interviewed dozens of collaborators all over the world, at the request of a group of Australian nonprofits whose leaders wanted to better understand what effective collaboration looked like before working closely together. I observed many effective collaborations. I also observed an assortment of dysfunctional ones, where leaders and others privately confided that they felt the other party was uncollaborative. Based on these interviews and my own experience, I’ve identified three major types of power struggles, where one party (either an organization or individual) implies the other is “bad,” “sad,” or “mad.”…

It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, many of the successful collaborations I’ve observed seem to get power right from day one. Specifically, ones that:

1. Set clear goals…

2. Recognize each other’s legitimate needs, which may differ….

3. Set clear roles, showing which parties have more power others, and why…(More)”.

The Participation Gap: Social Status and Political Inequality

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Book by Russell Dalton: “The dilemma of democracy arises from two contrasting trends. More people in the established democracies are participating in civil society activity, contacting government officials, protesting, and using online activism and other creative forms of participation. At the same time, the importance of social status as an influence on political activity is increasing. The democratic principle of the equality of voice is eroding. The politically rich are getting richer-and the politically needy have less voice.

This book assembles an unprecedented set of international public opinion surveys to identify the individual, institutional, and political factors that produce these trends. New forms of activity place greater demands on participants, raising the importance of social status skills and resources. Civil society activity further widens the participation gap. New norms of citizenship shift how people participate. And generational change and new online forms of activism accentuate this process. Effective and representative government requires a participatory citizenry and equal voice, and participation trends are undermining these outcomes.

The Participation Gap both documents the growing participation gap in contemporary democracies and suggests ways that we can better achieve their theoretical ideal of a participatory citizenry and equal voice….(More)”.

How Citizens Can Hack EU Democracy

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Stephen Boucher at Carnegie Europe: “…To connect citizens with the EU’s decisionmaking center, European politicians will need to provide ways to effectively hack this complex system. These democratic hacks need to be visible and accessible, easily and immediately implementable, viable without requiring changes to existing European treaties, and capable of having a traceable impact on policy. Many such devices could be imagined around these principles. Here are three ideas to spur debate.

Hack 1: A Citizens’ Committee for the Future in the European Parliament

The European Parliament has proposed that twenty-seven of the seventy-three seats left vacant by Brexit should be redistributed among the remaining member states. According to one concept, the other forty-six unassigned seats could be used to recruit a contingent of ordinary citizens from around the EU to examine legislation from the long-term perspective of future generations. Such a “Committee for the Future” could be given the power to draft a response to a yearly report on the future produced by the president of the European Parliament, initiate debates on important political themes of their own choosing, make submissions on future-related issues to other committees, and be consulted by members of the European Parliament (MEPs) on longer-term matters.

MEPs could decide to use these forty-six vacant seats to invite this Committee for the Future to sit, at least on a trial basis, with yearly evaluations. This arrangement would have real benefits for EU politics, acting as an antidote to the union’s existential angst and helping the EU think systemically and for the longer term on matters such as artificial intelligence, biodiversity, climate concerns, demography, mobility, and energy.

Hack 2: An EU Participatory Budget

In 1989, the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, decided to cede control of a share of its annual budget for citizens to decide upon. This practice, known as participatory budgets, has since spread globally. As of 2015, over 1,500 instances of participatory budgets have been implemented across five continents. These processes generally have had a positive impact, with people proving that they take public spending matters seriously.

To replicate these experiences at the European level, the complex realities of EU budgeting would require specific features. First, participative spending probably would need to be both local and related to wider EU priorities in order to ensure that citizens see its relevance and its wider European implications. Second, significant resources would need to be allocated to help citizens come up with and promote projects. For instance, the city of Paris has ensured that each suggested project that meets the eligibility requirements has a desk officer within its administration to liaise with the idea’s promoters. It dedicates significant resources to reach out to citizens, in particular in the poorer neighborhoods of Paris, both online and face-to-face. Similar efforts would need to be deployed across Europe. And third, in order to overcome institutional complexities, the European Parliament would need to work with citizens as part of its role in negotiating the budget with the European Council.

