Digitally Kind

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anna Grant with Cliff Manning and Ben Thurman: “Over the past decade and particularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen increasing use of digital technology in service provision by third and public sector organisations. But with this increasing use comes challenges. The development and use of these technologies often outpace the organisational structures put in place to improve delivery and protect both individuals and organisations.

Digitally Kind is devised to help bridge the gaps between digital policy, process and practice to improve outcomes, and introducing kindness as a value to underpin an organisational approach.

Based on workshops with over 40 practitioners and frontline staff, the report has been designed as a starting point to support organisations open up conversations around their use of digital in delivering services. Digitally Kind explores a range of technical, social and cultural considerations around the use of tech when working with individuals covering values and governance; access; safety and wellbeing; knowledge and skills; and participation.

While the project predominantly focused on the experiences of practitioners and organisations working with young people, many of the principles hold true for other sectors. The research also highlights a short set of considerations for funders, policymakers (including regulators) and online platforms….(More)”.

Tech tools help deepen citizen input in drafting laws abroad and in U.S. states

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gopal Ratnam at RollCall: “Earlier this month, New Jersey’s Department of Education launched a citizen engagement process asking students, teachers and parents to vote on ideas for changes that officials should consider as the state reopens its schools after the pandemic closed classrooms for a year. 

The project, managed by The Governance Lab at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering, is part of a monthlong nationwide effort using an online survey tool called All Our Ideas to help state education officials prioritize policymaking based on ideas solicited from those who are directly affected by the policies.

Among the thousands of votes cast for various ideas nationwide, teachers and parents backed changes that would teach more problem-solving skills to kids. But students backed a different idea as the most important: making sure that kids have social and emotional skills, as well as “self-awareness and empathy.” 

A government body soliciting ideas from those who are directly affected, via online technology, is one small example of greater citizen participation in governance that advocates hope can grow at both state and federal levels….

Taiwan has taken crowdsourcing legislative ideas to a new height.

Using a variety of open-source engagement and consultation tools that are collectively known as the vTaiwan process, government ministries, elected representatives, experts, civil society groups, businesses and ordinary citizens come together to produce legislation. 

The need for an open consultation process stemmed from the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement, when groups of students and others occupied the Taiwanese parliament to protest the fast-tracking of a trade agreement with China with little public review.  

After the country’s parliament acceded to the demands, the “consensus opinion was that instead of people having to occupy the parliament every time there’s a controversial, emergent issue, it might actually work better if we have a consultation mechanism in the very beginning of the issue rather than at the end,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister. …

At about the same time that Taiwan’s Sunflower movement was unfolding, in Brazil then-President Dilma Rousseff signed into law the country’s internet bill of rights in April 2014. 

The bill was drafted and refined through a consultative process that included not only legal and technical experts but average citizens as well, said Debora Albu, program coordinator at the Institute for Technology and Society of Rio, also known as ITS. 

The institute was involved in designing the platform for seeking public participation, Albu said. 

“From then onwards, we wanted to continue developing projects that incorporated this idea of collective intelligence built into the development of legislation or public policies,” Albu said….(More)”.

We’re Beating Systems Change to Death

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Kevin Starr: “Systems change! Just saying the words aloud makes me feel like one of the cognoscenti, one of the elite who has transcended the ways of old-school philanthropy. Those two words capture our aspirations of lasting impact at scale: systems are big, and if you manage to change them, they’ll keep spinning out impact forever. Why would you want to do anything else?

There’s a problem, though. “Systems analysis” is an elegant and useful way to think about problems and get ideas for solutions, but “systems change” is accelerating toward buzzword purgatory. It’s so sexy that everyone wants to use it for everything. …

But when you rummage through the growing literature on systems change thinking, there are in fact a few recurring themes. One is the need to tackle the root causes of any problem you take on. Another is that a broad coalition must be assembled ASAP. Finally, the most salient theme is the notion that the systems involved are transformed as a result of the work (although in many of the examples I read about, it’s not articulated clearly just what system is being changed).

