Agnes Batory & Sara Svensson at Policy and Politics: “Involving people in policy-making is generally a good thing. Policy-makers themselves often pay at least lip-service to the importance of giving citizens a say. In the academic literature, participatory governance has been, with some exaggeration, almost universally hailed as a panacea to all ills in Western democracies. In particular, it is advocated as a way to remedy the alienation of voters from politicians who seem to be oblivious to the concerns of the common man and woman, with an ensuing decline in public trust in government. Representation by political parties is ridden with problems, so the argument goes, and in any case it is overly focused on the act of voting in elections – a one-off event once every few years which limits citizens’ ability to control the policy agenda. On the other hand, various forms of public participation are expected to educate citizens, help develop a civic culture, and boost the legitimacy of decision-making. Consequently, practices to ensure that citizens can provide direct input into policy-making are to be welcomed on both pragmatic and normative grounds.
I do not disagree with these generally positive expectations. However, the main objective of my recent article in Policy and Politics, co-authored with Sara Svensson, is to inject a dose of healthy scepticism into the debate or, more precisely, to show that there are circumstances in which public consultations will achieve anything but greater legitimacy and better policy-outcomes. We do this partly by discussing the more questionable assumptions in the participatory governance literature, and partly by examining a recent, glaring example of the misuse, and abuse, of popular input….(More)”.
Camilo Romero Galeano at apolitical: “…According to the 2016 Corruption Perception Index analysing the behaviour of 178 countries, 69% of countries evaluated again raised the alarm about what has been referred to as “the cancer of the public service”.
The scandals of misappropriation of public funds, illicit enrichment of public officials, the slippery labyrinths of procurement and all kinds of practices that challenge ethics in the public service are daily news around the world.
Colombia and the department of Nariño suffer from the same problems. Bad practices of traditional politics and chiefdoms have ended up destroying the trust that citizens once had in political institutions. Corruption and its devastating effects always end up undermining people’s dignity.
With this as the current state of affairs, and in our capacity as a subnational government, we have designed hand in hand with the citizens of Nariño a new government program. It is based on an approach to innovation called “New Government” that relies on three pillars: open government; social innovation; and collaborative economy.
The new program has been endorsed by more than 300,000 voters and subsequently concretised in our roadmap for the territory: “Nariño heart of the World”. The creation of this policy document brought together 31,700 participants and involved travelling around the 13 subregions that compose the 64 municipalities in Nariño.
In this way, citizen participation has become an essential tool in the fight against corruption.
Our open government strategy is called GANA — Gobierno Abierto de Nariño (in English, “Win — Open Government of Nariño”). The strategy takes a step forward in ensuring cabinet officials become transparent and publicly declare private assets. Citizens can now find out the financial conditions in which public officials begin and finish their administrative periods. Each one of us….(More)”
Paper by Tamar Ziff and Maria Fernanda Pérez Argüello: “Across the Americas, corruption scandals have eroded citizens’ trust in their governing officials and institutions, leading elected leaders to promise they will root out graft. Against this backdrop of a growing citizen backlash against corruption, the Peruvian government designated “Democratic Governance against Corruption” as the central theme of the 2018 Summit of the Americas—the triennial meeting of heads of state from countries in the Americas. The Summit produced a Lima Declaration with 57 concrete actions to strengthen the fight against corruption in the Americas, including one–Commitment 17–specifically dedicated to promoting the use of new technologies to promote transparency and government accountability.
A new report by the Inter-American Dialogue’s Peter D. Bell Rule of Law program and the Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center at the Atlantic Council aims to advance Commitment 17 by examining the promise of tech solutions to assist the fight against corruption, specifically in public procurement. The report provides examples of a number of such solutions, as well as identifying obstacles to their more widespread adoption and proposing appropriate policy responses….(More)”
Book (New Second Edition) by Peter John, Sarah Cotterill, Alice Moseley, Liz Richardson, Graham Smith, Gerry Stoker and Corinne Wales: “How can governments persuade their citizens to act in socially beneficial ways? This ground-breaking book builds on the idea of ‘light touch interventions’ or ‘nudges’ proposed in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s highly influential Nudge (2008). While recognising the power of this approach, it argues that an alternative also needs to be considered: a ‘think’ strategy that calls on citizens to decide their own priorities as part of a process of civic and democratic renewal. As well as setting out these divergent approaches in theory, the book provides evidence from a number of experiments to show how using ‘nudge’ or ‘think’ techniques works in practice.
