Eric Kansa at LSE Blog: “…However, I’m increasingly convinced that advocating for openness in research (or government) isn’t nearly enough. There’s been too much of an instrumentalist justification for open data an open access. Many advocates talk about how it will cut costs and speed up research and innovation. They also argue that it will make research more “reproducible” and transparent so interpretations can be better vetted by the wider community. Advocates for openness, particularly in open government, also talk about the wonderful commercial opportunities that will come from freeing research…
These are all very big policy issues, but they need to be asked if the Open Movement really stands for reform and not just a further expansion and entrenchment of Neoliberalism. I’m using the term “Neoliberalism” because it resonates as a convenient label for describing how and why so many things seem to suck in Academia. Exploding student debt, vanishing job security, increasing compensation for top administrators, expanding bureaucracy and committee work, corporate management methodologies (Taylorism), and intensified competition for ever-shrinking public funding all fall under the general rubric of Neoliberalism. Neoliberal universities primarily serve the needs of commerce. They need to churn out technically skilled human resources (made desperate for any work by high loads of debt) and easily monetized technical advancements….
“Big Data,” “Data Science,” and “Open Data” are now hot topics at universities. Investments are flowing into dedicated centers and programs to establish institutional leadership in all things related to data. I welcome the new Data Science effort at UC Berkeley to explore how to make research data professionalism fit into the academic reward systems. That sounds great! But will these new data professionals have any real autonomy in shaping how they conduct their research and build their careers? Or will they simply be part of an expanding class of harried and contingent employees- hired and fired through the whims of creative destruction fueled by the latest corporate-academic hype-cycle?
Researchers, including #AltAcs and “data professionals”, need a large measure of freedom. Miriam Posner’s discussion about the career and autonomy limits of Alt-academic-hood help highlight these issues. Unfortunately, there’s only one area where innovation and failure seem survivable, and that’s the world of the start-up. I’ve noticed how the “Entrepreneurial Spirit” gets celebrated lots in this space. I’m guilty of basking in it myself (10 years as a quasi-independent #altAc in a nonprofit I co-founded!).
But in the current Neoliberal setting, being an entrepreneur requires a singular focus on monetizing innovation. PeerJ and Figshare are nice, since they have business models that less “evil” than Elsevier’s. But we need to stop fooling ourselves that the only institutions and programs that we can and should sustain are the ones that can turn a profit. For every PeerJ or Figshare (and these are ultimately just as dependent on continued public financing of research as any grant-driven project), we also need more innovative organizations like the Internet Archive, wholly dedicated to the public good and not the relentless pressure to commoditize everything (especially their patrons’ privacy). We need to be much more critical about the kinds of programs, organizations, and financing strategies we (as a society) can support. I raised the political economy of sustainability issue at a recent ThatCamp and hope to see more discussion.
In reality so much of the Academy’s dysfunctions are driven by our new Gilded Age’s artificial scarcity of money. With wealth concentrated in so few hands, it is very hard to finance risk taking and entreprenurialism in the scholarly community, especially to finance any form of entrepreneurialism that does not turn a profit in a year or two.
Open Access and Open Data will make so much more of a difference if we had the same kind of dynamism in the academic and nonprofit sector as we have in the for-profit start-up sector. After all, Open Access and Open Data can be key enablers to allow much broader participation in research and education. However, broader participation still needs to be financed: you cannot eat an open access publication. We cannot gloss over this key issue.
We need more diverse institutional forms so that researchers can find (or found) the kinds of organizations that best channel their passions into contributions that enrich us all. We need more diverse sources of financing (new foundations, better financed Kickstarters) to connect innovative ideas with the capital needed to see them implemented. Such institutional reforms will make life in the research community much more livable, creative, and dynamic. It would give researchers more options for diverse and varied career trajectories (for-profit or not-for-profit) suited to their interests and contributions.
Making the case to reinvest in the public good will require a long, hard slog. It will be much harder than the campaign for Open Access and Open Data because it will mean contesting Neoliberal ideologies and constituencies that are deeply entrenched in our institutions. However, the constituencies harmed by Neoliberalism, particularly the student community now burdened by over $1 trillion in debt and the middle class more generally, are much larger and very much aware that something is badly amiss. As we celebrate the impressive strides made by the Open Movement in the past year, it’s time we broaden our goals to tackle the needs for wider reform in the financing and organization of research and education.
