The political and policy contexts for FOI have fundamentally shifted due to the rise of the open government reform agenda. FOI was at one point the primary tool used to promote governance transparency. FOI is now just one good governance tool in an increasingly crowded field of transparency policy areas.
Bureaucracy vs. Democracy
Philip Howard in The American Interest: “…For 50 years since the 1960s, modern government has been rebuilt on what I call the “philosophy of correctness.” The person making the decision must be able to demonstrate its correctness by compliance with a precise rule or metric, or by objective evidence in a trial-type proceeding. All day long, Americans are trained to ask themselves, “Can I prove that what I’m about to do is legally correct?”
In the age of individual rights, no one talks about the rights of institutions. But the disempowerment of institutional authority in the name of individual rights has led, ironically, to the disempowerment of individuals at every level of responsibility. Instead of striding confidently toward their goals, Americans tiptoe through legal minefields. In virtually every area of social interaction—schools, healthcare, business, public agencies, public works, entrepreneurship, personal services, community activities, nonprofit organizations, churches and synagogues, candor in the workplace, children’s play, speech on campus, and more—studies and reports confirm all the ways that sensible choices are prevented, delayed, or skewed by overbearing regulation, by an overemphasis on objective metrics,3 or by legal fear of violating someone’s alleged rights.
A Three-Part Indictment of Modern Bureaucracy
Reformers have promised to rein in bureaucracy for 40 years, and it’s only gotten more tangled. Public anger at government has escalated at the same time, and particularly in the past decade. While there’s a natural reluctance to abandon a bureaucratic structure that is well-intended, public anger is unlikely to be mollified until there is change, and populist solutions do not bode well for the future of democracy. Overhauling operating structures to permit practical governing choices would re-energize democracy as well as relieve the pressures Americans feel from Big Brother breathing down their necks.
Viewed in hindsight, the operating premise of modern bureaucracy was utopian and designed to fail. Here’s the three-part indictment of why we should abandon it.
1. The Economic Dysfunction of Modern Bureaucracy
Regulatory programs are indisputably wasteful, and frequently extract costs that exceed benefits. The total cost of compliance is high, about $2 trillion for federal regulation alone….
2. Bureaucracy Causes Cognitive Overload
The complex tangle of bureaucratic rules impairs a human’s ability to focus on the actual problem at hand. The phenomenon of the unhelpful bureaucrat, famously depicted in fiction by Dickens, Balzac, Kafka, Gogol, Heller, and others, has generally been characterized as a cultural flaw of the bureaucratic personality. But studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems. This overload not only impedes drawing on
3. Bureaucracy Subverts the Rule of Law
The purpose of
Configurations, Dynamics and Mechanisms of Multilevel Governance
Book edited by Nathalie Behnke, Jörg Broschek and Jared Sonnicksen: “This edited volume provides a comprehensive overview of the diverse and multi-faceted research on governance in multilevel systems. The book features a collection of cutting-edge trans-Atlantic contributions, covering topics such as federalism, decentralization as well as various forms and processes of regionalization and Europeanization. While the field of multilevel governance is comparatively young, research in the subject has also come of age as considerable theoretical, conceptual and empirical advances have been achieved since the first influential works were published in the early noughties. The present volume aims to gauge the state-of-the-art in the different research areas as it brings together a selection of original contributions that are united by a variety of configurations, dynamics
Smart Contracts and Their Identity Crisis
This is an over-simplification of the role of relationships, contract law, and risk. We believe there is a gap in the understanding of the capabilities of SC’s. With that in
Open Data Politics: A Case Study on Estonia and Kazakhstan
Book by Maxat Kassen: “… offers a cross-national comparison of open data policies in Estonia and Kazakhstan. By analyzing a broad range of open data-driven projects and startups in both countries, it reveals the potential that open data phenomena hold with regard to promoting public sector innovations. The book addresses various political and socioeconomic contexts in these two transitional
Thinking about GovTech: A brief guide for policymakers
Report by Tanya Filer: “If developed with care, the emergent GovTech ecosystem, in which start-ups and innovative small and medium enterprises (SMEs) provide innovative technology products and services to public sector clients, could contribute to achieving these objectives. Thinking about GovTech introduces the concept of GovTech and identifies eight activities that policymakers can undertake to foster national GovTech innovation ecosystems and help to steer them towards positive outcomes for citizens and public administrators. It suggests that policymakers:
1. Build the social and technical foundations for GovTech
2. Embed expectations of accountability at an ecosystem-wide level
3. Address GovTech procurement barriers
4. Ensure the provision of appropriate, and often patient, capital
5. Engage academia at each stage of the GovTech innovation lifecycle
6. Develop pipelines of technological talent, emphasising public sector problems and
opportunities
7. Build translator capacity within the public sector
8. Develop and utilise regional and international networks
Thinking about GovTech is the first GovTech guide written for a fully international audience of policymakers. It offers examples of emerging international policy and programme design and urges policymakers to think carefully about local context and capacity for implementation….(More)”.