Updated and rewritten, this second edition features a new epilogue that reflects on recent developments in nudge theory and practice, introducing a radical version of nudge, ‘nudge plus’. There is also a substantial prologue by Cass Sunstein….(More)”.
Report by Michael Christopher Jelenic: “Open data and open government data have recently attracted much attention as a means to innovate, add value, and improve outcomes in a variety of sectors, public and private. Although some of the benefits of open data initiatives have been assessed in the past, particularly their economic and financial returns, it is often more difficult to evaluate their social and political impacts. In the public sector, a murky theory of change has emerged that links the use of open government data with greater government accountability as well as improved service delivery in key sectors, including health and education, among others. In the absence of cross-country empirical research on this topic, this paper asks the following: Based on the evidence available, to what extent and for what reasons is the use of open government data associated with higher levels of accountability and improved service delivery in developing countries?
To answer this question, the paper constructs a unique data set that operationalizes open government data, government accountability, service delivery, as well as other intervening and control variables. Relying on data from 25 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the paper finds a number of significant associations between open government data, accountability, and service delivery. However, the findings suggest differentiated effects of open government data across the health and education sectors, as well as with respect to service provision and service delivery outcomes. Although this early research has limitations and does not attempt to establish a purely causal relationship between the variables, it provides initial empirical support for claims about the efficacy of open government data for improving accountability and service delivery….(More)”
Book by Ronald M. Glassman: “…This book focuses on the processes that help stabilize democracy. It provides a socio-historical analysis of the future prospects of democracy.
The link between advanced capitalism and democracy is emphasized, focusing on contract law and the separation of the economy from the state. The book also emphasizes the positive effects of the scientific world view on legal- rational authority. Aristotle’s theory of the majority middle class and its stabilizing effect on democracy is highlighted.
This book describes the face to face democracies of the past in order to give us a better perspective on the high tech democracies of the future, making it appealing to students and academics in the political and social sciences….(More)”.
Privy Council Office (Canada): “…This document is intended to be both an accessible introduction to the topic, as well as a reference for those involved in the design, delivery, procurement or appraisal of impact measurement strategies for Impact Canada projects. Drawing on best practices, Measuring Impact by Design was written to guide its readers to think differently about measuring impact than we have traditionally done within the federal public service.
In its role leading Impact Canada as a whole-of-government effort, the IIU works with an ever-expanding network of partners to deliver a range of innovative, outcomes-based program approaches. We are aware that program spending is an investment that we are making on behalf of, and directly for Canadians, and we need to place a greater emphasis on understanding what differences these investments make in improving the lives of citizens. That means we need a better understanding of what works, for whom, and in what contexts; and we need a better understanding of what kinds of investments are likely to maximize the social, economic and environmental returns we seek.
“We are aware that program spending is an investment that we are making on behalf of, and directly for Canadians, and we need to place a greater emphasis on understanding what differences these investments make in improving the lives of citizens.”
Good impact measurement practices are fundamental to these understandings and it is incumbent upon us to be rigorous in our efforts. We recognize that we are still building our capacity in government deliver on these approaches. It is why we built flexibility within Impact Canada authorities to use grants and contributions to fund research organizations with expertise in the kinds of techniques outlined in this guide. We encourage our partner departments to consider taking up these flexibilities.
Measuring Impact by Design is one of a number of supports that the IIU provides to deliver on its commitment to improve measurement practices for Impact Canada. We look forward to continued collaboration with our partners in the delivery of these important outcomes-based approaches across the public sector….(More)”.