This post originally appeared on Digging Digitally and is reposted under a CC-BY license.”
The Moneyball Effect: How smart data is transforming criminal justice, healthcare, music, and even government spending
TED: “When Anne Milgram became the Attorney General of New Jersey in 2007, she was stunned to find out just how little data was available on who was being arrested, who was being charged, who was serving time in jails and prisons, and who was being released. It turns out that most big criminal justice agencies like my own didn’t track the things that matter,” she says in today’s talk, filmed at TED@BCG. “We didn’t share data, or use analytics, to make better decisions and reduce crime.”
Milgram’s idea for how to change this: “I wanted to moneyball criminal justice.”
Moneyball, of course, is the name of a 2011 movie starring Brad Pitt and the book it’s based on, written by Michael Lewis in 2003. The term refers to a practice adopted by the Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane in 2002 — the organization began basing decisions not on star power or scout instinct, but on statistical analysis of measurable factors like on-base and slugging percentages. This worked exceptionally well. On a tiny budget, the Oakland A’s made it to the playoffs in 2002 and 2003, and — since then — nine other major league teams have hired sabermetric analysts to crunch these types of numbers.
Milgram is working hard to bring smart statistics to criminal justice. To hear the results she’s seen so far, watch this talk. And below, take a look at a few surprising sectors that are getting the moneyball treatment as well.
Moneyballing music. Last year, Forbes magazine profiled the firm Next Big Sound, a company using statistical analysis to predict how musicians will perform in the market. The idea is that — rather than relying on the instincts of A&R reps — past performance on Pandora, Spotify, Facebook, etc can be used to predict future potential. The article reads, “For example, the company has found that musicians who gain 20,000 to 50,000 Facebook fans in one month are four times more likely to eventually reach 1 million. With data like that, Next Big Sound promises to predict album sales within 20% accuracy for 85% of artists, giving labels a clearer idea of return on investment.”
Moneyballing human resources. In November, The Atlantic took a look at the practice of “people analytics” and how it’s affecting employers. (Billy Beane had something to do with this idea — in 2012, he gave a presentation at the TLNT Transform Conference called “The Moneyball Approach to Talent Management.”) The article describes how Bloomberg reportedly logs its employees’ keystrokes and the casino, Harrah’s, tracks employee smiles. It also describes where this trend could be going — for example, how a video game called Wasabi Waiter could be used by employers to judge potential employees’ ability to take action, solve problems and follow through on projects. The article looks at the ways these types of practices are disconcerting, but also how they could level an inherently unequal playing field. After all, the article points out that gender, race, age and even height biases have been demonstrated again and again in our current hiring landscape.
Moneyballing healthcare. Many have wondered: what about a moneyball approach to medicine? (See this call out via Common Health, this piece in Wharton Magazine or this op-ed on The Huffington Post from the President of the New York State Health Foundation.) In his TED Talk, “What doctors can learn from each other,” Stefan Larsson proposed an idea that feels like something of an answer to this question. In the talk, Larsson gives a taste of what can happen when doctors and hospitals measure their outcomes and share this data with each other: they are able to see which techniques are proving the most effective for patients and make adjustments. (Watch the talk for a simple way surgeons can make hip surgery more effective.) He imagines a continuous learning process for doctors — that could transform the healthcare industry to give better outcomes while also reducing cost.
Moneyballing government. This summer, John Bridgeland (the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President George W. Bush) and Peter Orszag (the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Barack Obama’s first term) teamed up to pen a provocative piece for The Atlantic called, “Can government play moneyball?” In it, the two write, “Based on our rough calculations, less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely.” The two explain how, for example, there are 339 federally-funded programs for at-risk youth, the grand majority of which haven’t been evaluated for effectiveness. And while many of these programs might show great results, some that have been evaluated show troubling results. (For example, Scared Straight has been shown to increase criminal behavior.) Yet, some of these ineffective programs continue because a powerful politician champions them. While Bridgeland and Orszag show why Washington is so averse to making data-based appropriation decisions, the two also see the ship beginning to turn around. They applaud the Obama administration for a 2014 budget with an “unprecendented focus on evidence and results.” The pair also gave a nod to the nonprofit Results for America, which advocates that for every $99 spent on a program, $1 be spent on evaluating it. The pair even suggest a “Moneyball Index” to encourage politicians not to support programs that don’t show results.