Evidence vs Democracy: what are we doing to bridge the divide?
Jonathan Breckon, and Anna Hopkins at the Alliance for Useful E
The evidence movement must respond to the ‘politics of distrust’. We cannot carry on regardless. For evidence advocates like us, reaching over the heads of the public to get research into the hands of elite policy-makers is not enough. Let’s be honest and accept that a lot of our work goes on behind closed doors. The UK’s nine What Works Centres only rarely engage with the public – more often with professionals, budget holders or civil servants. The evidence movement needs to democratise.
However, the difficulty is that evidence is hard work. It needs slow-thinking, and at least a passing knowledge of statistics, economics, or science. How on earth can you do all that on Twitter or Facebook?
In a report published today we look at ‘mini-publics’ – an alternative democratic platform to connect citizens with research. Citizens’ Juries, Deliberative Polls, Consensus Conferences and other mini-publics are forums that bring people and evidence together, for constructive, considered debate. Ideally, people work in small groups, that are randomly chosen, and have the chance to interrogate experts in the field in question.
This is not a new idea. The idea of a ‘minipopulus’ was set out by the American political theorist Robert Dahl in the 1970s. Indeed, there is an even older heritage. Athenian classical democracy did for a time select small groups of officials by lot.
It’s also not a utopian idea from the past, as we have found many promising recent examples. For example in the UK, a Citizens’ Assembly on adult social care gave recommendations to two parliamentary Select Committees last year. There are also examples of citizens contributing to our public institutions and agendas by deliberating – through NICE’s Citizens Council or the James Lind Alliance.
We shouldn’t ignore this resistance to the mood of disaffection. Initiatives like the RSA’s Campaign for Deliberative Democracy are making the case for a step-change. To break the political deadlock on Brexit, there has been a call to create a Citizens’ Assembly on Brexit by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Stella Creasy MP and others. And there are many hopeful visions of a democratic future from abroad – like the experiments in Canada and Australia. Our report explores many of these international examples.
Citizens can make informed decisions – if we allow them to be citizens. They can understand, debate and interrogate research
How to use ‘design thinking’ to create better policy
Public Admin Explainer: “Public policies and programs are intended to improve the lives of citizens, so how can we ensure that they are as well-designed as possible?
In a recent article in Policy Design and Practice, ANZSOG’s Professor Michael Mintrom and Madeline Thomas explore the neglected connection between design thinking and the successful commissioning of public services.
Prof. Mintrom and
Design thinking encourages end-users, policy designers, central departments, and line agencies to work in a collaborative and iterative manner.
The most important skill for a design thinker is to “imagine the world from multiple perspectives – those of colleagues, clients, end-users, and customers”. This is where greater empathy for different perspectives emerges.
Design thinking does not start with a presumption of a known answer or even a well-defined problem. Through iterative ethnographic methods, design thinking can reduce gaps between the goals of policymaking and the experiences of citizens as they interact with government-funded services.
This kind of design thinking can be pursued through a range of techniques:
- Environment Scanning: This strategy explores present
behaviours of individuals and groups in given localities and the outcomes resulting from thosebehaviours . It also seeks to identify trends that may influence future outcomes. Used appropriately, it creates an evidence-based method of gathering,synthesising , and interpreting information, which can shift the attention of anorganisation towards new opportunities, threats, and potential blind spots. - Participant Observation: While environment scanning facilitates the broad exploration of an issue, observation requires engaging with people encountering specific problems. Participant observation can access tacit, otherwise, difficult-to-capture knowledge from subjects. This gives
policy makers the ability to notice significant and seemingly insignificant details to gather information. - Open-to-Learning Conversation: There is a common tendency, not limited to the public sector, for service-producing
organisations to limit choices for clients and make incremental adjustments. Problems are addressed using standard operating procedures that attempt to maintain predefined notions of order. Rather than just trying to find alternate strategies within an existing set of choices,policy makers should try and question the existing choice set. To achieve divergent thinking, it is important to have a diverse group of people involved in the process. Diverging thinking is less aboutanalysing existing options and more about the creation of new options and questioning the fundamental basis of existing structures. - Mapping: Mapping has long been used in policymaking to explore the links between mechanism design and implementation. A concept map can be used to develop a conceptual framework to guide evaluation or planning. Mapping allows the designer to
visualise how things connect and spot emerging patterns. This can be done by putting one idea, or user, at thecentre and then mapping how the other ideas and insights play off it. Journey mapping communicates the user experience from beginning to end and offersbroader , sophisticated, and holistic knowledge of that experience. This can be a very powerful antidote to complacency and a good way to challenge conventional thinking. - Sensemaking: The sensemaking perspective suggests that in organisational settings, much latitude exists in the interpretation of situations and events. Sensemaking requires connections to be forged between seemingly unrelated issues through a process of selective pruning and visual organisation. Dialogue is critical to sensemaking. Once data and insights have been
externalised – for example, in the form of post-it notes on the wall – designers can begin the more intellectual task of identifying explicit and implicit relationships….(More)”.
