national

Government for a Digital Economy

Curated on November 16, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Zoe Baird in America’s National Security Architecture: Rebuilding the Foundation: “The private sector is transforming at record speed for the digital economy. As recently as 2008, when America elected President Obama, most large companies had separate IT departments, which were seen as just that—departments—separate from the heart of the business. Now, as wireless networks connect the planet, and entire companies exist in the cloud, digital technology is no longer viewed as another arrow in the corporate quiver, but rather the very foundation upon which all functions are built. This, then, is the mark of the digital era: in order to remain successful, modern enterprises must both leverage digital technology and develop a culture that values its significance within the organization.

For the federal government to help all Americans thrive in this new economy, and for the government to be an engine of growth, it too must enter the digital era. On a basic level, we need to improve the government’s digital infrastructure and use technology to deliver government services better. But a government for the digital economy needs to take bold steps to embed these actions as part of a large and comprehensive transformation in how it goes about the business of governing. We should not only call on the “IT department” to provide tools, we must completely change the way we think about how a digital age government learns about the world, makes policy, and operates against its objectives.

Government today does not reflect the fundamental attributes of the digital age. It moves slowly at a time when information travels around the globe at literally the speed of light. It takes many years to develop and implement comprehensive policy in a world characterized increasingly by experimentation and iterative midcourse adjustments. It remains departmentally balkanized and hierarchical in an era of networks and collaborative problem solving. It assumes that it possesses the expertise necessary to make decisions while most of the knowledge resides at the edges. It is bogged down in legacy structures and policy regimes that do not take advantage of digital tools, and worse, create unnecessary barriers that hold progress back. Moreover, it is viewed by its citizens as opaque and complex in an era when openness and access are attributes of legitimacy….(More)”

Make Democracy Great Again: Let’s Try Some ‘Design Thinking’

Curated on November 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ken Carbone in the Huffington Post: “Allow me to begin with the truth. I’ve never studied political science, run for public office nor held a position in government. For the last forty years I’ve led a design agency working with enduring brands across the globe. As with any experienced person in my profession, I have used research, deductive reasoning, logic and “design thinking“ to solve complex problems and create opportunities. Great brands that are showing their age turn to our agency to get back on course. In this light, I believe American democracy is a prime target for some retooling….

The present campaign cycle has left many voters wondering how such divisiveness and national embarrassment could be happening in the land of the free and home of the brave. This could be viewed as symptomatic of deeper structural problems in our tradition bound 240 year-old democracy. Great brands operate on a “innovate or die” model to insure success. The continual improvement of how a business operates and adapts to market conditions is a sound and critical practice.

Although the current election frenzy will soon be over, I want to examine three challenges to our election process and propose possible solutions for consideration. I’ll use the same diagnostic thinking I use with major corporations:

Term Limits…

Voting and Voter registration…

Political Campaigns…

In June of this year I attended the annual leadership conference of AIGA, the professional association for design, in Raleigh NC. A provocative question posed to a select group of designers was “What would you do if you were Secretary of Design.” The responses addressed issues concerning positive social change, education and Veteran Affairs. The audience was full of several hundred trained professionals whose everyday problem solving methods encourage divergent thinking to explore many solutions (possible or impossible) and then use convergent thinking to select and realize the best resolution. This is the very definition of “design thinking.” That leads to progress….(More)”.

Digital Government: Leveraging Innovation to Improve Public Sector Performance and Outcomes for Citizens

Curated on November 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Svenja Falk, Andrea Römmele, Andrea and Michael Silverman: “This book focuses on the implementation of digital strategies in the public sectors in the US, Mexico, Brazil, India and Germany. The case studies presented examine different digital projects by looking at their impact as well as their alignment with their national governments’ digital strategies. The contributors assess the current state of digital government, analyze the contribution of digital technologies in achieving outcomes for citizens, discuss ways to measure digitalization and address the question of how governments oversee the legal and regulatory obligations of information technology. The book argues that most countries formulate good strategies for digital government, but do not effectively prescribe and implement corresponding policies and programs. Showing specific programs that deliver results can help policy makers, knowledge specialists and public-sector researchers to develop best practices for future national strategies….(More)”

Crowd-sourcing pollution control in India

Curated on November 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Following orders by the national government to improve the air quality of the New Delhi region by reducing air pollution, the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority created the Hawa Badlo app. Designed for citizens to report cases of air pollution, each complaint is sent to the appropriate official for resolution.