Jane C.Hu in P/S Magazine: “…But just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical. That doesn’t mean it’s necessarily unethical, either, but it’s worth asking questions about how and why researchers use social media posts, and whether those uses could be harmful. I was once a researcher who had to obtain human-subjects approval from a university institutional review board, and I know it can be a painstaking application process with long wait times. Collecting data from individuals takes a long time too. If you could just sub in YouTube videos in place of collecting your own data, that saves time, money, and effort. But that could be at the expense of the people whose data you’re scraping.
But, you might say, if people don’t want to be studied online, then they shouldn’t post anything. But most people don’t fully understand what “publicly available” really means or its ramifications. “You might know intellectually that technically anyone can see a tweet, but you still conceptualize your audience as being your 200 Twitter followers,” Fiesler says. In her research, she’s found that the majority of people she’s polled have no clue that researchers study public tweets.
Some may disagree that it’s researchers’ responsibility to work around social media users’ ignorance, but Fiesler and others are calling for their colleagues to be more mindful about any work that uses publicly available data. For instance, Ashley Patterson, an assistant professor of language and literacy at Penn State University, ultimately decided to use YouTube videos in her dissertation work on biracial individuals’ educational experiences. That’s a decision she arrived at after carefully considering her options each step of the way. “I had to set my own levels of ethical standards and hold myself to it, because I knew no one else would,” she says. One of Patterson’s first steps was to ask herself what YouTube videos would add to her work, and whether there were any other ways to collect her data. “It’s not a matter of whether it makes my life easier, or whether it’s ‘just data out there’ that would otherwise go to waste. The nature of my question and the response I was looking for made this an appropriate piece [of my work],” she says.
Researchers may also want to consider qualitative, hard-to-quantify contextual cues when weighing ethical decisions. What kind of data is being used? Fiesler points out that tweets about, say, a television show are way less personal than ones about a sensitive medical condition. Anonymized written materials, like Facebook posts, could be less invasive than using someone’s face and voice from a YouTube video. And the potential consequences of the research project are worth considering too. For instance, Fiesler and other critics have pointed out that researchers who used YouTube videos of people documenting their experience undergoing hormone replacement therapy to train an artificial intelligence to identify trans people could be putting their unwitting participants in danger. It’s not obvious how the results of Speech2Face will be used, and, when asked for comment, the paper’s researchers said they’d prefer to quote from their paper, which pointed to a helpful purpose: providing a “representative face” based on the speaker’s voice on a phone call. But one can also imagine dangerous applications, like doxing anonymous YouTubers.
One way to get ahead of this, perhaps, is to take steps to explicitly inform participants their data is being used. Fiesler says that, when her team asked people how they’d feel after learning their tweets had been used for research, “not everyone was necessarily super upset, but most people were surprised.” They also seemed curious; 85 percent of participants said that, if their tweet were included in research, they’d want to read the resulting paper. “In human-subjects research, the ethical standard is informed consent, but inform and consent can be pulled apart; you could potentially inform people without getting their consent,” Fiesler suggests….(More)”.
Stefaan Verhulst at apolitical: “…While the overarching message emerging from these case studies was promising, several barriers were identified that if not addressed systematically could undermine the potential of data science to address critical public needs and limit the opportunity to scale the practice more broadly.
Below we summarise the five priorities that emerged through the workshop for the field moving forward.
1. Become People-Centric
Much of the data currently used for drawing insights involve or are generated by people.
These insights have the potential to impact people’s lives in many positive and negative ways. Yet, the people and the communities represented in this data are largely absent when practitioners design and develop data for social good initiatives.
To ensure data is a force for positive social transformation (i.e., they address real people’s needs and impact lives in a beneficiary way), we need to experiment with new ways to engage people at the design, implementation, and review stage of data initiatives beyond simply asking for their consent.
As we explain in our People-Led Innovation methodology, different segments of people can play multiple roles ranging from co-creation to commenting, reviewing and providing additional datasets.
The key is to ensure their needs are front and center, and that data science for social good initiatives seek to address questions related to real problems that matter to society-at-large (a key concern that led The GovLab to instigate 100 Questions Initiative).
2. Establish Data About the Use of Data (for Social Good)
Many data for social good initiatives remain fledgling.