Hack 3: An EU Collective Intelligence Forum

Many ideas have been put forward to address popular dissatisfaction with representative democracy by developing new forums such as policy labs, consensus conferences, and stakeholder facilitation groups. Yet many citizens still feel disenchanted with representative democracy, including at the EU level, where they also strongly distrust lobby groups. They need to be involved more purposefully in policy discussions.

A yearly Deliberative Poll could be run on a matter of significance, ahead of key EU summits and possibly around the president of the commission’s State of the Union address. On the model of the first EU-wide Deliberative Poll, Tomorrow’s Europe, this event would bring together in Brussels a random sample of citizens from all twenty-seven EU member states, and enable them to discuss various social, economic, and foreign policy issues affecting the EU and its member states. This concept would have a number of advantages in terms of promoting democratic participation in EU affairs. By inviting a truly representative sample of citizens to deliberate on complex EU matters over a weekend, within the premises of the European Parliament, the European Parliament would be the focus of a high-profile event that would draw media attention. This would be especially beneficial if—unlike Tomorrow’s Europe—the poll was not held at arm’s length by EU policymakers, but with high-level national officials attending to witness good-quality deliberation remolding citizens’ views….(More)”.

The Researcher Passport: Improving Data Access and Confidentiality Protection

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Report by Margaret C. Levenstein, Allison R.B. Tyler, and Johanna Davidson Bleckman: “Research and evidence-building benefit from the increased availability of administrative datasets, linkage across datasets, detailed geospatial data, and other confidential data. Systems and policies for provisioning access to confidential data, however, have not kept pace and indeed restrict and unnecessarily encumber leading-edge science.

One series of roadblocks can be smoothed or removed by establishing a common understanding of what constitutes different levels of data sensitivity and risk as well as minimum researcher criteria for data access within these levels. This report presents the results of a recently completed study of 23 data repositories.

It describes the extant landscape of policies, procedures, practices, and norms for restricted data access and identifies the significant challenges faced by researchers interested in accessing and analyzing restricted use datasets.

It identifies commonalities among these repositories to articulate shared community standards that can be the basis of a community-normed researcher passport: a credential that identifies a trusted researcher to multiple repositories and other data custodians.

Three main developments are recommended.

First, language harmonization: establishing a common set of terms and definitions – that will evolve over time through collaboration within the research community – will allow different repositories to understand and integrate shared standards and technologies into their own processes.

Second: develop a researcher passport, a durable and transferable digital identifier issued by a central, community-recognized data steward. This passport will capture researcher attributes that emerged as common elements of user access requirements across repositories, including training, and verification of those attributes (e.g., academic degrees, institutional affiliation, citizenship status, and country of residence).

Third: data custodians issue visas that grant a passport holder access to particular datasets for a particular project for a specific period of time. Like stamps on a passport, these visas provide a history of a researcher’s access to restricted data. This history is integrated into the researcher’s credential, establishing the researcher’s reputation as a trusted data steward….(More)

Ten Reasons Not to Measure Impact—and What to Do Instead

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Essay by Mary Kay Gugerty & Dean Karlan in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Good impact evaluations—those that answer policy-relevant questions with rigor—have improved development knowledge, policy, and practice. For example, the NGO Living Goods conducted a rigorous evaluation to measure the impact of its community health model based on door-to-door sales and promotions. The evidence of impact was strong: Their model generated a 27-percent reduction in child mortality. This evidence subsequently persuaded policy makers, replication partners, and major funders to support the rapid expansion of Living Goods’ reach to five million people. Meanwhile, rigorous evidence continues to further validate the model and help to make it work even better.

Of course, not all rigorous research offers such quick and rosy results. Consider the many studies required to discover a successful drug and the lengthy process of seeking regulatory approval and adoption by the healthcare system. The same holds true for fighting poverty: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a research and policy nonprofit that promotes impact evaluations for finding solutions to global poverty, has conducted more than 650 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) since its inception in 2002. These studies have sometimes provided evidence about how best to use scarce resources (e.g., give away bed nets for free to fight malaria), as well as how to avoid wasting them (e.g., don’t expand traditional microcredit). But the vast majority of studies did not paint a clear picture that led to immediate policy changes. Developing an evidence base is more like building a mosaic: Each individual piece does not make the picture, but bit by bit a picture becomes clearer and clearer.

