Governance Level: international

Why We Make Free, Public Information More Accessible

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gabi Fitz and Lisa Brooks in Philantopic: “One of the key roles the nonprofit sector plays in civil society is providing evidence about social problems and their solutions. Given recent changes to policies regarding the sharing of knowledge and evidence by federal agencies, that function is more critical than ever.

Nonprofits deliver more than direct services such as running food banks or providing shelter to people who are homeless. They also collect and share data, evidence, and lessons learned so as to help all of us understand complex and difficult problems.

Those efforts not only serve to illuminate and benchmark our most pressing social problems, they also inform the actions we take, whether at the individual, organizational, community, or policy level. Often, they provide the evidence in “evidence-based” decision making, not to mention the knowledge that social sector organizations and policy makers rely on when shaping their programs and services and individual citizens turn to inform their own engagement.

In January 2017, several U.S. government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture, were ordered by officials of the incoming Trump administration not to share anything that could be construed as controversial through official communication channels such as websites and social media channels. (See “Federal Agencies Told to Halt External Communications.”) Against that backdrop, the nonprofit sector’s interest in generating and sharing evidence has become more urgent than ever…..

Providing access to evidence and lessons learned is always important, but in light of recent events, we believe it’s more necessary than ever. That’s why we are asking for your help in providing — and preserving — access to this critical knowledge base.

Over the next few months, we will be updating and maintaining special collections of non-academic research on the following topics and need lead curators with issue expertise to lend us a hand. IssueLab special collections are an effort to contextualize important segments of the growing evidence base we curate, and are one of the ways we  help visitors to the platform learn about nonprofit organizations and resources that may be useful to their work and knowledge-gathering efforts.

Possible special collection topics to be updated or curated:

→ Access to reproductive services (new)
→ Next steps for ACA
→ Race and policing
→ Immigrant detention and deportation
→ Climate change and extractive mining (new)
→ Veterans affairs
→ Gun violence

If you are a researcher, knowledge broker, or service provider in any of these fields of practice, please consider volunteering as a lead curator. …(More)”

Corporate Social Responsibility for a Data Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst in the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Proprietary data can help improve and save lives, but fully harnessing its potential will require a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data….

We live, as it is now common to point out, in an era of big data. The proliferation of apps, social media, and e-commerce platforms, as well as sensor-rich consumer devices like mobile phones, wearable devices, commercial cameras, and even cars generate zettabytes of data about the environment and about us.

Yet much of the most valuable data resides with the private sector—for example, in the form of click histories, online purchases, sensor data, and call data records. This limits its potential to benefit the public and to turn data into a social asset. Consider how data held by business could help improve policy interventions (such as better urban planning) or resiliency at a time of climate change, or help design better public services to increase food security.

Data responsibility suggests steps that organizations can take to break down these private barriers and foster so-called data collaboratives, or ways to share their proprietary data for the public good. For the private sector, data responsibility represents a new type of corporate social responsibility for the 21st century.

While Nepal’s Ncell belongs to a relatively small group of corporations that have shared their data, there are a few encouraging signs that the practice is gaining momentum. In Jakarta, for example, Twitter exchanged some of its data with researchers who used it to gather and display real-time information about massive floods. The resulting website, PetaJakarta.org, enabled better flood assessment and management processes. And in Senegal, the Data for Development project has brought together leading cellular operators to share anonymous data to identify patterns that could help improve health, agriculture, urban planning, energy, and national statistics.

Examples like this suggest that proprietary data can help improve and save lives. But to fully harness the potential of data, data holders need to fulfill at least three conditions. I call these the “the three pillars of data responsibility.”…

The difficulty of translating insights into results points to some of the larger social, political, and institutional shifts required to achieve the vision of data responsibility in the 21st century. The move from data shielding to data sharing will require that we make a cultural transformation in the way companies, governments, and other organizations treat and act on data. We must incorporate new levels of pro-activeness, and make often-unfamiliar commitments to transparency and accountability.