Free to use, the app is available for both iOS and Android. Complaints are geo-tagged, and there are two different versions available – one for citizens and one for government officials. Officials must provide photographic evidence to close a case. The app itself produces weekly reports listings the numbers and status of complaints, along with any actions taken to resolve the problem. Currently focusing on pollution from construction, unpaved roads and the burning of garbage, the team behind the app plans to expand its use to cover other types of pollution as well.

From providing free wi-fi when the air is clean enough to mapping air-quality in real-time, air pollution solutions are increasingly involving citizens….(More)”

Open data aims to boost food security prospects

Curated on November 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Kinver at BBC News: “Rothamsted Research, a leading agricultural research institution, is attempting to make data from long-term experiments available to all.

In partnership with a data consultancy, is it developing a method to make complex results accessible and useable.

The institution is a member of the Godan Initiative that aims to make data available to the scientific community.

In September, Godan called on the public to sign its global petition to open agricultural research data.

“The continuing challenge we face is that the raw data alone is not sufficient enough on its own for people to make sense of it,” said Chris Rawlings, head of computational and systems biology at Rothamsted Research.

“This is because the long-term experiments are very complex, and they are looking at agriculture and agricultural ecosystems so you need to know a lot of about what the intention of the studies are, how they are being used, and the changes that have taken place over time.”

However, he added: “Even with this level of complexity, we do see significant number of users contacting us or developing links with us.”

One size fits all

The ability to provide open data to all is one of the research organisation’s national capabilities, and forms a defining principle of its web portal to the experiments carried out at its North Wyke Farm Platform in North Devon.

Rothamsted worked in partnership with Tessella, a data consultancy, on the data collected from the experiments, which focused on livestock pastures.

The information being collected, as often as every 15 minutes, includes water run-off levels, soil moisture, meteorological data, and soil nutrients, and this is expected to run for decades.

“The data is quite varied and quite diverse, and [Rothamsted] wants to make to make this data available to the wider research community,” explained Tessella’s Andrew Bowen.

“What Rothamsted needed was a way to store it and a way to present it in a portal in which people could see what they had to offer.”

He told BBC News that there were a number of challenges that needed to be tackled.

One was the management of the data, and the team from Tessella adopted an “agile scrum” approach.

“Basically, what you do is draw up a list of the requirements, of what you need, and we break the project down into short iterations, starting with the highest priority,” he said.

“This means that you are able to take a more exploratory approach to the process of developing software. This is very well suited to the research environment.”…(More)”

Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy

Curated on November 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michele Catanzaro at EuroScientist: “Imagine a world without peer review committees, project proposals or activity reports. Imagine a world where research funds seamlessly flow where they are best employed, like nutrients in a food-web or materials in a river network. Many scientists would immediately signup to live in such a world.

The Netherlands is set to become the place where this academic paradise will be tested, in the next few years. In July 2016, the Dutch parliament approved a motion related to implementing alternative funding procedures to alleviate the research bureaucracy, which is increasingly burdening scientists. Here EuroScientistinvestigates whether the self-organisation power of the scientific community could help resolve one of researchers’ worse burden.

Self-organisation

The Dutch national funding agency is planning to adopt a radically new system to allocate part of its funding, promoted by ecologist Marten Sheffer, who is professor of aquatic ecology and water quality management at Wageningen University and Research Centre. Under the proposed approach, funds would intially be evenly divided among all scientists in the country. Then, they would each have to allocate half of what they have received to the person who, in their opinion, is the most deserving scientist in their network. Then, the process would be iterated.

The promoters of the system believe that the “wisdom of the crowd” of the scientific community would assigning more funds to the most deserving scientists among them; with minimal amount of paperwork. The Dutch initiative is part of a broader effort to use a scientific approach to improve science.

In other words, it is part of a trend aiming to employ scientific evidence to tweak the social mechanisms of academia. Specifically, findings from what is known as complexity research are increasingly brought forward as a way of reducing bureaucracy, removing red tape, and maximising the time scientists spend in thinking….

Abandoning the current bureaucratic, top-down system to evaluate and fund research, based on labour-intensive peer-review, may not be too much of a loss. “Peer-review is an imperfect, fragile mechanism. Our simulations show that assigning funds at random would not distort too much the results of the traditional mechanism,” says Flaminio Squazzoni, an economist at the University of Brescia, Italy, and the coordinator of the PEERE-New Frontiers of Peer Review COST action.

