Paper by Cristiano Codagnone et al: “This article discusses the socio-political dimension of measurement in the context of benchmarking e-government within the European Union׳s Open Method of Coordination. It provides empirical evidence of how this has resulted in institutional isomorphism within the self-referential policy network community involved in the benchmarking process. It argues that the policy prominence retained by supply-side benchmarking of e-government has probably indirectly limited efforts made to measure and evaluate more tangible impacts. High scores in EU benchmarking have contributed to increasing the institutionally-perceived quality but not necessarily the real quality and utility of e-government services. The article concludes by outlining implications for policy and practical recommendations for filling the gaps identified in measurement and evaluation of e-government. It proposes a more comprehensive policy benchmarking framework, which aims to ensure a gradual improvement in measurement activities with indicators that reflect and follow the pace of change, align measurement activities to evaluation needs and, eventually, reduce measurement error….(More)”
The Platform for Political Innovation
The Platform for Political Innovation …”is a project aiming to strengthen the role and efficiency of Civil Society in Greece, focusing on the imperative need for innovation in policy-making. The project is based on the collaboration of three Greek Civil Society Organizations which combine and build on their experience and know-how in order to maximize the impact of activities for Political Innovation. From October 2014 to May 2015, experimental applications of innovative processes and tools are initiated in different Greek cities, focusing on the re-design of decision-making processes at local and national level. The proposed action plan constitutes the phase B of the wider social project POLITEIA 2.0 which won the Audience Award in the 2012 European Investment Bank Social Innovation Tournament.
The activities of the Platform for Political Innovation focus on Research, Networking, Training, Digital Tools and Innovation Workshops Development in 4 Greek cities….including:
Syntagma 2.0: workshops for the participatory design of a new Constitution for Greece by its citizens.
Pedio_Agora: workshops for the participatory design of a public space. Focus area: Varvakeios Square, Athens….(More)”
Budgets for the People
Data for good
NESTA: “This report explores how capturing, sharing and analysing data in new ways can transform how charities work and how social action happens.
Key Findings
- Citizens Advice (CAB) and Data Kind partnered to develop the Civic Dashboard. A tool which mines data from CAB consultations to understand emerging social issues in the UK.
- Shooting Star Chase volunteers streamlined the referral paths of how children come to be at the hospices saving up to £90,000 for children’s hospices around the country by refining the referral system.
- In a study of open grant funding data, NCVO identified 33,000 ‘below the radar organisations’ not currently registered in registers and databases on the third sector
- In their social media analysis of tweets related to the Somerset Floods, Demos found that 39,000 tweets were related to social action
New ways of capturing, sharing and analysing data have the potential to transform how community and voluntary sector organisations work and how social action happens. However, while analysing and using data is core to how some of the world’s fastest growing businesses understand their customers and develop new products and services, civil society organisations are still some way off from making the most of this potential.
Over the last 12 months Nesta has grant funded a number of research projects that explore two dimensions of how big and open data can be used for the common good. Firstly, how it can be used by charities to develop better products and services and secondly, how it can help those interested in civil society better understand social action and civil society activity.
- Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) and Datakind, a global community of data scientists interested in how data can be used for a social purpose, were grant funded to explore how a datadriven approach to mining the rich data that CAB holds on social issues in the UK could be used to develop a real–time dashboard to identify emerging social issues. The project also explored how data–driven methods could better help other charities such as St Mungo’s and Buttle UK, and how data could be shared more effectively between charities as part of this process, to create collaborative data–driven projects.
- Five organisations (The RSA, Cardiff University, The Demos Centre for Analysis of Social Media, NCVO and European Alternatives) were grant funded to explore how data–driven methods, such as open data analysis and social media analysis, can help us understand informal social action, often referred to as ‘below the radar activity’ in new ways.
This paper is not the definitive story of the opportunities in using big and open data for the common good, but it can hopefully provide insight on what can be done and lessons for others interested in exploring the opportunities in these methods….(More).”
Data Mining Reveals a Global Link Between Corruption and Wealth
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104 Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”
More Power to the People: How Cities Are Letting Data Flow
Stephen Taylor at People4SmarterCities: “Smart cities understand that engaging the public in decision-making is vital to enhancing services and ensuring accountability. Here are three ideas that show how cities are embracing new technologies and opening up data to spur civic participation and improve citizens’ lives.
City Texts Help Keep Food on the Table
In San Francisco, about a third of the 52,000 people that receive food stamps are disenrolled from the program because they miss certain deadlines, such as filing quarterly reports with the city’s Human Services Agency. To help keep recipients up to date on their status, the nonprofit organization Code for America worked with the city agency to create Promptly, an open-source software platform that sends alerts by text message when citizens need to take action to keep their benefits. Not only does it help ensure that low-income residents keep food on the table, it also helps the department run more efficiently as less staff time is spent on re-enrollments.
Fired Up in Los Angeles Over Open Data
For the Los Angeles Fire Department, its work is all about responding to citizens. Not only does it handle fire and medical calls, it’s also the first fire agency in the U.S. to gather and post data on its emergency-response times on the Internet through a program called FireStat. The data gives citizens the opportunity to review metrics such as the amount of time it takes for stations to process emergency calls, the time for firefighters to leave the station and the travel time to the incident for each of its 102 firehouses throughout the city. The goal of FireStat is to see where and how response times can be improved, while increasing management accountability….(More)”
Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
New Book edited by Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec: “This book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings together several cutting-edge research studies that offer exciting new insights into the nature and formats of interpersonal communication in diverse technology-mediated contexts. Some papers introduce new theoretical extensions to participation formats, while others present case studies in various discourse domains spanning public and private genres. Adopting the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction, these contributions discuss data ranging from public, mass-mediated and quasi-authentic texts, fully staged and scripted textual productions, to authentic, non-scripted private messages and comments, both of a permanent and ephemeral nature. The analyses include news interviews, online sports reporting, sitcoms, comedy shows, stand-up comedies, drama series, institutional and personal blogs, tweets, follow-up YouTube video commentaries, and Facebook status updates. All the authors emphasize the role of context and pay attention to how meaning is constructed by participants in interactions in increasingly complex participation frameworks existing in traditional as well as novel technologically mediated interactions….(Table of Contents)”.
