Foundation Transparency: Game Over?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brad Smith at Glass Pockets (Foundation Center): “The tranquil world of America’s foundations is about to be shaken, but if you read the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP) new study — Sharing What Matters, Foundation Transparency — you would never know it.

Don’t get me wrong. That study, like everything CEP produces, is carefully researched, insightful and thoroughly professional. But it misses the single biggest change in foundation transparency in decades: the imminent release by the Internal Revenue Service of foundation 990-PF (and 990) tax returns as machine-readable open data.

Clara Miller, President of the Heron Foundation, writes eloquently in her manifesto, Building a Foundation for the 21St Century: “…the private foundation model was designed to be protective and separate, much like a terrarium.”

Terrariums, of course, are highly “curated” environments over which their creators have complete control. The CEP study, proves that point, to the extent that much of the study consists of interviews with foundation leaders and reviews of their websites as if transparency were a kind of optional endeavor in which foundations may choose to participate, if at all, and to what degree.

To be fair, CEP also interviewed the grantees of various foundations (sometimes referred to as “partners”), which helps convey the reality that foundations have stakeholders beyond their four walls. However, the terrarium metaphor is about to become far more relevant as the release of 990 tax returns as open data will literally make it possible for anyone to look right through those glass walls to the curated foundation world within.

What Is Open Data?

It is safe to say that most foundation leaders and a fair majority of their staff do not understand what open data really is. Open data is free, yes, but more importantly it is digital and machine-readable. This means it can be consumed in enormous volumes at lightning speed, directly by computers.

Once consumed, open data can be tagged, sorted, indexed and searched using statistical methods to make obvious comparisons while discovering previously undetected correlations. Anyone with a computer, some coding skills and a hard drive or cloud storage can access open data. In today’s world, a lot of people meet those requirements, and they are free to do whatever they please with your information once it is, as open data enthusiasts like to say, “in the wild.”

What is the Internal Revenue Service Releasing?

Thanks to the Aspen Institute’s leadership of a joint effort – funded by foundations and including Foundation Center, GuideStar, the National Center for Charitable Statistics, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, and others – the IRS has started to make some 1,000,000 Form 990s and 40,000 Form 990PF available as machine-readable open data.

Previously, all Form 990s had been released as image (TIFF) files, essentially a picture, making it both time-consuming and expensive to extract useful data from them. Credit where credit is due; a kick in the butt in the form of a lawsuit from open data crusader Carl Malamud helped speed the process along.

The current test phase includes only those tax returns that were digitally filed by nonprofits and community foundations (990s) and private foundations (990PFs). Over time, the IRS will phase in a mandatory digital filing requirement for all Form 990s, and the intent is to release them all as open data. In other words, that which is born digital will be opened up to the public in digital form. Because of variations in the 990 forms, getting the information from them into a database will still require some technical expertise, but will be far more feasible and faster than ever before.

The Good

The work of organizations like Foundation Center– who have built expensive infrastructure in order to turn years of 990 tax returns into information that can be used by nonprofits looking for funding, researchers trying to understand the role of foundations and foundations, themselves, seeking to benchmark themselves against peers—will be transformed.

Work will shift away from the mechanics of capturing and processing the data to higher level analysis and visualization to stimulate the generation and sharing of new insights and knowledge. This will fuel greater collaboration between peer organizations, innovation, the merging of previous disparate bodies of data, better philanthropy, and a stronger social sector… (more)

 

Value and Vulnerability: The Internet of Things in a Connected State Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pressrelease: “The National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) today released a policy brief on the Internet of Things (IoT) in state government. The paper focuses on the different ways state governments are using IoT now and in the future and the policy considerations involved.

“In NASCIO’s 2015 State CIO Survey, we asked state CIOs to what extent IoT was on their agenda. Just over half said they were in informal discussions, however only one in five had moved to the formal discussion phase. We believe IoT needs to be a formal part of each state’s policy considerations,” explained NASCIO Executive Director Doug Robinson.

The paper encourages state CIOs to make IoT part of the enterprise architecture discussions on asset management and risk assessment and to develop an IoT roadmap.

“Cities and municipalities have been working toward the designation of ‘smart city’ for a while now,” said Darryl Ackley, cabinet secretary for the New Mexico Department of Information Technology and NASCIO president. “While states provide different services than cities, we are seeing a lot of activity around IoT to improve citizen services and we see great potential for growth. The more organized and methodical states can be about implementing IoT, the more successful and useful the outcomes.”

