Prototyping for policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Camilla Buchanan at Policy Lab Blog: “…Prototyping is common in the product and industrial design process – it has also extended to less tangible design sub-specialisms like service design. Prototypes are low fidelity mockups of an imagined idea or solution and they allow for testing before implementation. A product can be tested in cardboard form, a website can be tested through a hand drawn wireframe, a service interaction can be tested with roleplay….

Policy is a more hazy concept, it implies a message or statement of intent which sets a direction of work. Before a policy statement is made there will be some form of strategic conversation. In governments this usually takes place at the political level amongst ministers or within political parties and there is little scope for outsiders to enter these spaces. Policies set by elected officials tend to be high-level statements – as short as a line or two in a manifesto – expressed through speeches or other policy documents like White Papers.

A policy statement therefore expresses a goal and it sets in motion realisations of that goal through laws, programmes or other activities. A short policy statement can determine major programmes of government work for many years. Policy programmes have their own problem spaces to define and there is much to do in order to translate a policy goal into practical activities. Whether consciously or not, policy programmes touch the lives of millions of people and the unintended consequences or conflicting results from the enactment of poor policies can be extremely harmful. The potential benefits of testing policy goals before they are put in place are therefore huge.

The idea of design interacting directly with policy making has been explored in the last five or so years, and the first book on this subject was published in 2014. In government terms this work is very new and there is relatively little precision in current explanations. Prototyping for Policy made space to explore this better….

It is still early days for articulating exactly how and why the “physical making” aspect of design is so important in government contexts but almost all designers working in this way will emphasis it. An obvious benefit to building something real is that operational errors become more evident. And because prototypes make ideas manifest, they can help to build consensus or reveal where it is absent. They are also a way of asking questions and the presence of a prototype often prompts discussion of broader issues.

As an example, the picture below shows staff from the Service Design team at the consultancy OpenRoad in Vancouver considering advanced prototypes of changes to transit fare policy for the city for their client TransLink….(More).

Prototypes of changes to transit fares by OpenRoad

New methods help identify what drives sensitive or socially unacceptable behaviors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mary Guiden at Physorg: “Conservation scientists and statisticians at Colorado State University have teamed up to solve a key problem for the study of sensitive behaviors like poaching, harassment, bribery, and drug use.

Sensitive behaviors—defined as socially unacceptable or not compliant with rules and regulations—are notoriously hard to study, researchers say, because people often do not want to answer direct questions about them.

To overcome this challenge, scientists have developed indirect questioning approaches that protect responders’ identities. However, these methods also make it difficult to predict which sectors of a population are more likely to participate in sensitive behaviors, and which factors, such as knowledge of laws, education, or income, influence the probability that an individual will engage in a sensitive behavior.

Assistant Professor Jennifer Solomon and Associate Professor Michael Gavin of the Department of Human Dimensions of Natural Resources at CSU, and Abu Conteh from MacEwan University in Alberta, Canada, have teamed up with Professor Jay Breidt and doctoral student Meng Cao in the CSU Department of Statistics to develop a new method to solve the problem.

The study, “Understanding the drivers of sensitive behavior using Poisson regression from quantitative randomized response technique data,” was published recently in PLOS One.

Conteh, who, as a doctoral student, worked with Gavin in New Zealand, used a specific technique, known as quantitative randomized response, to elicit confidential answers to questions on behaviors related to non-compliance with natural resource regulations from a protected area in Sierra Leone.

In this technique, the researcher conducting interviews has a large container containing pingpong balls, some with numbers and some without numbers. The interviewer asks the respondent to pick a ball at random, without revealing it to the interviewer. If the ball has a number, the respondent tells the interviewer the number. If the ball does not have a number, the respondent reveals how many times he illegaly hunted animals in a given time period….

Armed with the new computer program, the scientists found that people from rural communities with less access to jobs in urban centers were more likely to hunt in the reserve. People in communities with a greater proportion people displaced by Sierra Leone’s 10-year civil war were also more likely to hunt illegally….(More)”

The researchers said that collaborating across disciplines was and is key to addressing complex problems like this one. It is commonplace for people to be noncompliant with rules and regulations and equally important for social scientists to analyze these behaviors….(More)”

Beyond GDP: Measuring What Counts for Economic and Social Performance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Book: “Metrics matter for policy and policy matters for well-being. In this report, the co-chairs of the OECD-hosted High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand, show how over-reliance on GDP as the yardstick of economic performance misled policy makers who did not see the 2008 crisis coming. When the crisis did hit, concentrating on the wrong indicators meant that governments made inadequate policy choices, with severe and long-lasting consequences for many people.