By way of conclusion, here are four immediate steps—essential but not exhaustive—we can take to move forward:

  1. Data holders should issue a public commitment to data responsibility so that it becomes the default—an expected, standard behavior within organizations.
  2. Organizations should hire data stewards to determine what and when to share, and how to protect and act on data.
  3. We must develop a data responsibility decision tree to assess the value and risk of corporate data along the data lifecycle.
  4. Above all, we need a data responsibility movement; it is time to demand data responsibility to ensure data improves and safeguards people’s lives…(More)”

What Communication Can Contribute to Data Studies: Three Lenses on Communication and Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Schrock at the International Journal of Communication: “We are awash in predictions about our data-driven future. Enthusiasts believe big data imposes new ways of knowing, while critics worry it will enable powerful regimes of institutional control. This debate has been of keen interest to communication scholars. To encourage conceptual clarity, this article draws on communication scholarship to suggest three lenses for data epistemologies. I review the common social scientific perspective of communication as data. A data as discourse lens interrogates the meanings that data carries. Communication around data describes moments where data are constructed. By employing multiple perspectives, we might understand how data operate as a complex structure of dominance….(More)”

Big data may be reinforcing racial bias in the criminal justice system

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laurel Eckhouse at the Washington Post: “Big data has expanded to the criminal justice system. In Los Angeles, police use computerized “predictive policing” to anticipate crimes and allocate officers. In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., machine-learning algorithms are used to set bond amounts. In states across the country, data-driven estimates of the risk of recidivism are being used to set jail sentences.

Advocates say these data-driven tools remove human bias from the system, making it more fair as well as more effective. But even as they have become widespread, we have little information about exactly how they work. Few of the organizations producing them have released the data and algorithms they use to determine risk.

 We need to know more, because it’s clear that such systems face a fundamental problem: The data they rely on are collected by a criminal justice system in which race makes a big difference in the probability of arrest — even for people who behave identically. Inputs derived from biased policing will inevitably make black and Latino defendants look riskier than white defendants to a computer. As a result, data-driven decision-making risks exacerbating, rather than eliminating, racial bias in criminal justice.
Consider a judge tasked with making a decision about bail for two defendants, one black and one white. Our two defendants have behaved in exactly the same way prior to their arrest: They used drugs in the same amount, have committed the same traffic offenses, owned similar homes and took their two children to the same school every morning. But the criminal justice algorithms do not rely on all of a defendant’s prior actions to reach a bail assessment — just those actions for which he or she has been previously arrested and convicted. Because of racial biases in arrest and conviction rates, the black defendant is more likely to have a prior conviction than the white one, despite identical conduct. A risk assessment relying on racially compromised criminal-history data will unfairly rate the black defendant as riskier than the white defendant.

To make matters worse, risk-assessment tools typically evaluate their success in predicting a defendant’s dangerousness on rearrests — not on defendants’ overall behavior after release. If our two defendants return to the same neighborhood and continue their identical lives, the black defendant is more likely to be arrested. Thus, the tool will falsely appear to predict dangerousness effectively, because the entire process is circular: Racial disparities in arrests bias both the predictions and the justification for those predictions.

We know that a black person and a white person are not equally likely to be stopped by police: Evidence on New York’s stop-and-frisk policy, investigatory stops, vehicle searches and drug arrests show that black and Latino civilians are more likely to be stopped, searched and arrested than whites. In 2012, a white attorney spent days trying to get himself arrested in Brooklyn for carrying graffiti stencils and spray paint, a Class B misdemeanor. Even when police saw him tagging the City Hall gateposts, they sped past him, ignoring a crime for which 3,598 people were arrested by the New York Police Department the following year.

Before adopting risk-assessment tools in the judicial decision-making process, jurisdictions should demand that any tool being implemented undergo a thorough and independent peer-review process. We need more transparencyand better data to learn whether these risk assessments have disparate impacts on defendants of different races. Foundations and organizations developing risk-assessment tools should be willing to release the data used to build these tools to researchers to evaluate their techniques for internal racial bias and problems of statistical interpretation. Even better, with multiple sources of data, researchers could identify biases in data generated by the criminal justice system before the data is used to make decisions about liberty. Unfortunately, producers of risk-assessment tools — even nonprofit organizations — have not voluntarily released anonymized data and computational details to other researchers, as is now standard in quantitative social science research….(More)”.