Read the policy brief at www.NASCIO.org/ValueAndVulnerability “

Is civic technology the killer app for democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at TechCrunch: “Smartphone apps have improved convenience for public transportation in many urban centers. In Washington, DC, riders can download apps to help them figure out where to go, when to show up and how long to wait for a bus or train. However, the problem with public transport in DC is not the lack of modern, helpful and timely information. The problem is that the Metro subway system is onfire. 

Critical infrastructure refers to the vital systems that connect us. Like the water catastrophe in Flint, Michigan and our crumbling roads, bridges and airports, the Metro system in DC is experiencing a systems failure. The Metro’s problems arise from typical public challenges like  poor management and deferred maintenance.

Upgrades of physical infrastructure are not easy and nimble like a software patch or an agile design process. They are slow, expensive and subject to deliberation and scrutiny. In other words, they are the fundamental substance of democratic decision-making: big decisions with long-term implications that require thoughtful strategy, significant investment, political leadership and public buy-in.

A killer app is an application you love so much you buy into a whole new way of doing things. Email and social media are good examples of killer apps. The killer app for Metro would have to get political leaders to look beyond their narrow, short-term interests and be willing to invest in modern public transportation for our national capital region.

The same is true for fixing our critical infrastructure throughout the nation. The killer apps for the systems on which we rely daily won’t be technical, they will be human. It will be Americans working together to a build a technology-enabled resilient democracy —one that is inclusive, responsive and successful in the Information Age.

In 2007, the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi river. During his presidential bid, Senator John McCain used this event as an example of the failure of our leaders to make trade-offs for common national purpose. Case in point, an extravagantly expensive congressionally funded Alaskan “bridge to nowhere” that served just a handful of people on an island. But how many apps to nowhere are we building?.

In DC, commuters who can afford alternatives will leave Metro. They’ll walk, drive, ordera car service or locate a bikeshare. The people who suffer from the public service risk and imbalance of the current Metro system are those who have no choice.

So here’s the challenge: Modern technology needs to create an inclusive society. Our current technical approach too often means that we’re prioritizing progress or profit for the few over the many. This pattern defeats the purpose of both the technology revolution and American democracy. Government and infrastructure are supposed to serve everyone, but technology thus far has made it so that public failures affect some Americans more than others. …

For democracy to succeed in the Information Age, we’ll need some new rules of engagement with technology. The White House recently released its third report on data and its implications for society. The 2016 report pays special attention to the ethics of machine automation and algorithms. The authors stress the importance of ethical analytics and propose the principle of “equal opportunity by design.” It’s an excellent point of departure as we recalibrate old systems and build new bridges to a more resilient, inclusive and prosperous nation….(more)”

Real-Time Data Can Improve Traffic Management in Major Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

World Bank: “Traffic management agencies and city planners will soon have access to real-time data to better manage traffic flows on the streets of Cebu City and Metro Manila.

Grab, The World Bank, and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) launched today the OpenTraffic initiative, which will help address traffic congestion and road safety challenges.

Grab is the leading ride-hailing platform in Southeast Asia and operates in 30 cities across six countries – Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Grab and the World Bank have been developing free, open-source tools that translate Grab’s voluminous driver GPS data into traffic statistics, including speeds, flows, and intersection delays. These statistics power big data open source tools such as OpenTraffic, for analysing traffic speeds and flows, and DRIVER, for identifying road incident blackspots and improving emergency response. Grab and the World Bank plan to make OpenTraffic available to other Southeast Asian city governments in the near future.

“Using big data is one of the potential solutions to the challenges faced by our transport systems. Through this we can provide accurate, real-time information for initiatives that can help alleviate traffic congestion and improve road safety,” said DOTC Secretary Joseph Emilio A. Abaya.

Last month, the World Bank and DOTC helped train more than 200 government staff from the agency, the Philippine National Police (PNP), the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), and the Cebu City Transportation Office on the use of the OpenTraffic platform….In the near future, traffic statistics derived through OpenTraffic will be fed into another application called “DRIVER” or Data for Road Incident Visualization, Evaluation, and Reporting for road incident recording and analysis. This application, developed by the World Bank, will help engineering units to prioritize crash-prone areas for interventions and improve emergency response….(More)”

Improving patient care by bridging the divide between doctors and data scientists

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the Conversation: “While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, doctors struggle daily with using information and techniques available right now while carefully adopting new concepts and treatments. As a practicing doctor, I deal with uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions all the time….At the moment, a report from the National Academy of Medicine tells us, most doctors base most of their everyday decisions on guidelines from (sometimes biased) expert opinions or small clinical trials. It would be better if they were from multicenter, large, randomized controlled studies, with tightly controlled conditions ensuring the results are as reliable as possible. However, those are expensive and difficult to perform, and even then often exclude a number of important patient groups on the basis of age, disease and sociological factors.