Millions of LinkedIn Members Want to Volunteer Their Skills for Good [INFOGRAPHIC]
LinkedIn: “What do 140,000 marketers, 4,000 Googlers, and 170,000 C-level executives have in common?
Answer: They all want to use their skills for good!
More than 4 million professionals like them have expressed interest in joining a nonprofit board or doing skills-based volunteering – or both.
GreatNonprofits, an organization that helps people find and rate other nonprofits, recently found two of these professionals on LinkedIn. Both are product managers who are spending 6 months to develop critical web-based tools to help the organization expand its reach.
“Both volunteers are creative, analytical, and really engaging deeply with staff,” says GreatNonprofits Founder and CEO Perla Ni. “We’re encouraged by how many talented, passionate people there are on LinkedIn who are willing to commit time to help nonprofits.”
As a professional, you can signal you want to use your skills for good on your LinkedIn profile by checking the boxes for “Joining a nonprofit board” and/or “Skills-based volunteering” in the Volunteer Experience & Causes section. If you’ve already done that, try searching for volunteer opportunities in your area.
For nonprofit organizations, we’ve made it quick and easy to find professionals who are eager to help. Use our free Advanced Search tool to find these talented needles in the haystack.
We took a closer look at the millions of LinkedIn members who’ve raised their hands for volunteer or board service, and found some interesting insights. For starters, the stereotype that millennials are hungry for purpose actually rings true. Also, the highest concentration of would-be volunteers are in the Midwest. And they have a ton of valuable skills – from strategic planning to marketing – for nonprofits to leverage.
Check out the infographic below for more, or visit nonprofit.linkedin.com.”
Moneyball for Government
New book edited by Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle: “A bipartisan group of current and former federal government leaders and advisors have written a new book, titled Moneyball for Government, which encourages government to change how it works so that data, evidence and evaluation drive policy and funding decisions.
The book includes jointly-written chapters by former Obama and George W. Bush administration Budget Directors Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle, U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Mark Warner (D-VA), former Obama and George W. Bush domestic policy advisors Melody Barnes and John Bridgeland; and former spokesmen for the Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns Kevin Madden and Howard Wolfson. It also includes chapters from former Obama and George W. Bush economic advisors Gene Sperling and Glenn Hubbard, and Obama and George W. Bush policy experts Robert Gordon and Ron Haskins.
The book also features profiles of innovative government and nonprofit leaders and organizations across the country that are successfully leveraging data, evidence and evaluation to get better results.
This book is about changing the way government works. By shifting public resources toward solutions that are informed by the best possible data, evidence and evaluation about what works, our government can improve the lives of young people, their families and communities. By brining together leading thinkers from across the political spectrum and highlighting the good work underway across the country, this book makes the case for Moneyball for Government and shows that it’s possible.”
Opening travel spending through civic intelligence, participation and co-creation
Joel Salas Suárez at the Open Government Partnership Blog: “When we were appointed by the Senate as Commissioners of the Access to Information Institute in Mexico (IFAI), we identified two high profile issues that had negatively affected the Institute’s image: the acquisition of its new building and the lack of transparency on international travel expenditure of the former Commissioners.
IFAI has to lead by example, so my fellow commissioners and I decided to tackle these two problems with transparency actions to send a clear message to the Mexican society and the international community in our first hundred days in office. First we created the website sede.ifai.mx to publish all the information about the new building procurement (a 45.6 million USD lease). Secondly, we decided to start our first civic innovation project, a joint venture with civil society organizations, to find the best way to publish information related to travel spending by IFAI’s public servants.
Travel expenditure of IFAI is comparatively smaller. During 2013 it allotted to 186,760 USD, 0.5% of the Institute’s budget (38.2 million USD). However, this expenditure has historically been of public interest and it should be. According to the 2013 Mexican Government Expenditure Review (the latest available) the Federal Level (Executive, Legislative and Judicial Powers, and Autonomous organs) spent close to 633 million USD in official travel (Chapter 3000, concept 3700). Therefore, we decided to tackle the problem and design a platform that would allow us to effectively publish information related to the public money spent on travel by public officials and the results obtained during these trips.
In order to do this, we worked with civil society experts in public participation, accountability and technology, Codeando México, SocialTIC and IMCO. Together we launched a public challenge to create an open source web application to publish information on official travel spending.
The challenge #RetoViajesTransparentes was a very successful experience. Close to a hundred participants registered 14 projects that competed to develop an app that IFAI would officially use and to win a 3,500 USD prize. The jury selected 3 finalists, who presented their projects on a public Google Hangout. The winner app is named Viajes Claros and is being used to publish travel expenditure information of IFAI at viajesclaros.ifai.mx.
This challenge has allowed us to shift focus from the inputs of official travel (i.e. the money spent) to the outputs or results attained in each trip. Viajes Claros opens relevant information to understand and evaluate the activities performed by the public servants during their trips. It also allowed us to co-create with society an open source tool that can be replicated in Mexico and other countries….(More)”.