While GDP is the most well-known, and most powerful economic indicator, it can’t tell us everything we need to know about the health of countries and societies. In fact, it can’t even tell us everything we need to know about economic performance. We need to develop dashboards of indicators that reveal who is benefitting from growth, whether that growth is environmentally sustainable, how people feel about their lives, what factors contribute to an individual’s or a country’s success. This book looks at progress made over the past 10 years in collecting well-being data, and in using them to inform policies. An accompanying volume, For Good Measure: Advancing Research on Well-being Metrics Beyond GDP, presents the latest findings from leading economists and statisticians on selected issues within the broader agenda on defining and measuring well-being….(More)”

Our bold vision for Australia’s digital future

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Speech by Minister for Human Services and Digital Transformation, Michael Keenan: ” …The job of the Australian Government is to keep Australia at the forefront of these changes and work to utilise digital advances for the good of the whole population….

This is the most exciting story in town. Digital transformation will change how government does things for you. It will mean much less red tape and much more responsive policy. It means we can harness data to deliver social and economic benefits. It will mean the government can be there whenever you need us, but we will stay out of your way when you don’t, so you can go about your life with minimal interference….

To power this transformation forward I am very pleased to announce today the launch of our Digital Transformation Strategy. This Strategy sets out a bold vision for Australia to remain in the top 3 digital governments in the world by 2025..

The Strategy will provide a clear direction for our work on data and digital transformation, with the aim to have all government services available digitally in the next 7 years.

The Strategy is accompanied by a comprehensive Roadmap of key projects and milestones being rolled out over the next two years….

Our new approach is to design services that respond to common life events — like having a baby or starting a new job.

This is a big change from the way we do things now, where a member of the public has to go to any number of government departments, online or community groups to find information and services.

We currently organise government around our imperatives and needs, but in the future we will organise it around yours….

For example, digital technology will make it possible to deliver a fully personalised digital assistant.

That means that everyone accessing government services may have access to their own dedicated, personal avatar assistant, that can talk in their language, know their preferences, understand their needs and provide a familiar face to dealing with the government.

This is not science-fiction. In fact, a couple of years ago, my department had a prototype – Nadia – that was world leading.

Unfortunately, Nadia wasn’t quite ready at the time to deliver on the promise, but technology is evolving rapidly. I am confident that the day when such assistants will be around us – both in government and in private enterprise – is not that far away.

We already see smart assistants in our lives, whether it’s Siri and Cortana in our phones and computers, or Amazon’s Alexa or Google in our homes.

Having your own dedicated government digital assistant also means that, as a government, we will be able to deliver truly personalised services.

While we are starting with re-focusing government services around life events, our ambition is to end up offering you tailored support when you need it, based on your individual circumstances….(More)”.

See also: Digital Transformation Strategy.


Fostering innovation in public procurement through public private partnerships

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Nunzia Carbonara in the Journal of Public Procurement: “The prevailing view in the studies on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) is that PPPs can improve the quality and efficiency of infrastructure services and facilitates innovation in infrastructure developments. Although researchers highlight the potentiality of PPP models for stimulating innovation, they do not prove whether and in which conditions the PPP model is capable of developing innovative solutions. This paper aims to provide answers to the following key research questions: Which are the PPP features that favor innovation? How properly structure a PPP to foster innovation?

With this aim, drawing upon the main streams of studies on innovation, the authors develop a conceptual framework that identifies the PPP features that can influence the innovativeness. Second, they define how these PPP features have to be structured to foster innovation.

The authors find that a wider involvement of the private sector will increase the level of innovation. The industry structure exerts opposite forces on innovation: the dominance of large-sized firms is positively related to innovative output, whereas the market concentration negatively affects innovation. Performance-based contracts should be used in the context of PPP instead of traditional contracts. Finally, the authors find that, to fully exploit the networking effects on innovation, cooperation and trusting among partners involved in PPPs should be enhanced….(More)”.