Part of the problem is that health records are traditionally kept on paper, making them hard to analyze en masse. As a result, most of what medical professionals might have learned from experiences was lost – or at least was inaccessible to another doctor meeting with a similar patient.

A digital system would collect and store as much clinical data as possible from as many patients as possible. It could then use information from the past – such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, heart rate and other measurements of patients’ body functions – to guide future doctors to the best diagnosis and treatment of similar patients.

Industrial giants such as Google, IBM, SAP and Hewlett-Packard have also recognized the potential for this kind of approach, and are now working on how to leverage population data for the precise medical care of individuals.

Collaborating on data and medicine

At the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have begun to collect large amounts of detailed patient data in the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care (MIMIC). It is a database containing information from 60,000 patient admissions to the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The data in MIMIC has been meticulously scoured so individual patients cannot be recognized, and is freely shared online with the research community.

But the database itself is not enough. We bring together front-line clinicians (such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors) to identify questions they want to investigate, and data scientists to conduct the appropriate analyses of the MIMIC records. This gives caregivers and patients the best individualized treatment options in the absence of a randomized controlled trial.

Bringing data analysis to the world

At the same time we are working to bring these data-enabled systems to assist with medical decisions to countries with limited health care resources, where research is considered an expensive luxury. Often these countries have few or no medical records – even on paper – to analyze. We can help them collect health data digitally, creating the potential to significantly improve medical care for their populations.

This task is the focus of Sana, a collection of technical, medical and community experts from across the globe that is also based in our group at MIT. Sana has designed a digital health information system specifically for use by health providers and patients in rural and underserved areas.

At its core is an open-source system that uses cellphones – common even in poor and rural nations – to collect, transmit and store all sorts of medical data. It can handle not only basic patient data such as height and weight, but also photos and X-rays, ultrasound videos, and electrical signals from a patient’s brain (EEG) and heart (ECG).

Partnering with universities and health organizations, Sana organizes training sessions (which we call “bootcamps”) and collaborative workshops (called “hackathons”) to connect nurses, doctors and community health workers at the front lines of care with technology experts in or near their communities. In 2015, we held bootcamps and hackathons in Colombia, Uganda, Greece and Mexico. The bootcamps teach students in technical fields like computer science and engineering how to design and develop health apps that can run on cellphones. Immediately following the bootcamp, the medical providers join the group and the hackathon begins…At the end of the day, though, the purpose is not the apps….(More)

How innovation agencies work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kirsten Bound and Alex Glennie at NESTA: “This report considers how governments can get better at designing and running innovation agencies, drawing on examples from around the world.

Key findings

  • There is no single model for a ‘successful’ innovation agency.  Although there is much to learn from other countries about best practice in institution and programme design, attempts to directly replicate organisational models that operate in very different contexts are likely to fail.
  • There are a variety of roles that innovation agencies can play. From our case studies, we have identified a number of different approaches that an innovation agency might take, depending on the specific nature of a country’s innovation system, the priorities of policymakers, and available resources.
  • Innovation agencies need a clear mission, but an ability to adapt and experiment. Working towards many different objectives at once or constantly changing strategic direction can make it difficult for an innovation agency to deliver impactful innovation support for businesses. However, a long-term vision of what success looks like should not prevent innovation agencies from experimenting with new approaches, and responding to new needs and opportunities.
  • Innovation agencies should be assessed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Evaluations tend to focus on the financial return they generate, but our research suggests that more effort needs to be put into assessing some of the more qualitative aspects of their role, including the quality of their management, their ability to take (and learn from) strategic risks, and the skill with which they design and implement their programmes.
  • Governments should be both ambitious and realistic about what they expect an innovation agency to achieve. An innovation agency’s role will inevitably be affected by shifts in government priorities. Understanding how innovation agencies shape (and are shaped by) the broader political environment around innovation is a necessary part of ensuring that they are able to deliver on their potential.

Governments around the world are looking for ways to nurture innovative businesses, as a way of solving some of their most urgent economic and societal challenges. Many seek to do this by setting up national innovation agencies: institutions that provide financial and other support to catalyse or drive private sector innovation. Yet we still know relatively little about the range of approaches that these agencies take, what programmes and instruments are likely to work best in a given context, and how to assess their long-term impact.