In any industry, figuring out what to measure, how to measure it and how to apply the information gleaned from those measurements is a challenge. Which of the applications of statistical analysis has you the most excited? And which has you the most terrified?”
OGP’s Independent Reporting Mechanism to Publish 35 Reports
“The Open Government Partnership has many attributes that make it stand out from other multilateral initiatives. The central role for civil society, the focus on supporting domestic reformers, and the diverse mix of countries in leadership roles, are all cited as organisational strengths. In February it will be the turn of OGP’s unique accountability mechanism, which is set up to be entirely independent and makes all of its findings public, to take centre stage. The Independent Reporting Mechanism will be publishing 35 progress reports over the next month. These are check-ins on how the large group of countries who formally joined OGP at the Brasilia Summit in April 2012 are doing against their open government reform commitments. The reports examine individual commitments from the National Action Plans, as well as the quality of the consultation process and dialogue between civil society and the government. The executive summaries will highlight the star commitments that saw tremendous progress, and were the most ambitious in terms of potential impact. These reports come at an important time for OGP. All the countries receiving reports are embarking on their second National Action Plan, due for publication on June 15th 2014. (Over 2/3 of OGP participating countries are currently developing new action plans.) The recommendations made by the IRM are designed to feed into the process of creating the new plans, making specific suggestions to improve the ambition and quality of new commitments and civil society engagement. However, these recommendations will only be acted upon if they are widely publicized at the national level and used by both civil society and government officials. If the reports remain unread, the likelihood of meaningful reforms through OGP will decrease…”
New Open Data Tool Helps Countries Compare Progress on Education
World Bank Group: “The World Bank Group today launched a new open data tool that provides in-depth, comparative, and easily accessible data on education policies around the world. The Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) web tool helps countries collect and analyze information on their education policies, benchmark themselves against other countries, and prioritize areas for reform, with the goal of ensuring that all children and youth go to school and learn….
To date, the Bank Group, through SABER, has analyzed more than 100 countries to guide more effective reforms and investments in education at all levels, from pre-primary to tertiary education and workforce development.
Through SABER, the Bank Group aims to improve education quality by supplying policymakers, civil society, school administrators, teachers, parents, and students with more, and more meaningful, data about key education policy areas, including early childhood development, student assessment, teachers, school autonomy and accountability, and workforce development, among others.
SABER helps countries improve their education systems in three ways:
- Providing new data on policies and institutions. SABER collects comparable country data on education policies and institutions that are publicly available at: http://worldbank.org/education/saber, allowing governments, researchers, and other stakeholders to measure and monitor progress.
- Benchmarking education policies and institutions. Each policy area is rated on a four-point scale, from “Latent” to “Emerging” to “Established” and “Advanced.” These ratings highlight a country’s areas of strength and weakness while promoting cross-country learning.
- Highlighting key policy choices. SABER data collection and analysis produce an objective snapshot of how well a country’s education system is performing in relation to global good practice. This helps highlight the most important policy choices to spur learning.”
Brazil let its citizens make decisions about city budgets. Here’s what happened.
Brian Wampler and Mike Touchton in the Washington Post: “Over the past 20 years, “participatory institutions” have spread around the world. Participatory institutions delegate decision-making authority directly to citizens, often in local politics, and have attracted widespread support. International organizations, such as the World Bank and USAID, promote citizen participation in hopes that it will generate more accountable governments, strengthen social networks, improve public services, and inform voters. Elected officials often support citizen participation because it provides them the legitimacy necessary to alter spending patterns, develop new programs, mobilize citizens, or open murky policymaking processes to greater public scrutiny. Civil society organizations and citizens support participating institution because they get unprecedented access to policymaking venues, public budgets and government officials.