How do these investments in evidence pay off? IPA estimated the benefits of its research by looking at its return on investment—the ratio of the benefit from the scale-up of the demonstrated large-scale successes divided by the total costs since IPA’s founding. The ratio was 74x—a huge result. But this is far from a precise measure of impact, since IPA cannot establish what would have happened had IPA never existed. (Yes, IPA recognizes the irony of advocating for RCTs while being unable to subject its own operations to that standard. Yet IPA’s approach is intellectually consistent: Many questions and circumstances do not call for RCTs.)

Even so, a simple thought exercise helps to demonstrate the potential payoff. IPA never works alone—all evaluations and policy engagements are conducted in partnership with academics and implementing organizations, and increasingly with governments. Moving from an idea to the research phase to policy takes multiple steps and actors, often over many years. But even if IPA deserves only 10 percent of the credit for the policy changes behind the benefits calculated above, the ratio of benefits to costs is still 7.4x. That is a solid return on investment.

Despite the demonstrated value of high-quality impact evaluations, a great deal of money and time has been wasted on poorly designed, poorly implemented, and poorly conceived impact evaluations. Perhaps some studies had too small of a sample or paid insufficient attention to establishing causality and quality data, and hence any results should be ignored; others perhaps failed to engage stakeholders appropriately, and as a consequence useful results were never put to use.

The push for more and more impact measurement can not only lead to poor studies and wasted money, but also distract and take resources from collecting data that can actually help improve the performance of an effort. To address these difficulties, we wrote a book, The Goldilocks Challenge, to help guide organizations in designing “right-fit” evidence strategies. The struggle to find the right fit in evidence resembles the predicament that Goldilocks faces in the classic children’s fable. Goldilocks, lost in the forest, finds an empty house with a large number of options: chairs, bowls of porridge, and beds of all sizes. She tries each but finds that most do not suit her: The porridge is too hot or too cold, the bed too hard or too soft—she struggles to find options that are “just right.” Like Goldilocks, the social sector has to navigate many choices and challenges to build monitoring and evaluation systems that fit their needs. Some will push for more and more data; others will not push for enough….(More)”.

Free Speech is a Triangle

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Essay by Jack Balkin: “The vision of free expression that characterized much of the twentieth century is inadequate to protect free expression today.

The twentieth century featured a dyadic or dualist model of speech regulation with two basic kinds of players: territorial governments on the one hand, and speakers on the other. The twenty-first century model is pluralist, with multiple players. It is easiest to think of it as a triangle. On one corner are nation states and the European Union. On the second corner are privately-owned Internet infrastructure companies, including social media companies, search engines, broadband providers, and electronic payment systems. On the third corner are many different kinds of speakers, legacy media, civil society organizations, hackers, and trolls.

Territorial goverments continue to regulate speakers and legacy media through traditional or “old-school” speech regulation. But nation states and the European Union also now employ “new-school” speech regulation that is aimed at Internet infrastructure owners and designed to get these private companies to surveil, censor, and regulate speakers for them. Finally, infrastructure companies like Facebook also regulate and govern speakers through techniques of private governance and surveillance.

The practical ability to speak in the digital world emerges from the struggle for power between these various forces, with old-school, new-school and private regulation directed at speakers, and both nation states and civil society organizations pressuring infrastructure owners to regulate speech.

If the characteristic feature of free speech regulation in our time is a triangle that combines new school speech regulation with private governance, then the best way to protect free speech values today is to combat and compensate for that triangle’s evolving logic of public and private regulation. The first goal is to prevent or ameliorate as much as possible collateral censorship and new forms of digital prior restraint. The second goal is to protect people from new methods of digital surveillance and manipulation—methods that emerged from the rise of large multinational companies that depend on data collection, surveillance, analysis, control, and distribution of personal data.