Managing for Social Impact: Innovations in Responsible Enterprise

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Mary J, Cronin and , Tiziana C. Dearing: “This book presents innovative strategies for sustainable, socially responsible enterprise management from leading thinkers in the fields of corporate citizenship, nonprofit management, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, community-based economic development and urban design. The book’s integration of research and practitioner perspectives with focused best practice examples offers an in-depth, balanced analysis, providing new insights into the social issues that are most relevant to organizational stakeholders. This integrated focus on sustainable social innovation differentiates the book from academic research monographs on stakeholder theory and practitioner guides to managing traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs.

Managing for Social Impact features 15 contributed chapters written by thought leaders, industry analysts, and managers of global and local organizations who are engaged with innovative models of sustainable social impact. The editors also provide a substantive introductory chapter describing a new strategic framework for enhancing the Return on Social Innovation (ROSI) through four pillars of social change: Open Circles, Focused Purpose Sharing, Mutuality of Success, and a Persistent Change Perspective….(More)”.

Citizen Empowerment and Innovation in the Data-Rich City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by C. Certomà, M. Dyer, L. Pocatilu and F. Rizzi: “… analyzes the ongoing transformation in the “smart city” paradigm and explores the possibilities that technological innovations offer for the effective involvement of ordinary citizens in collective knowledge production and decision-making processes within the context of urban planning and management. To so, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach, with contributions from a range of experts including city managers, public policy makers, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) specialists, and researchers. The first two parts of the book focus on the generation and use of data by citizens, with or without institutional support, and the professional management of data in city governance, highlighting the social connectivity and livability aspects essential to vibrant and healthy urban environments. In turn, the third part presents inspiring case studies that illustrate how data-driven solutions can empower people and improve urban environments, including enhanced sustainability. The book will appeal to all those who are interested in the required transformation in the planning, management, and operations of data-rich cities and the ways in which such cities can employ the latest technologies to use data efficiently, promoting data access, data sharing, and interoperability….(More)”.

Toward a User-Centered Social Sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tris Lumley at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “Over the last three years, a number of trends have crystallized that I believe herald the promise of a new phase—perhaps even a new paradigm—for the social sector. I want to explore three of the most exciting, and sketch out where I believe they might take us and why we’d all do well to get involved.

  • The rise of feedback
  • New forms of collaboration
  • Disruption through technology

Taken individually, these three themes are hugely significant in their potential impact on the work of nonprofits and those that invest in them. But viewed together, as interwoven threads, I believe they have the potential to transform both how we work and the underlying fundamental incentives and structure of the social sector.

The rise of feedback

The nonprofit sector is built on a deep and rich history of community engagement. Yet, in a funding market that incentivizes accountability to funders, this strong tradition of listening, engagement, and ownership by primary constituents—the people and communities nonprofits exist to serve—has sometimes faded. Opportunities for funding can drive strategies. Practitioner experience and research evidence can shape program designs. Engagement with service users can become tokenistic, or shallow….

In recognition of this growing momentum, Keystone Accountability and New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) published a paper in 2016 to explore the relationship between impact measurement and user voice. It is our shared belief that many of the recent criticisms of the impact movement—such as impact reporting being used primarily for fundraising rather than improving programs—would be addressed if impact evidence and user voice were seen as two sides of the same coin, and we more routinely sought to synthesize our understanding of nonprofits’ programs from both aspects at once…

New forms of collaboration

As recent critiques of collective impact have pointed out, the social sector has a long history of collaboration. Yet it has not always been the default operating model of nonprofits or their funders. The fragmented nature of the social sector today exposes an urgent imperative for greater focus on collaboration….