But do participatory institutions actually achieve any of these beneficial outcomes? In a new study of participatory institutions in Brazil, we find that they do. In particular, we find that municipalities with participatory programs improve the lives of their citizens.
Brazil is a leading innovator in participatory institutions. Brazilian municipal governments can voluntarily adopt a program known as Participatory Budgeting. This program directly incorporates citizens into public meetings where citizens decide how to allocate public funds. The funding amounts can represent up to 100 percent of all new capital spending projects and generally fall between 5 and 15 percent of the total municipal budget. This is not enough to radically change how cities spend limited resources, but it is enough to generate meaningful change. For example, the Brazilian cities of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre have each spent hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars over the past two decades on projects that citizens selected. Moreover, many Participatory Budgeting programs have an outsize impact because they focus resources on areas that have lower incomes and fewer public services.
Between 1990 and 2008, over 120 of Brazil’s largest 250 cities adopted Participatory Budgeting. In order to assess whether PB had an impact, we compared the number of cities that adopted Participatory Budgeting during each mayoral period to cities that did not adopt it, and accounted for a range of other factors that might distinguish these two groups of cities.
The results are promising. Municipal governments that adopted Participatory Budgeting spent more on education and sanitation and saw infant mortality decrease as well. We estimate cities without PB to have infant mortality levels similar to Brazil’s mean. However, infant mortality drops by almost 20 percent for municipalities that have used PB for more than eight years — again, after accounting for other political and economic factors that might also influence infant mortality. The evidence strongly suggests that the investment in these programs is paying important dividends. We are not alone in this conclusion: Sónia Gonçalves has reached similar conclusions about Participatory Budgeting in Brazil….
Our results also show that Participatory Budgeting’s influence strengthens over time, which indicates that its benefits do not merely result from governments making easy policy changes. Instead, Participatory Budgeting’s increasing impact indicates that governments, citizens, and civil society organizations are building new institutions that produce better forms of governance. These cities incorporate citizens at multiple moments of the policy process, allowing community leaders and public officials to exchange better information. The cities are also retraining policy experts and civil servants to better work with poor communities. Finally, public deliberation about spending priorities makes these city governments more transparent, which decreases corruption…”
Rethinking Democratic Governance: Looking Back, Moving Forward
Chapter by M. Shamsul Haque in Challenges to Democratic Governance in Developing Countries Public Administration, Governance and Globalization: “The recent three decades witnessed massive reforms in the mode of public governance worldwide. This period of restructuring public policy and public administration has been unprecedented in terms of the speed and intensity of such reforms encapsulated often as Reinventing Government or New Public Management or NPM. There also has emerged a series of post-NPM reform proposals—which largely represent the revision rather than rejection of NPM—under catchy expressions like Shared Governance, Collaborative Governance, Joined-Up Governance, Networked Governance, Good Governance, Digital Era Governance, and Good Enough Governance (Lodge and Gill 2011; Ferlie and Steane 2002). These trends of reforms are characterized, first, by their neoliberal ideological assumptions that free market competition is better than state intervention for optimizing customer satisfaction (utility) and cost-effectiveness or efficiency, and thus, the role of the state should be minimal so that a greater role can be played by market forces. Reflecting these ideological underlying predispositions of contemporary reforms in governance are the market-led redirections in state policies, government institutions, and civil service. More specifically, while state policies are reoriented towards privatization, deregulation, liberalization, downsizing, and outsourcing, most public organizations and their management are restructured in favor of organizational disaggregation or agencification, managerial autonomy, performance-driven indicators, result-based finance and budget, and customer-led priorities. It should be mentioned here that while both NPM and post-NPM prescribe pro-market policies and organizational and managerial reforms in order to roll back the state and to transfer much of the state sector role in service delivery to non-state actors, there is a distinction. The basic distinction is that while the NPM model prescribes this transfer of the public sector’s role mainly to the private sector, the post-NPM alternatives recommend such transfer to other additional stakeholders like Nongovernment Organizations (NGO) and grassroots groups.”