Taken individually or as a whole, these themes point to some of the ways in which systems change is a less-than-ideal paradigm for the work we need to get done:

1. It’s too hard to know to what degree systems change is or isn’t happening. It may be the case that “not everything that matters can be counted,” but most of the stuff that matters can, and it’s hard to get better at something if you’re unable to measure it. But these words of a so-called expert on systems change measurement are typical of what I’ve seen in in the literature: “Measuring systems change is about detecting patterns in the connections between the parts. It is about qualitative changes in the structure of the system, about its adaptiveness and resilience, about synergies emerging from collective efforts—and more…”

Like I said, it’s too hard to know to what is or isn’t happening.

2. “Root cause” thinking can—paradoxically—bog down progress. “Root cause” analysis is a common feature of most systems change discussions, and it’s a wonderful tool to generate ideas and avoid unintended consequences. However, broad efforts to tackle all of a problem’s root causes can turn anything into a complicated, hard-to-replicate project. It can also make things look so overwhelming as to result in a kind of paralysis. And however successful a systems change effort might be, that complication makes it hard to replicate, and you’re often stuck with a one-off project….(More)”.

Re-Thinking Think Tanks: Differentiating Knowledge-Based Policy Influence Organizations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Adam Wellstead and Michael P. Howlett: “The idea of “think tanks” is one of the oldest in the policy sciences. While the topic has been studied for decades, however, recent work dealing with advocacy groups, policy and Behavioural Insight labs, and into the activities of think tanks themselves have led to discontent with the definitions used in the field, and especially with the way the term may obfuscate rather than clarify important distinctions between different kinds of knowledge-based policy influence organizations (KBPIO). In this paper, we examine the traditional and current definitions of think tanks utilized in the discipline and point out their weaknesses. We then develop a new framework to better capture the variation in such organizations which operate in many sectors….(More)”.

Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Innovation in Real Places – Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World - Oxford Scholarship Online

Book by Dan Breznitz: “Across the world, cities and regions have wasted trillions of dollars blindly copying the Silicon Valley model of growth creation. We have lived with this system for decades, and the result is clear: a small number of regions and cities are at the top of the high-tech industry, but many more are fighting a losing battle to retain economic dynamism. But, as this books details, there are other models for innovation-based growth that don’t rely on a flourishing high-tech industry. Breznitz argues that the purveyors of the dominant ideas on innovation have a feeble understanding of the big picture on global production and innovation.

They conflate innovation with invention and suffer from techno-fetishism. In their devotion to start-ups, they refuse to admit that the real obstacle to growth for most cities is the overwhelming power of the real hubs, which siphon up vast amounts of talent and money. Communities waste time, money, and energy pursuing this road to nowhere. Instead, Breznitz proposes that communities focus on where they fit within the four stages in the global production process. Success lies in understanding the changed structure of the global system of production and then using those insights to enable communities to recognize their own advantages, which in turn allows to them to foster surprising forms of specialized innovation. All localities have certain advantages relative to at least one stage of the global production process, and the trick is in recognizing it….(More)”.

The Co-Creation Compass: From Research to Action.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Brief by Jill Dixon et al: ” Modern public administrations face a wider range of challenges than in the past, from designing effective social services that help vulnerable citizens to regulating data sharing between banks and fintech startups to ensure competition and growth to mainstreaming gender policies effectively across the departments of a large public administration.

These very different goals have one thing in common. To be solved, they require collaboration with other entities – citizens, companies and other public administrations and departments. The buy-in of these entities is the factor determining success or failure in achieving the goals. To help resolve this problem, social scientists, researchers and students of public administration have devised several novel tools, some of which draw heavily on the most advanced management thinking of the last decade.

First and foremost is co-creation – an awkward sounding word for a relatively simple idea: the notion that better services can be designed and delivered by listening to users, by creating feedback loops where their success (or failure) can be studied, by frequently innovating and iterating incremental improvements through small-scale experimentation so they can deliver large-scale learnings and by ultimately involving users themselves in designing the way these services can be made most effective and best be delivered.

Co-creation tools and methods provide a structured manner for involving users, thereby maximising the probability of satisfaction, buy-in and adoption. As such, co-creation is not a digital tool; it is a governance tool. There is little doubt that working with citizens in re-designing the online service for school registration will boost the usefulness and effectiveness of the service. And failing to do so will result in yet another digital service struggling to gain adoption….(More)”

Tracking Economic Activity in Response to the COVID-19 using nighttime Lights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mark Roberts: “Over the last decade, nighttime lights – artificial lighting at night that is associated with human activity and can be detected by satellite sensors – have become a proxy for monitoring economic activity. To examine how the COVID-19 crisis has affected economic activity in Morocco, we calculated monthly lights estimates for both the country overall and at a sub-national level. By examining the intensity of Morocco’s lights in comparison with the quarterly GDP data at the national level, we are also able to confirm that nighttime lights are able to track movements in real economic activity for Morocco….(More)”.