The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD: Today, the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) is pleased to announce the release of The Innovation System of the Public Service of Canada, the first of the OECD’s reviews of a national public sector innovation system….Some of the key findings and observations from the report include:

  • The Government of Canada starts with a strong base, having a long demonstrated history of innovation. The civil service also has a longstanding awareness and appreciation of the need for innovation.
  • There has been an ongoing recognition that the Public Service of Canada needs to continue to adapt and be responsive. Respective Clerks (the Heads of the Public Service) have repeatedly identified the need to go further.
  • Much of the ‘low-hanging’ fruit (i.e. activities to support public sector innovation such as awards, efforts to remove hurdles, introduction of new tools) has already been picked, but this is unlikely to lead to long term sustainability.
  • The innovation system is still relatively fragmented, in that most actors are experiencing the same system in different ways. New approaches are needed.
  • The Canadian Public Service has made some significant steps towards a more systemic approach to public sector innovation. However, it is likely that without continuous efforts and direction the innovation system will not be able to consistently and reliably contribute to the delivery of the best outcomes for citizens.

Given that much is still being learnt about public sector innovation, the report avoids a prescriptive approach as to what should be done. It identifies potential areas of intervention, but recognises that the context will continue to evolve, and that the specific actions taken should be matched to the ambitions and intent of the Public Service of Canada.

An innovation system is made up of many parts and contributed to by many actors. The effectiveness of the innovation system – i.e. its ability to consistently and reliably develop and deliver innovative solutions that contribute to achieving the goals and priorities of the government – will depend on collective effort, involving action from different actors at the individual, organisational, and system levels.

While a range of options are put forward, the aim of this review, and the guidance included within it, is to help provide a reflection of the system so that all actors can see themselves within it. This can provide a contribution to the ongoing discussion and deliberation about what the collective aim for innovation is within the Public Service of Canada, and how everyone can play a part, and be supported in that….(More)”.

Library of Congress Launches Crowdsourcing Platform

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Enis at the Library Journal: “The Library of Congress (LC) last month launched crowd.loc.gov, a new crowdsourcing platform that will improve discovery and access to the Library’s digital collections with the help of volunteer transcription and tagging. The project kicked off with the “Letters to Lincoln Challenge,” a campaign encouraging volunteers to transcribe 10,000 digitized versions of documents written by or to Abraham Lincoln, which will make these materials full-text searchable for the first time….

The new project is the earliest example of LC’s new Digital Strategy, which complements the library’s new 2019–23 strategic plan. Announced in October, the strategic plan, “Enriching the User Experience,” outlines four high-level goals—expanding access, enhancing services, optimizing resources, and measuring results—while the digital strategy outlines how LC plans to accomplish these goals with its digital resources, described as “throwing open the treasure chest, connecting, and investing in our future”…

LC aims to use crowdsourcing to enrich the user experience in two key ways, Zwaard said.

“First, it helps with the legibility of our collections,” she explained. “The Library of Congress is home to so many historic treasures, but the handwriting can be hard to read…. For example, we have this amazing letter from Abraham Lincoln to his first fiancée. It’s really quite lovely, but at a glance, if you’re not familiar with historic handwriting, it’s hard to read.”…

Second, crowdsourcing “invites people into the collections,” she added. “The library is very optimized around answering specific research questions. One of the things we’re thinking about is how to serve users who don’t have a specific research question—who just want to see all of the cool stuff. We have so much cool stuff! But it can be hard for people to find purchase when they are just browsing and don’t have anything specific in mind. One of the ways we can [showcase interesting content] is by offering them a window into the collections by asking for their help.”…

To facilitate ongoing engagement with these varied projects, LC has set up an online forum on History Hub, a site hosted by the National Archives, to encourage crowd.loc.gov participants to ask questions, discuss projects, and meet other volunteers. …

Crowd.loc.gov is not LC’s first crowdsourcing project. Followers of the library’s official Flickr account have added tens of thousands of descriptive tags to digitized historical photos since the account debuted in 2007. And last year, the debut of labs.loc.gov—which aims to encourage creative use of LOC’s digital collections—included the Beyond Words crowdsourcing project developed by LC software developer Tong Wang….(More)”

Nudging compliance in government: A human-centered approach to public sector program design

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Michelle Cho, Joshua Schoop, Timothy Murphy: “What are the biggest challenges facing government? Bureaucracy? Gridlock? A shrinking pool of resources?

Chances are compliance—when people act in accordance with preset rules, policies, and/or expectations—doesn’t top the list for many. Yet maybe it should. Compliance touches nearly every aspect of public policy implementation. Over the past 10 years, US government spending on compliance reached US$7.5 billion.

