Putting the Public First: Improving Customer Experience and Service Delivery for the American People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Executive Order (US): “… directs Federal agencies to put people at the center of everything the Government does. Specifically, the Executive Order includes 36 customer experience (CX) improvement commitments across 17 Federal agencies, all of which aim to improve people’s lives and the delivery of Government services. The Executive Order also creates a sustained, cross-government service delivery process that aligns to the moments that matter most in people’s lives – like turning 65, having a child, or applying for a small business loan. As part of this framework, the Administration will work to identify and define critical services that meet customers’ needs and expectations, assess performance delivery and report it publicly, incorporate customer feedback during each interaction, and ultimately ensure services deliver a better experience to the public. Every interaction between the Government and the public, whether it involves filing taxes or renewing a passport, is an opportunity to deliver the value, service, and efficiency that the public expects and deserves.

The Government has designated 35 High-Impact Service Providers in Federal agencies as key service providers due to the volume and types of benefits, services, and programs they deliver to the public. As part of this Executive Order, agencies commit to putting their customers at the center of everything they do. These actions include modernizing programs, reducing administrative burdens, and piloting new online tools and technologies that can provide a simple, seamless, and secure customer experience….(More)”.

Data Portals and Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Series of blogs by Tim Davies: “Portals have been an integral part of the open data movement. They provided a space for publishing and curation of data for governments (usually), and a space to discover and access data for users (often individuals, civil society organisations or sometimes private sector organisations building services or deriving insights from this data). 

While many data portals are still maintained, and while some of them enable access to a sizeable amount of data, portals face some big questions in the decade ahead:

  1. Are open data portals still fit for purpose (and if so, which purpose)?
  2. Do open data portals still “make sense” in this decade, or are they a public sector anomaly in a context when data lakes, data meshes, data platforms are adopted across industry? Is there a minimum viable spec for a future-proof open data “portal”?
  3. What roles and activities have emerged around data platforms and portals that deserve to be codified and supported by the future type of platforms?
  4. Could re-imagined open data “platforms” create change in the role of the public service organisation with regards to data (from publisher to… steward?)?
  5. How can a new generation of portals or data platforms better support citizen engagement and civic participation?
  6. What differences are there between the private and public approaches, and why? Does any difference introduce any significant dynamics in private / public open data ecosystems?…(More)”.

Using social media data to ‘nowcast’ migration around the globe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by RAND: “In recent years, unprecedented waves of refugees, economic migrants and people displaced by a variety of factors have made migration a high-priority policy issue around the world. Despite this, official migration statistics often come with a time lag and can fail to correctly capture the full extent of migration, leaving decision makers without timely and robust data to make informed policy decisions.

In a RAND-initiated, self-funded research study, we developed a methodological tool to compute near real-time migration estimates for European Union member states and the United States. The tool, underpinned by a Bayesian model, is capable of providing ‘nowcasts’ of migrant stocks by combining real-time data from the Facebook Marketing Application Programming Interface and data from official migration sources, such as Eurostat and the US Census Bureau.

These nowcasts can serve as an early-warning system to anticipate ‘shock events’ and rapid migration trends that would otherwise be captured too late or not at all by official migration data sources. The tool could therefore enable decision makers to make informed, evidence-based policy decisions in the rapidly changing social policy sphere of international migration.

The study also provides a useful example of how to combine ‘big data’ with traditional data to improve measurement and estimation which can be applied to other social and demographic phenomena…(More)”.

Technology and democracy: a paradox wrapped in a contradiction inside an irony

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and Peter Pomerantsev: “Democracy is in retreat around the globe. Many commentators have blamed the Internet for this development, whereas others have celebrated the Internet as a tool for liberation, with each opinion being buttressed by supporting evidence. We try to resolve this paradox by reviewing some of the pressure points that arise between human cognition and the online information architecture, and their fallout for the well-being of democracy. We focus on the role of the attention economy, which has monetised dwell time on platforms, and the role of algorithms that satisfy users’ presumed preferences. We further note the inherent asymmetry in power between platforms and users that arises from these pressure points, and we conclude by sketching out the principles of a new Internet with democratic credentials….(More)”.

Leveraging Location and Mobility Data: Perils & Practices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Suha Mohamed: “…Mobility data refers to information (often passively captured) that provides insights into the location and movement of a population – often through their interactions with digital mobility devices (like our smartphones) or transport services. Sources of mobility data, while diverse, include call detail records from telecom companies, GPS details from phones or vehicles, geotagged social media data or first or third-party software data. 

Geolocation, a subset of mobility data, may be useful in shaping responsive courses of action as it can be leveraged in granular form to understand hyperlocal realities or, when aggregated, regional, national or international patterns. However, privacy concerns arise from the sensitive or personal data that may be inferred from these records and the often opaque conditions around its usage. The ongoing deployment of contact tracing applications, which largely depend on individual-level location data, have demonstrated extensive potential for misuse and surveillance….

Despite the surveillance and privacy concerns around the use of contact tracing apps and mobility data, it is undeniable that this data has immense public value and has helped officials understand the development of the COVID-19 virus and map its variants and waves. It has also been used to track: areas of mobility that contribute towards increased transmission of the virus, adherence to social distancing norms and the effectiveness of measures like lockdowns or restrictions….(More)”.

Improving Consumer Welfare with Data Portability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Daniel Castro: “Data protection laws and regulations can contain restrictive provisions, which limit data sharing and use, as well as permissive provisions, which increase it. Data portability is an example of a permissive provision that allows consumers to obtain a digital copy of their personal information from an online service and provide this information to other services. By carefully crafting data portability provisions, policymakers can enable consumers to obtain more value from their data, create new opportunities for businesses to innovate with data, and foster competition….(More)”.