Budget transparency and governance quality: a cross-country analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marco Bisogno and Beatriz Cuadrado-Ballesteros: “The aim of this study is to assess whether there is a relationship between budget transparency and governance quality. The so-called openness movement and the global financial crises, which have put significant pressure on governments to cut expenditures and ensure balanced budgets, have motivated this research. The public choice and principal-agent theories have been used to investigate this relationship, implementing econometric models based on a sample of 96 countries over the period 2008–2019. The results show that higher levels of budget transparency positively affect the quality of governance, and vice versa, documenting simultaneous causality between both issues….(More)”

Foundations of complexity economics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by W. Brian Arthur: “Conventional, neoclassical economics assumes perfectly rational agents (firms, consumers, investors) who face well-defined problems and arrive at optimal behaviour consistent with — in equilibrium with — the overall outcome caused by this behaviour. This rational, equilibrium system produces an elegant economics, but is restrictive and often unrealistic. Complexity economics relaxes these assumptions. It assumes that agents differ, that they have imperfect information about other agents and must, therefore, try to make sense of the situation they face. Agents explore, react and constantly change their actions and strategies in response to the outcome they mutually create. The resulting outcome may not be in equilibrium and may display patterns and emergent phenomena not visible to equilibrium analysis. The economy becomes something not given and existing but constantly forming from a developing set of actions, strategies and beliefs — something not mechanistic, static, timeless and perfect but organic, always creating itself, alive and full of messy vitality….(More)”.

Data Is Power: Washington Needs to Craft New Rules for the Digital Age

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Slaughter and David McCormick at Foreign Affairs: “…Working with all willing and like-minded nations, it should seek a structure for data that maximizes its immense economic potential without sacrificing privacy and individual liberty. This framework should take the form of a treaty that has two main parts.

First would be a set of binding principles that would foster the cross-border flow of data in the most data-intensive sectors—such as energy, transportation, and health care. One set of principles concerns how to value data and determine where it was generated. Just as traditional trade regimes require goods and services to be priced and their origins defined, so, too, must this framework create a taxonomy to classify data flows by value and source. Another set of principles would set forth the privacy standards that governments and companies would have to follow to use data. (Anonymizing data, made easier by advances in encryption and quantum computing, will be critical to this step.) A final principle, which would be conditional on achieving the other two, would be to promote as much cross-border and open flow of data as possible. Consistent with the long-established value of free trade, the parties should, for example, agree to not levy taxes on data flows—and diligently enforce that rule. And they would be wise to ensure that any negative impacts of open data flows, such as job losses or reduced wages, are offset through strong programs to help affected workers adapt to the digital economy.

Such standards would benefit every sector they applied to. Envision, for example, dozens of nations with data-sharing arrangements for autonomous vehicles, oncology treatments, and clean-tech batteries. Relative to their experience in today’s Balkanized world, researchers would be able to discover more data-driven innovations—and in more countries, rather than just in those that already have a large presence in these industries.

The second part of the framework would be free-trade agreements regulating the capital goods, intermediate inputs, and final goods and services of the targeted sectors, all in an effort to maximize the gains that might arise from data-driven innovations. Thus would the traditional forces of comparative advantage and global competition help bring new self-driving vehicles, new lifesaving chemotherapy compounds, and new sources of renewable energy to participating countries around the world. 

There is already a powerful example of such agreements. In 1996, dozens of countries accounting for nearly 95 percent of world trade in information technology ratified the Information Technology Agreement, a multilateral trade deal under the WTO. The agreement ultimately eliminated all tariffs for hundreds of IT-related capital goods, intermediate inputs, and final products—from machine tools to motherboards to personal computers. The agreement proved to be an important impetus for the subsequent wave of the IT revolution, a competitive spur that led to productivity gains for firms and price declines for consumers….(More)”.