Even the most sophisticated and well-planned policies often require cooperation and input from real humans to be successful. From voluntary tax filing at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to reducing greenhouse emissions at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to achieving the public policy outcomes decision-makers intend, compliance is fundamental.

Consider these examples of noncompliance and their costs:

  • Taxes. By law, the IRS requires all income-earning, eligible constituents to file and pay their owed taxes. Tax evasion—the illegal nonpayment or underpayment of tax—cost the federal government an average of US$458 billion per year between 2008 and 2010.3 The IRS believes it will recover just 11 percent of the amount lost in that time frame.
  • The environment. The incorrect disposal of recyclable materials has cost more than US$744 million in the state of Washington since 2009.4 The city audit in San Diego found that 76 percent of materials disposed of citywide are recyclable and estimates that those recyclables could power 181,000 households for a year or conserve 3.4 million barrels of oil.5

Those who fail to comply with these rules could face direct and indirect consequences, including penalties and even jail time. Yet a significant subset of the population still behaves in a noncompliant manner. Why?

Behavioral sciences offer some clues. Through the combination of psychology, economics, and neuroscience, behavioral sciences demonstrate that people do not always do what is asked of them, even when it seems in their best interest to do so. Often, people choose a noncompliant path because of one of these reasons: They are unaware of their improper behavior, they find the “right” choice is too complex to decipher, or they simply are not intrinsically motivated to make the compliant choice.

For any of these reasons, when a cognitive hurdle emerges, some people resort to noncompliant behavior. But these hurdles can be overcome. Policymakers can use these same behavioral insights to understand why noncompliance occurs and alternatively, employ behavioral-inspired tools to encourage compliant behavior in a more agile and resource-efficient fashion.

In this spirit, leaders can take a more human-centered approach to program design by using behavioral science lessons to develop policies and programs in a manner that can make compliance easier and more appealing. In our article, we discuss three common reasons behind noncompliance and how better, more human-centered design can help policymakers achieve more positive results….(More)”.

Advancing Open Data for Open Governance in Asia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael P. Cañares: “The record of countries in the region in terms of transparency and accountability is dismal. In the latest Corruption Perceptions Index released by Transparency International, more than half of the country in the region scored below 50, with at least a quarter of these are countries considered with systemic corruption problems. Nevertheless, there have been significant attempts of several countries to install transparency measures and project a commitment towards greater openness. At least a dozen of countries has right to information laws that provide citizens’ fundamental access to government information and several have installed open data policies and are implementing e-government programs or practices. But access of citizens to data and information to hold governments to account, demand for better services, and strengthen citizen participation in governance remain elusive.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. OGP’s vision is that more governments become more transparent, more accountable, and more responsive to their own citizens, with the goal of improving the quality of governance, as well as the quality of services that citizens receive. Since its inception in 2011, OGP today brings together 75 countries and 15 subnational governments with over 2,500 commitments to make their governments more open and accountable. In Asia, only the governments of Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Korea are participating countries along with two subnational pilots, Seoul and Bojonegoro. These governments have launched initiatives to involve citizens in the planning and budgeting processes, proactively disclose budget and other public financial information, and engage citizens in monitoring of public service delivery. But these countries remain the exception rather than the norm….(More)”.

Quantum Information Science: Applications, Global Research and Development, and Policy Considerations

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Report from the Congressional Research Service: “Quantum information science (QIS) combines elements of mathematics, computer science, engineering, and physical sciences, and has the potential to provide capabilities far beyond what is possible with the most advanced technologies available today.
Although much of the press coverage of QIS has been devoted to quantum computing, there is more to QIS. Many experts divide QIS technologies into three application areas:

  • Sensing and metrology,
  • Communications, and
  • Computing and simulation.

… Today, QIS is a component of the National Strategic Computing Initiative (Presidential Executive Order 13702), which was established in 2015. Most recently, in September 2018, the National Science and Technology Council issued the National Strategic Overview for Quantum Information Science. The policy opportunities identified in this strategic overview include:

  • choosing a science-first approach to QIS,
  • creating a “quantum-smart” workforce,
  • deepening engagement with the quantum industry,
  • providing critical infrastructure,
  • maintaining national security and economic growth, and
  • advancing international cooperation.

This report provides an overview of QIS technologies: sensing and metrology, communications, and computing and simulation. It also includes examples of existing and potential future applications; brief summaries of funding and selected R&D initiatives in the United States and elsewhere around the world; a description of U.S. congressional activity; and a discussion of related policy considerations….(More)”.