Enhancing Social Innovation by Rethinking Collaboration, Leadership and Public Governance
New paper by Professors Eva Sørensen & Jacob Torfing: “It is widely recognized that public innovation is the intelligent alternative to blind across-the-board-cuts in times of shrinking budgets, and that innovation may help to break policy deadlocks and adjust welfare services to new and changing demands. At the same time, there is growing evidence that multi-actor collaboration in networks, partnerships and interorganizational teams can spur public innovation (Sørensen and Torfing, 2011). The involvement of different public and private actors in public innovation processes improves the understanding of the problem or challenge at hand and brings forth new ideas and proposals. It also ensures that the needs of users, citizens and civil society organizations are taken into account when innovative solutions are selected, tested and implemented.
While a lot of public innovation continues to be driven by particular public employees and managers, there seems to be a significant surge in collaborative forms of innovation that cut across the institutional and organization boundaries within the public sector and involve a plethora of private actors with relevant innovation assets. Indeed, the enhancement of collaborative innovation has be come a key aspiration of many public organizations around the world. However, if we fail to develop a more precise and sophisticated understanding of the concepts of ‘innovation’ and ‘collaboration’, we risk that both terms are reduced to empty and tiresome buzzwords that will not last to the end of the season. Moreover, in reality, collaborative and innovative processes are difficult to trigger and sustain without proper innovation management and a supporting cultural and institutional environment. This insight calls for further reflections on the role of public leadership and management and for a transformation of the entire system of public governing.
Hence, in order to spur collaborative innovation in the public sector, we need to clarify the basic terms of the debate and explore how collaborative innovation can be enhanced by new forms of innovation management and new forms of public governing. To this end, we shall first define the notions of innovation and public innovation and discuss the relation between public innovation and social innovation in order to better understand the purposes of different forms of innovation.
We shall then seek to clarify the notion of collaboration and pinpoint why and how collaboration enhances public innovation. Next, we shall offer some theoretical and practical reflections about how public leaders and managers can advance collaborative innovation. Finally, we shall argue that the enhancement of collaborative forms of social innovation calls for a transformation of the system of public governing that shifts the balance from New Public Management towards New Public Governance.”
The LinkedIn Volunteer Marketplace: Connecting Professionals to Nonprofit Volunteer Opportunities
LinkedIn: “Last spring, a shelter in Berkeley, CA needed an architect to help it expand its facilities. A young architect who lives nearby had just made a New Year’s resolution to join a nonprofit board. In an earlier era, they would not have known each other existed.
But in this instance the shelter’s executive director used LinkedIn to contact the architect – and the architect jumped at the opportunity to serve on the shelter’s board. The connection brought enormous value to both parties involved – the nonprofit shelter got the expertise it needed and the young architect was able to amplify her social impact while broadening her professional skills.
This story inspired me and my colleagues at LinkedIn. As someone who studies and invests (as a venture capitalist) in internet marketplaces, I realized the somewhat serendipitous connection between architect and shelter would happen more often if there were a dedicated volunteer marketplace. After all, there are hundreds of thousands of “nonprofit needs” in the world, and even more professionals who want to donate their skills to help meet these needs.
The challenge is that nonprofits and professionals don’t know how to easily find each other. LinkedIn Volunteer Marketplace aims to solve that problem.
Changing the professional definition of “opportunity”
When I talk with LinkedIn members, many tell me they aren’t actively looking for traditional job opportunities. Instead, they want to hone or leverage their skills while also making a positive impact on the world.
Students often fall into this category. Retired professionals and stay-at-home parents seek ways to continue to leverage their skills and experience. And while busy professionals who love their current gigs may not necessarily be looking for a new position, these are often the very people who are most actively engaged in “meaningful searches” – a volunteer opportunity that will enhance their life in ways beyond what their primary vocation provides.
By providing opportunities for all these different kinds of LinkedIn members, we aim to help the social sector by doing what we do best as a company: connecting talent with opportunity at massive scale.
And to ensure that the volunteer opportunities you see in the LinkedIn Volunteer Marketplace are high quality, we’re partnering with the most trusted organizations in this space, including Catchafire, Taproot Foundation, BoardSource and VolunteerMatch.”