As currently designed, the field often struggles with translating sound data projects into positive change. As a result, many potential stakeholders—private sector and government “owners” of data as well as public beneficiaries—remain unsure about the value of using data for social good, especially against the background of high risks and transactions costs.
The field needs to overcome such limitations if data insights and its benefits are to spread. For that, we need hard evidence about data’s positive impact. Ironically, the field is held back by an absence of good data on the use of data—a lack of reliable empirical evidence that could guide new initiatives.
The field needs to prioritise developing a far more solid evidence base and “business case” to move data for social good from a good idea to reality.
3. Develop End-to-End Data Initiatives
Too often, data for social good focus on the “data-to-knowledge” pipeline without focusing on how to move “knowledge into action.”
As such, the impact remains limited and many efforts never reach an audience that can actually act upon the insights generated. Without becoming more sophisticated in our efforts to provide end-to-end projects and taking “data from knowledge to action,” the positive impact of data will be limited….
4. Invest in Common Trust and Data Steward Mechanisms
For data for social good initiatives (including data collaboratives) to flourish and scale, there must be substantial trust between all parties involved; and amongst the public-at-large.
Establishing such a platform of trust requires each actor to invest in developing essential trust mechanisms such as data governance structures, contracts, and dispute resolution methods. Today, designing and establishing these mechanisms take tremendous time, energy, and expertise. These high transaction costs result from the lack of common templates and the need to each time design governance structures from scratch…
5. Build Bridges Across Cultures
As C.P. Snow famously described in his lecture on “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” we must bridge the “two cultures” of science and humanism if we are to solve the world’s problems….
To implement these five priorities we will need experimentation at the operational but also institutional level. This involves the establishment of “data stewards” within organisations that can accelerate data for social good initiative in a responsible manner integrating the five priorities above….(More)”
Carlos Torres Vila in the Financial Times: “Data is now driving the global economy — just look at the list of the world’s most valuable companies. They collect and exploit the information that users generate through billions of online interactions taking place every day.
But companies are hoarding data too, preventing others, including the users to whom the data relates, from accessing and using it. This is true of traditional groups such as banks, telcos and utilities, as well as the large digital enterprises that rely on “proprietary” data. Global and national regulators must address this problem by forcing companies to give users an easy way to share their own data, if they so choose. This is the logical consequence of personal data belonging to users. There is also the potential for enormous socio-economic benefits if we can create consent-based free data flows. We need data-sharing across companies in all sectors in a real time, standardised way — not at a speed and in a format dictated by the companies that stockpile user data. These new rules should apply to all electronic data generated by users, whether provided directly or observed during their online interactions with any provider, across geographic borders and in any sector. This could include everything from geolocation history and electricity consumption to recent web searches, pension information or even most recently played songs.
This won’t be easy to achieve in practice, but the good news is that we already have a framework that could be the model for a broader solution. The UK’s Open Banking system provides a tantalising glimpse of what may be possible. In Europe, the regulation known as the Payment Services Directive 2 allows banking customers to share data about their transactions with multiple providers via secure, structured IT interfaces. We are already seeing this unlock new business models and drive competition in digital financial services. But these rules do not go far enough — they only apply to payments history, and that isn’t enough to push forward a data-driven economic revolution across other sectors of the economy.
We need a global framework with common rules across regions and sectors. This has already happened in financial services: after the 2008 financial crisis, the G20 strengthened global banking standards and created the Financial Stability Board. The rules, while not perfect, have delivered uniformity which has strengthened the system.
We need a similar global push for common rules on the use of data. While it will be difficult to achieve consensus on data, and undoubtedly more difficult still to implement and enforce it, I believe that now is the time to decide what we want. The involvement of the G20 in setting up global standards will be essential to realising the potential that data has to deliver a better world for all of us. There will be complaints about the cost of implementation. I know first hand how expensive it can be to simultaneously open up and protect sensitive core systems.
The alternative is siloed data that holds back innovation. There will also be justified concerns that easier data sharing could lead to new user risks. Security must be a non-negotiable principle in designing intercompany interfaces and protecting access to sensitive data. But Open Banking shows that these challenges are resolvable. …(More)”.