We have been investigating these questions by studying a diverse group selection of innovation agencies in ten different countries. Our aim has been to improve understanding of the range of existing institutional models and to learn more about their design, evolution and effectiveness. In doing so, we have developed a broad framework to help policymakers think about the set of choices and options they face in the design and management of an innovation agency….(More)”

How to implement “open innovation” in city government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Victor Mulas at the Worldbank: “City officials are facing increasingly complex challenges. As urbanization rates grow, cities face higher demand for services from a larger and more densely distributed population. On the other hand, rapid changes in the global economy are affecting cities that struggle to adapt to these changes, often resulting in economic depression and population drain.

“Open innovation” is the latest buzz word circulating in forums on how to address the increased volume and complexity of challenges for cities and governments in general.

But, what is open innovation?

Traditionally, public services were designed and implemented by a group of public officials. Open innovation allows us to design these services with multiple actors, including those who stand to benefit from the services, resulting in more targeted and better tailored services, often implemented through partnership with these stakeholders. Open innovation allows cities to be more productive in providing services while addressing increased demand and higher complexity of services to be delivered.

New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam and many other cities have been experimenting with this concept, introducing challenges for entrepreneurs to address common problems or inviting stakeholders to co-create new services.   Open innovation has gone from being a “buzzword” to another tool in the city officials’ toolbox.

However, even cities that embrace open innovation are still struggling to implement it beyond a few specific areas.  This is understandable, as introducing open innovation practically requires a new way of doing things for city governments, which tend to be complex and bureaucratic organizations.

Counting with an engaged mayor is not enough to bring this kind of transformation. Changing the behavior of city officials requires their buy-in, it can’t be done top down

We have been introducing open innovation to cities and governments for the last three years in Chile, Colombia, Egypt and Mozambique. We have addressed specific challenges and iteratively designed and tested a systematic methodology to introduce open innovation in government through both a top-down and a bottom-up approaches. We have tested this methodology in Colombia (Cali, Barranquilla and Manizales) and Chile (metropolitan area of Gran Concepción).   We have identified “internal champions” (i.e., government officials who advocate the new methodology), and external stakeholders organized in an “innovation hub” that provides long-term sustainability and scalability of interventions. We believe that this methodology is easily applicable beyond cities to other government entities at the regional and national levels. …To understand how the methodology practically works, we describe in this report the process and its results in its application in the city area of Gran Concepción, in Chile. For this activity, the urban transport sector was selected and the target of intervention were the regional and municipal government departments in charge or urban transport in the area of Gran Concepción. The activity in Chile resulted in a threefold impact:

  1. It catalyzed the adoption of the bottom-up smart city model following this new methodology throughout Chile; and
  2. It expanded the implementation and mainstreaming of the methodologies developed and tested through this activity in other World Bank projects.

More information about this activity in Chile can be found in the Smart City Gran Concepcion webpage…(More)”

Teenage scientists enlisted to fight Zika

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

ShareAmerica: “A mosquito’s a mosquito, right? Not when it comes to Zika and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Only two of the estimated 3,000 species of mosquitoes are capable of carrying the Zika virus in the United States, but estimates of their precise range remain hazy, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Scientists could start getting better information about these pesky, but important, insects with the help of plastic cups, brown paper towels and teenage biology students.

As part of the Invasive Mosquito Project from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, secondary-school students nationwide are learning about mosquito populations and helping fill the knowledge gaps.

Simple experiment, complex problem

The experiment works like this: First, students line the cups with paper, then fill two-thirds of the cups with water. Students place the plastic cups outside, and after a week, the paper is dotted with what looks like specks of dirt. These dirt particles are actually mosquito eggs, which the students can identify and classify.

Students then upload their findings to a national crowdsourced database. Crowdsourcing uses the collective intelligence of online communities to “distribute” problem solving across a massive network.

Entomologist Lee Cohnstaedt of the U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinates the program, and he’s already thinking about expansion. He said he hopes to have one-fifth of U.S. schools participate in the mosquito species census. He also plans to adapt lesson plans for middle schools, Scouting troops and gardening clubs.

Already, crowdsourcing has “collected better data than we could have working alone,” he told the Associated Press….

