Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton at Open Government Partnership: “Participatory budgeting (PB) empowers citizens to allocate portions of public budgets in a way that best fits the needs of the people. In turn, proponents expect PB to improve citizens’ lives in important ways, by expanding their participation in politics, providing better public services such as in healthcare, sanitation, or education, and giving them a sense of efficacy. Below we outline several potential outcomes that emerge from PB. Of course, assessing PB’s potential impact is difficult, because reliable data is rare and PB is often one of several... (More >)
Public Brainpower: Civil Society and Natural Resource Management
Book edited by Indra Øverland: ” …examines how civil society, public debate and freedom of speech affect natural resource governance. Drawing on the theories of Robert Dahl, Jurgen Habermas and Robert Putnam, the book introduces the concept of ‘public brainpower’, proposing that good institutions require: fertile public debate involving many and varied contributors to provide a broad base for conceiving new institutions; checks and balances on existing institutions; and the continuous dynamic evolution of institutions as the needs of society change. The book explores the strength of these ideas through case studies of 18 oil and gas-producing countries: Algeria,... (More >)
Open data is shaking up civic life in eastern Europe
Anna Sienicka in the Financial Times: “I often imagine how different the world would look if citizens and social activists were able to fully understand and use data, and new technologies. Unfortunately, the entry point to this world is often inaccessible for most civil society groups… The concept of open data has revolutionised thinking about citizens’ participation in civic life. Since the fall of communism, citizens across central and eastern Europe have been fighting for more transparent and responsive governments, and to improve collaboration between civil society and the public sector. When an institution makes its data public, it... (More >)
Linux Foundation Debuts Community Data License Agreement
Press Release: “The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration, today announced the Community Data License Agreement(CDLA) family of open data agreements. In an era of expansive and often underused data, the CDLA licenses are an effort to define a licensing framework to support collaborative communities built around curating and sharing “open” data. Inspired by the collaborative software development models of open source software, the CDLA licenses are designed to enable individuals and organizations of all types to share data as easily as they currently share open source software code. Soundly drafted licensing models... (More >)
Are you doing what’s needed to get the state to respond to its citizens? Or are you part of the problem?
Vanessa Herringshaw at Making All Voices Count: ” …I’ve been reading over the incredibly rich and practically-orientated research and practice papers already on the Making All Voices Count website, and some of those coming out soon. There’s a huge amount of useful and challenging learning, and I’ll be putting out a couple of papers summarising some important threads later this year. But as different civic tech and accountability actors prepare to come together in Brighton for Making All Voices Count’s final learning event later this week, I’m going to focus here on three things that really stood out and... (More >)
Laboratories for news? Experimenting with journalism hackathons
Jan Lauren Boyles in Journalism: “Journalism hackathons are computationally based events in which participants create news product prototypes. In the ideal case, the gatherings are rooted in local community, enabling a wide set of institutional stakeholders (legacy journalists, hacker journalists, civic hackers, and the general public) to gather in conversation around key civic issues. This study explores how and to what extent journalism hackathons operate as a community-based laboratory for translating open data from practitioners to the public. Surfaced from in-depth interviews with event organizers encompassing nine countries, the findings illustrate that journalism hackathons are most successful when collaboration... (More >)
When Cartography Meets Disaster Relief
Mimi Kirk at CityLab: “Almost three weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, the island is in a grim state. Fewer than 15 percent of residents have power, and much of the island has no clean drinking water. Delivery of food and other necessities, especially to remote areas, has been hampered by a variety of ills, including a lack of cellular service, washed-out roads, additional rainfall, and what analysts and Puerto Ricans say is a slow and insufficient response from the U.S. government. Another issue slowing recovery? Maps—or lack of them. While pre-Maria maps of Puerto Rico were fairly... (More >)
Can Blockchain Bring Voting Online?
Ben Miller at Government Technology: “Hash chains are not a new concept in cryptography. They are, essentially, a long chain of data connected by values called hashes that prove the connection of each part to the next. By stringing all these pieces together and representing them in small values, then, one can represent a large amount of information without doing much. Josh Benaloh, a senior cryptographer for Microsoft Research and director of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, gives the rough analogy of taking a picture of a person, then taking another picture of that person holding the first... (More >)
Paraguay’s transparency alchemists
Story by the Open Contracting Partnership: “….The “Cocido de oro” scandal is seen as part of a well-organized and well-informed youth movement that has sprung up in Paraguay in recent years. An equally dramatic controversyinvolving alleged corruption and unfair staff appointments at one of the country’s top public universities led to the resignation of the Chancellor and other senior staff in September 2015. Mostly high school and university students, they are no longer willing to tolerate the waste and corruption in public spending — a hangover from 35 years of authoritarian rule. They expect their government to be more... (More >)
Cross-sector Collaboration in Data Science for Social Good: Opportunities, Challenges, and Open Questions Raised by Working with Academic Researchers
Paper by presented by Anissa Tanweer and Brittany Fiore-Gartland at the Data Science for Social Good Conference: “Recent years have seen growing support for attempts to solve complex social problems through the use of increasingly available, increasingly combinable, and increasingly computable digital data. Sometimes referred to as “data science for social good” (DSSG), these efforts are not concentrated in the hands of any one sector of society. Rather, we see DSSG emerging as an inherently multi-sector and collaborative phenomenon, with key participants hailing from governments, nonprofit organizations, technology companies, and institutions of higher education. Based on three years of... (More >)