Sharing Student Data Across Public Sectors: Importance of Community Engagement to Support Responsible and Equitable Use

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by CDT: “Data and technology play a critical role in today’s education institutions, with 85 percent of K-12 teachers anticipating that online learning and use of education technology at their school will play a larger role in the future than it did before the pandemic.  The growth in data-driven decision-making has helped fuel the increasing prevalence of data sharing practices between K-12 education agencies and adjacent public sectors like social services. Yet the sharing of personal data can pose risks as well as benefits, and many communities have historically experienced harm as a result of irresponsible data sharing practices. For example, if the underlying data itself is biased, sharing that information exacerbates those inequities and increases the likelihood that potential harms fall disproportionately on certain communities. As a result, it is critical that agencies participating in data sharing initiatives take steps to ensure the benefits are available to all and no groups of students experience disproportionate harm.

A core component of sharing data responsibly is proactive, robust community engagement with the group of people whose data is being shared, as well as their surrounding community. This population has the greatest stake in the success or failure of a given data sharing initiative; as such, public agencies have a practical incentive, and a moral obligation, to engage them regarding decisions being made about their data…

This paper presents guidance on how practitioners can conduct effective community engagement around the sharing of student data between K-12 education agencies and adjacent public sectors. We explore the importance of community engagement around data sharing initiatives, and highlight four dimensions of effective community engagement:

  • Plan: Establish Goals, Processes, and Roles
  • Enable: Build Collective Capacity
  • Resource: Dedicate Appropriate People, Time, and Money
  • Implement: Carry Out Vision Effectively and Monitor Implementation…(More)”.

How Smart Tech Is Transforming Nonprofits

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Allison Fine and Beth Kanter: “Covid-19 created cascades of shortages, disruptions, and problems that rolled downhill and landed in the most vulnerable neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods, it’s often nonprofit organizations that provide services to members of the community. While the pandemic accelerated the need for digital transformation throughout the economy, the nonprofit sector was not immune to the need for nearly overnight innovation. As experts on the use of technology for social good, we’ve observed the many ways that nonprofits have been adopting “smart tech” to further social change in the wake of the pandemic, which we chronicle in our upcoming book, The Smart Nonprofit.

We use “smart tech” as an umbrella term for advanced digital technologies that make decisions for people. It includes artificial intelligence (AI) and its subsets and cousins, such as machine learning, natural language processing, smart forms, chatbots, robots, and more.

The use of smart tech by social service agencies and other nonprofits exploded during the pandemic. For example, food banks deployed robots to pack meals; homeless services agencies used chatbots to give legal and mental health advice; and fundraising departments turned to AI-powered software to identify potential donors.Insight Center CollectionTaking on Digital TransformationMoving your company forward in the wake of the pandemic.

When the pandemic began and schools switched to remote learning, many students who relied on school lunches were not able to receive them. Here’s where nonprofits stepped in to use smart technologies for social good. For example, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University used machine learning to flip the system on its head; instead of using buses to deliver children to schools, new bus routes were created to bring meals to children in the Pittsburgh area in the most efficient way.

The use of chatbots to provide support and deliver services to vulnerable populations increased tremendously during the pandemic. For instance, the Rentervention chatbot was developed by the legal aid nonprofits in Illinois to help tenants navigate eviction and other housing issues they were experiencing due to Covid-19. It also directs renters to pro bono legal advice….(More)”.

Senators unveil bipartisan bill requiring social media giants to open data to researchers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Rebecca Klar: “Meta and other social media companies would be required to share their data with outside researchers under a new bill announced by a bipartisan group of senators on Thursday. 

Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) underscored the need for their bill based on information leaked about Meta’s platforms in the so-called Facebook Papers, though the proposal would also apply to other social media companies.

The bill, the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, would allow independent researchers to submit proposals to the National Science Foundation. If the requests are approved, social media companies would be required to provide the necessary data subject to certain privacy protections. 

“It’s increasingly clear that more transparency is needed so that the billions of people who use Facebook, Twitter, and similar platforms can fully understand the impact of those tradeoffs. This bipartisan proposal is an important step that will bring much needed information about the impact of social media companies to light and ought to be a crucial part of any comprehensive strategy that Congress can take to regulate major social media companies,” Coons said in a statement. 

If companies failed to comply with the requirement under the bill, they would be subject to enforcement from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and face losing immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Section 230 is a controversial provision that provides immunity for internet companies based on content posted by third parties, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed measures to weaken its reach….(More)”.

Group Backed by Top Companies Moves to Combat A.I. Bias in Hiring

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steve Lohr at The New York Times: “Artificial intelligence software is increasingly used by human resources departments to screen résumés, conduct video interviews and assess a job seeker’s mental agility.

Now, some of the largest corporations in America are joining an effort to prevent that technology from delivering biased results that could perpetuate or even worsen past discrimination.

The Data & Trust Alliance, announced on Wednesday, has signed up major employers across a variety of industries, including CVS Health, Deloitte, General Motors, Humana, IBM, Mastercard, Meta (Facebook’s parent company), Nike and Walmart.

The corporate group is not a lobbying organization or a think tank. Instead, it has developed an evaluation and scoring system for artificial intelligence software.

The Data & Trust Alliance, tapping corporate and outside experts, has devised a 55-question evaluation, which covers 13 topics, and a scoring system. The goal is to detect and combat algorithmic bias.“This is not just adopting principles, but actually implementing something concrete,” said Kenneth Chenault, co-chairman of the group and a former chief executive of American Express, which has agreed to adopt the anti-bias tool kit…(More)”.