Open data movement faces fresh hurdles
SciDevNet: “The open-data community made great strides in 2013 towards increasing the reliability of and access to information, but more efforts are needed to increase its usability on the ground and the general capacity of those using it, experts say.
An international network of innovation hubs, the first extensive open data certification system and a data for development partnership are three initiatives launched last year by the fledgling Open Data Institute (ODI), a UK-based not-for-profit firm that champions the use of open data to aid social, economic and environmental development.
Before open data can be used effectively the biggest hurdles to be cleared are agreeing common formats for data sets and improving their trustworthiness and searchability, says the ODI’s chief statistician, Ulrich Atz.
“As it is so new, open data is often inconsistent in its format, making it difficult to reuse. We see a great need for standards and tools,” he tells SciDev.Net. Data that is standardised is of “incredible value” he says, because this makes it easier and faster to use and gives it a longer useable lifetime.
The ODI — which celebrated its first anniversary last month — is attempting to achieve this with a first-of-its-kind certification system that gives publishers and users important details about online data sets, including publishers’ names and contact information, the type of sharing licence, the quality of information and how long it will be available.
Certificates encourage businesses and governments to make use of open data by guaranteeing their quality and usability, and making them easier to find online, says Atz.
Finding more and better ways to apply open data will also be supported by a growing network of ODI ‘nodes’: centres that bring together companies, universities and NGOs to support open-data projects and communities….
Because lower-income countries often lack well-established data collection systems, they have greater freedom to rethink how data are collected and how they flow between governments and civil society, he says.
But there is still a long way to go. Open-data projects currently rely on governments and other providers sharing their data on online platforms, whereas in a truly effective system, information would be published in an open format from the start, says Davies.
Furthermore, even where advances are being made at a strategic level, open-data initiatives are still having only a modest impact in the real world, he says.
“Transferring [progress at a policy level] into availability of data on the ground and the capacity to use it is a lot tougher and slower,” Davies says.”
Entrepreneurs Shape Free Data Into Money
Supporters of such programs often see them as a local economic stimulus plan, allowing software developers and entrepreneurs in cities ranging from San Francisco to South Bend, Ind., to New York, to build new businesses based on the information they get from government websites.
When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive directive last month to launch the city’s open-data program, he cited entrepreneurs and businesses as important beneficiaries. Open-data promotes innovation and “gives companies, individuals, and nonprofit organizations the opportunity to leverage one of government’s greatest assets: public information,” according to the Dec. 18 directive.
A poster child for the movement might be 34-year-old Matt Ehrlichman of Seattle, who last year built an online business in part using Seattle work permits, professional licenses and other home-construction information gathered up by the city’s Department of Planning and Development.
While his website is free, his business, called Porch.com, has more than 80 employees and charges a $35 monthly fee to industry professionals who want to boost the visibility of their projects on the site.
The site gathers raw public data—such as addresses for homes under renovation, what they are doing, who is doing the work and how much they are charging—and combines it with photos and other information from industry professionals and homeowners. It then creates a searchable database for users to compare ideas and costs for projects near their own neighborhood.
…Ian Kalin, director of open-data services at Socrata, a Seattle-based software firm that makes the back-end applications for many of these government open-data sites, says he’s worked with hundreds of companies that were formed around open data.
Among them is Climate Corp., a San Francisco-based firm that collects weather and yield-forecasting data to help farmers decide when and where to plant crops. Launched in 2006, the firm was acquired in October by Monsanto Co. MON -2.90% , the seed-company giant, for $930 million.
Overall, the rate of new business formation declined nationally between 2006 and 2010. But according to the latest data from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, an entrepreneurship advocacy group in Kansas City, Mo., the rate of new business formation in Seattle in 2011 rose 9.41% in 2011, compared with the national average of 3.9%.
Other cities where new business formation was ahead of the national average include Chicago, Austin, Texas, Baltimore, and South Bend, Ind.—all cities that also have open-data programs. Still, how effective the ventures are in creating jobs is difficult to gauge.
One wrinkle: privacy concerns about the potential for information—such as property tax and foreclosure data—to be misused.
Some privacy advocates fear that government data that include names, addresses and other sensitive information could be used by fraudsters to target victims.”