In reality peer-review is never quite neutral. “If scientists behave perfectly, then peer review works,” Squazzoni explains, “but if strategic motivations are taken into account, like saving time or competition, then the results are worse than random.” Squazzoni believes that automation, economic incentives, or the creation of professional reviewers may improve the situation….(More)”

Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on November 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Why citizen input is crucial to the government design process

Curated on November 2, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Forman in NextGov: “…Whether agencies are implementing an application or enterprisewide solution, end-user input (from both citizens and government workers) is a requirement for success. In fact, the only path to success in digital government is the “moment of truth,” the point of interaction when a government delivers a service or solves a problem for its citizens.

A recent example illustrates this challenge. A national government recently deployed a new application that enables citizens to submit questions to agency offices using their mobile devices. The mobile application, while functional and working to specifications, failed to address the core issue: Most citizens prefer asking questions via email, an option that was terminated when the new app was deployed.

Digital technologies offer government agencies numerous opportunities to cut costs and improve citizen services. But in the rush to implement new capabilities, IT professionals often neglect to consider fully their users’ preferences, knowledge, limitations and goals.

When developing new ways to deliver services, designers must expand their focus beyond the agency’s own operating interests to ensure they also create a satisfying experience for citizens. If not, the applications will likely be underutilized or even ignored, thus undermining the anticipated cost-savings and performance gains that set the project in motion.

Government executives also must recognize merely relying on user input creates a risk of “paving the cowpath”: innovations cannot significantly improve the customer experience if users do not recognize the value of new technologies in simplifying, making more worthwhile, or eliminating a task.

Many digital government playbooks and guidance direct IT organizations to create a satisfying citizen experience by incorporating user-centered design methodology into their projects. UCD is a process for ensuring a new solution or tool is designed from the perspective of users. Rather than forcing government workers or the public to adapt to the new solution, UCD helps create a solution tailored to their abilities, preferences and needs….effective UCD is built upon four primary principles or guidelines:

Focus on the moment of truth. A new application or service must actually be something that citizens want and need via the channel used, and not just easy to use.
Optimize outcomes, not just processes. True transformation occurs when citizens’ expectations and needs remain the constant center of focus. Merely overlaying new technology on business as usual may provide a prettier interface, but success requires a clear benefit for the public at the moment of truth in the interaction with government.
Evolve processes over time to help citizens adapt to new applications. In most instances, citizens will make a smoother transition to new services when processes are changed gradually to be more intuitive rather than with an abrupt, flip-of-the-switch approach.
Combine UCD with robust DevOps. Agencies need a strong DevOps process to incorporate what they learn about citizens’ preferences and needs as they develop, test and deploy new citizen services….(More)”

Three ways to grow the open data economy

Curated on November 1, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shadbolt in The Guardian: “…here are three areas where action by the UK government can help to support and promote a flourishing open data economy

Strengthen our data infrastructure

We are used to thinking of areas like transport and energy requiring physical infrastructure. From roads and rail networks to the national grid and power stations, we understand that investment and management of these vital parts of an infrastructure are essential to the economic wellbeing and future prosperity of the nation.

This is no less true of key data assets. Our data infrastructure is a core part of our national infrastructure. From lists of legally constituted companies to the country’s geospatial data, our data infrastructure needs to be managed, maintained, in some cases built and in all cases made as widely available as possible.

To maximise the benefits to the UK’s economy and to reduce costs in delivery of public services, the data we rely on needs to be adaptable, trustworthy, and as open as possible….

While we do have some excellent examples of infrastructure data from the likes of Companies House, Land Registry, Ordnance Survey and Defra, core parts of the data infrastructure that we need within the UK are missing, unreliable, or of a low quality. The government must invest here just as it invests in our other traditional infrastructure.

Support and promote data innovation

If we are to make best use of data, we need a bridge between academic research, public, private and third sectors, and a thriving startup ecosystem where new ideas and approaches can grow.

We have learned that properly targeted challenges could identify potential savings for government – similar to Prescribing Analytics, an ODI-incubated startup which used publicly available data to identify £200m in prescriptions savings per year for the NHS – but, more importantly, translate that potential into procurable products and services that could deliver those savings.

A data challenge series run at a larger scale, funded by Innovate UK, openly contested and independently managed, would stimulate the creation of new companies, jobs, products and services. It would also act as a forcing function to strengthen data infrastructure around key challenges, and raise awareness and capacity for those working to solve them. The data needed to satisfy the challenges would have to be made available and usable, bringing data innovation into government and bolstering the offer of the startups and SMEs who take part.

Invest in data literacy

In order to take advantage of the data revolution, policymakers, businesses and citizens need to understand how to make use of data. In other words, they must become data literate.

Data literacy is needed through our whole educational system and society more generally. Crucially, policymakers are going to need to be informed by insights that can only be gleaned through understanding and analysing data effectively….(More)”