Yet the need for greater collaboration and new forms to incentivize and enable it is increasing. Deepening austerity policies, the shrinking of the state in many countries, and the sheer scale of the social issues we face have driven the “demand” side of collaboration. The collective impact movement has certainly been one driver of momentum on the “supply” side, and a number of other forms of collaboration are emerging.

The Young People’s Foundation model, developed in the UK by the John Lyons Charity, is one response to deepening cuts in nonprofit funding. Young People’s Foundations are new organizations that serve three purposes for nonprofits working with young people in the local area—creating a network, leading on collaborative funding bids and contracting processes, and sharing assets across the network.

Elsewhere, philanthropic donors and foundations are increasingly exploring collaboration in practical terms, through pooled grant funds that provide individual donors unrivalled leverage, and that allow groups of funders to benefit from each other’s strengths through coordination and shared strategies. The Dasra Girl Alliance in India is an example of a pooled fund that brings together philanthropic donors and institutional development funders, and fosters collaboration between the nonprofits it supports….

Disruption through technology

Technology might appear an incongruous companion to feedback and collaboration, which are both very human in nature, yet it’s likely to transform our sector….(More)”

Data ideologies of an interested public: A study of grassroots open government data intermediaries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Schrock and Gwen Shaffer in Big Data & Society: “Government officials claim open data can improve internal and external communication and collaboration. These promises hinge on “data intermediaries”: extra-institutional actors that obtain, use, and translate data for the public. However, we know little about why these individuals might regard open data as a site of civic participation. In response, we draw on Ilana Gershon to conceptualize culturally situated and socially constructed perspectives on data, or “data ideologies.” This study employs mixed methodologies to examine why members of the public hold particular data ideologies and how they vary. In late 2015 the authors engaged the public through a commission in a diverse city of approximately 500,000. Qualitative data was collected from three public focus groups with residents. Simultaneously, we obtained quantitative data from surveys. Participants’ data ideologies varied based on how they perceived data to be useful for collaboration, tasks, and translations. Bucking the “geek” stereotype, only a minority of those surveyed (20%) were professional software developers or engineers. Although only a nascent movement, we argue open data intermediaries have important roles to play in a new political landscape….(More)”

Making the Case for Open Contracting in Healthcare Procurement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Transparency International “…new report “Making the Case for Open Contracting in Healthcare Procurement”   examines the utility of open contracting in healthcare procurement. The process relies on governments to disclose procurement information to businesses and civil society improves stakeholders’ understanding of procurement processes increasing the integrity, fairness and efficiency of public contracting.

In several countries, including Honduras, Ukraine and Nigeria, corruption was significantly reduced throughout the healthcare procurement process following the implementation of open contracting, according to the report. Click here to download the report”

Participatory budgeting in Indonesia: past, present and future

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IDS Practice Paper by Francesca Feruglio and Ahmad Rifai: “In 2015, Yayasan Kota Kita (Our City Foundation), an Indonesian civil society organisation, applied to Making All Voices Count for a practitioner research and learning grant.

Kota Kita is an organisation of governance practitioners who focus on urban planning and citizen participation in the design and development of cities. Following several years of experience with participatory budgeting in Solo city, their research set out to examine participatory budgeting processes in six Indonesian cities, to inform their work – and the work of others – strengthening citizen participation in urban governance.

Their research looked at:

  • the current status of participatory budgeting in six Indonesian cities
  • the barriers and enablers to implementing participatory budgeting
  • how government and CSOs can help make participatory budgeting more transparent, inclusive and impactful.This practice paper describes Kota Kita and its work in more detail, and reflects on the history and evolution of participatory budgeting in Indonesia. In doing so, it contextualises some of the findings of the research, and discusses their implications.

    Key Themes in this Paper

  • What are the risks and opportunities of institutionalising participation?
  • How do access to information and use of new technologies have an impact onparticipation in budget planning processes?
  • What does it take for participatory budgeting to be an empowering process for citizens?
  • How can participatory budgeting include hard-to-reach citizens and accommodate different citizens’ needs? …(More)”.
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