This essay describes how nation states should and should not regulate the digital infrastructure consistent with the values of freedom of speech and press; it emphasizes that different models of regulation are appropriate for different parts of the digital infrastructure. Some parts of the digital infrastructure are best regulated along the lines of common carriers or places of public accommodation. But governments should not impose First Amendment-style or common carriage obligations on social media and search engines. Rather, governments should require these companies to provide due process toward their end-users. Governments should also treat these companies as information fiduciaries who have duties of good faith and non-manipulation toward their end-users. Governments can implement all of these reforms—properly designed—consistent with constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press….(More)”.

4 reasons why Data Collaboratives are key to addressing migration

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Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young at the Migration Data Portal: “If every era poses its dilemmas, then our current decade will surely be defined by questions over the challenges and opportunities of a surge in migration. The issues in addressing migration safely, humanely, and for the benefit of communities of origin and destination are varied and complex, and today’s public policy practices and tools are not adequate. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but also new, more agile, methods for arriving at solutions.

Data are central to meeting these challenges and to enabling public policy innovation in a variety of ways. Yet, for all of data’s potential to address public challenges, the truth remains that most data generated today are in fact collected by the private sector. These data contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for innovation in how we solve public problems. But because of access restrictions, privacy concerns and often limited data science capacity, their vast potential often goes untapped.

Data Collaboratives offer a way around this limitation.

Data Collaboratives: A new form of Public-Private Partnership for a Data Age

Data Collaboratives are an emerging form of partnership, typically between the private and public sectors, but often also involving civil society groups and the education sector. Now in use across various countries and sectors, from health to agriculture to economic development, they allow for the opening and sharing of information held in the private sector, in the process freeing data silos up to serve public ends.

Although still fledgling, we have begun to see instances of Data Collaboratives implemented toward solving specific challenges within the broad and complex refugee and migrant space. As the examples we describe below suggest (which we examine in more detail Stanford Social Innovation Review), the use of such Collaboratives is geographically dispersed and diffuse; there is an urgent need to pull together a cohesive body of knowledge to more systematically analyze what works, and what doesn’t.

This is something we have started to do at the GovLab. We have analyzed a wide variety of Data Collaborative efforts, across geographies and sectors, with a goal of understanding when and how they are most effective.

The benefits of Data Collaboratives in the migration field

As part of our research, we have identified four main value propositions for the use of Data Collaboratives in addressing different elements of the multi-faceted migration issue. …(More)”,

Open Data Charter Measurement Guide

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Guide by Ana Brandusescu and Danny Lämmerhirt: “We are pleased to announce the launch of our Open Data Charter Measurement Guide. The guide is a collaborative effort of the Charter’s Measurement and Accountability Working Group (MAWG). It analyses the Open Data Charter principles and how they are assessed based on current open government data measurement tools. Governments, civil society, journalists, and researchers may use it to better understand how they can measure open data activities according to the Charter principles.

What can I find in the Measurement Guide?

  • An executive summary for people who want to quickly understand what measurement tools exist and for what principles.
  • An analysis of how each Charter principle is measured, including a comparison of indicators that are currently used to measure each Charter principle and its commitments. This analysis is based on the open data indicators used by the five largest measurement tools — the Web Foundation’s Open Data Barometer, Open Knowledge International’s Global Open Data Index, Open Data Watch’s Open Data Inventory, OECD’s OURdata Index, and the European Open Data Maturity Assessment . For each principle, we also highlight case studies of how Charter adopters have practically implemented the commitments of that principle.
  • Comprehensive indicator tables show how each Charter principle commitment can be measured. This table is especially helpful when used to compare how different indices approach the same commitment, and where gaps exist. Here, you can see an example of the indicator tables for Principle 1.
  • A methodology section that details how the Working Group conducted the analysis of mapping existing measurements indices against Charter commitments.
  • A recommended list of resources for anyone that wants to read more about measurement and policy.

The Measurement Guide is available online in the form of a Gitbook and in a printable PDF version“