In addition to mosquito tracking, crowdsourcing has been used to develop innovative responses to a number of complex challenges, from climate change to archaeologyto protein modeling….(More)”

Big Data for public policy: the quadruple helix

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Julia Lane in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management: “Data from the federal statistical system, particularly the Census Bureau, have long been a key resource for public policy. Although most of those data have been collected through purposive surveys, there have been enormous strides in the use of administrative records on business (Jarmin & Miranda, 2002), jobs (Abowd, Halti- wanger, & Lane, 2004), and individuals (Wagner & Layne, 2014). Those strides are now becoming institutionalized. The President has allocated $10 million to an Administrative Records Clearing House in his FY2016 budget. Congress is considering a bill to use administrative records, entitled the Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission Act, sponsored by Patty Murray and Paul Ryan. In addition, the Census Bureau has established a Center for “Big Data.” In my view, these steps represent important strides for public policy, but they are only part of the story. Public policy researchers must look beyond the federal statistical system and make use of the vast resources now available for research and evaluation.

All politics is local; “Big Data” now mean that policy analysis can increasingly be local. Modern empirical policy should be grounded in data provided by a network of city/university data centers. Public policy schools should partner with scholars in the emerging field of data science to train the next generation of policy researchers in the thoughtful use of the new types of data; the apparent secular decline in the applications to public policy schools is coincident with the emergence of data science as a field of study in its own right. The role of national statistical agencies should be fundamentally rethought—and reformulated to one of four necessary strands in the data infrastructure; that of providing benchmarks, confidentiality protections, and national statistics….(More)”

Using Tweets and Posts to Speed Up Organ Donation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bornstein in the New York Times: “…But there is a problem: Demand for organ transplants vastly outstrips supply, as my colleague Tina Rosenberg has reported. In 2015 in the United States, there were only about 9,000 deceased donors (each of whom can save up to eight lives) and 6,000 living donors (who most often donate a kidney or liver lobe). Today, more than 121,000 people are on waiting lists, roughly 100,000 for kidney transplants, 15,000 for livers, and 4,000 for hearts. And the lists keep getting longer — 3,000 people are added to the kidney list each month. Last year, more than 4,000 people died while waiting for a new kidney; 3,600 dropped off the waiting list because they became too sick to qualify for a transplant.

Although 95 percent of Americans support organ donation, fewer than half of American adults are registered as donors. Research suggests that the number who donate organs after death could be increased greatly. Moreover, surveys indicate untapped support for living donation, too; nearly one in four people have told pollsters they would be willing to donate a kidney to save the life of a friend, community member or stranger. “If one in 10,000 Americans decided to donate each year, there wouldn’t be a shortage,” said Josh Morrison, who donated a kidney to a stranger and founded WaitList Zero, an organization that works to increase living kidney donation.

What could be done to harness people’s generous impulses more effectively to save lives?

One group attacking the question is Organize, which was founded in 2014 by Rick Segal’s son Greg, and Jenna Arnold, a media producer and educator who has worked with MTV and the United Nations in engaging audiences in social issues. Organize uses technology, open data and insights from behavioral economics to simplify becoming an organ donor.

This approach is shaking up longstanding assumptions.

For example, in the last four decades, people have most often been asked to register as an organ donor as part of renewing or obtaining a driver’s license. This made sense in the 1970s, when the nation’s organ procurement system was being set up, says Blair Sadler, the former president and chief executive of Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego. He helped draft theUniform Anatomical Gift Act in 1967, which established a national legal framework for organ donation. “Health care leaders were asking, ‘How do we make this more routine?’” he recalled. “It’s hard to get people to put it in their wills. Oh, there’s a place where people have to go every five years” — their state Department of Motor Vehicles.

Today, governments allow individuals to initiate registrations online, but the process can be cumbersome. For example, New York State required me to fill out a digital form on my computer, then print it out and mail it to Albany. Donate Life America, by contrast, allows individuals to register online as an organ donor just by logging in with email or a Facebook or Google account — much easier.

In practice, legal registration may be overemphasized. It may be just as important to simply make your wishes known to your loved ones. When people tell relatives, “If something happens to me, I want to be an organ donor,” families almost always respect their wishes. This is particularly important for minors, who cannot legally register as donors.

Using that insight, Organize is making it easier to conduct social media campaigns to both prompt and collect sentiments about organ donation from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

If you post or tweet about organ donation, or include a hashtag like #iwanttobeanorgandonor, #organdonor, #donatemyparts, or any of a number of other relevant terms, Organize captures the information and logs it in a registry. In a year, it has gathered the names of nearly 600,000 people who declare support for organ donation. Now the big question is: Will it actually increase organ donation rates?

We should begin getting an idea pretty soon. Organize has been working with the Nevada Donor Network to test its registry. And in the coming months, several other states will begin using it….(More)”