Privacy concerns collide with the public interest in data
Gillian Tett in the Financial Times: “Late last year Statistics Canada — the agency that collects government figures — launched an innovation: it asked the country’s banks to supply “individual-level financial transactions data” for 500,000 customers to allow it to track economic trends. The agency argued th
Corporate boards around the world should take note. In the past year, executive angst has exploded about the legal and reputational risks created when private customer data leak out, either by accident or in a cyber hack. Last year’s Facebook scandals have been a hot debating topic among chief executives at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, as has the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. However, there is another important side to this Big Data debate: must companies provide private digital data to public bodies for statistical and policy purposes? Or to put it another way, it is time to widen the debate beyond emotive privacy issues to include the public interest and policy needs. The issue has received little public debate thus far, except in Canada. But it is becoming increasingly important.
Companies are sitting on a treasure trove of digital data that offers valuable real-time signals about economic activity. This information could be even more significant than existing
But the biggest data collections sit inside private companies. Big groups know this, and some are trying to respond. Google has created its own measures to track inflation, which it makes publicly available. JPMorgan and other banks crunch customer data and publish reports about general economic and financial trends. Some tech groups are even starting to volunteer data to government bodies. LinkedIn has offered to provide
MIT Sloan study finds crowdsourcing an effective tool to fight spread of fake news
MIT Sloan Press Release: “Fake news isn’t a new problem, but it’s becoming a greater concern because of social media, where it is easily created and rapidly distributed. A recent study by MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. David Rand and Prof. Gordon Pennycook of the University of Regina finds there is a possible solution: crowdsourcing. As their research shows that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than outlets that create misinformation, social media platforms could use trust ratings to inform how they promote content.
“There has been a lot of research examining fake news and how it spreads, but this study is among the first to suggest a potential long-term solution, which is cause for measured optimism. If we can decrease the amount of misinformation spreading on social media, we can increase agreement on basic facts across political parties, which will hopefully lead to less political polarization and a greater ability to compromise on how to run the country,” says Rand. “It may also make it harder for individuals to win elections based on false claims.”
He notes that current solutions for fighting misinformation deployed by social media companies haven’t been that effective. For example, partnering with fact-checkers isn’t scalable because they can’t keep up with the rapid creation of false stories. Further, putting warnings on content found to be false can be counterproductive, because it makes misleading stories that didn’t get checked seem more accurate – the “implied truth” effect.
“Our study is good news because we find a scalable solution to this problem, based on the surprisingly good judgment of everyday Americans. Things may not be as hopeless as most coverage of fake news makes you think,” says Rand.
In their study, Rand and Pennycook examined whether crowdsourcing could work as an effective tool in fighting the spread of misinformation. They asked laypeople to rate familiarity with and trust in news sources across three categories: mainstream media outlets, hyper-partisan websites, and websites that produce blatantly false content (“fake news”). The pool of people surveyed was nationally representative across age, gender, ethnicity, and political affiliations. They also asked professional fact-checkers the same questions to compare responses.
They found that laypeople trust reputable news outlets more than those that create misinformation and that the trust ratings of the laypeople surveyed closely matched the trust ratings of professional fact-checkers. “Our results show that laypeople are much better than many would have expected at knowing which outlets to trust,” says Rand. “Although there were clear partisan differences, with Republicans distrusting all mainstream outlets (except for Fox News) relative to Democrats, there was a remarkable consensus regarding non-mainstream outlets being untrustworthy.”…(More)”.