Data for policy: when the haystack is made of needles. A call for contributions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Diana Vlad-Câlcic at the European Commission: “If policy-making is ‘whatever government chooses to do or not to do’ (Th. Dye), then how do governments actually decide? Evidence-based policy-making is not a new answer to this question, but it is constantly challenging both policy-makers and scientists to sharpen their thinking, their tools and their responsiveness.  The European Commission has recognised this and has embedded in its processes, namely through Impact Assessment, policy monitoring and evaluation, an evidence-informed decision-making approach.

With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk. (John von Neumann)

New data technologies raise the bar high for advanced modelling, dynamic visualisation, real-time data flows and a variety of data sources, from sensors, to cell phones or the Internet as such. An abundance of (big) data, a haystack made of needles, but do public administrations have the right tools and skills to exploit it? How much of it adds real value to established statistics and to scientific evidence? Are the high hopes and the high expectations partly just hype? And what lessons can we learn from experience?

To explore these questions, the European Commission is launching a study with the Oxford Internet Institute, Technopolis and CEPS  on ‘Data for policy: big data and other innovative data-driven approaches for evidence-informed policymaking’. As a first step, the study will collect examples of initiatives in public institutions at national and international level, where innovative data technologies contribute to the policy process. It will eventually develop case-studies for EU policies.

Contribute to the collective reflection by sharing with us good practices and examples you have from other public administrations. Follow the developments of the study also on Twitter @data4policyEU”

Our New Three Rs: Rigor, Relevance, and Readability

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Stephen J. Del Rosso in Governance: “…Because of the dizzying complexity of the contemporary world, the quest for a direct relationship between academic scholarship and its policy utility is both quixotic and unnecessary. The 2013 U.S. Senate’s vote to prohibit funding for political science projects through the National Science Foundation, except for those certified “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States,” revealed a fundamental misreading of the nonlinear path between idea and policy. Rather than providing a clear blueprint for addressing emergent or long-standing challenges, a more feasible role for academic scholarship is what political scientist Roland Paris describes as helping to “order the world in which officials operate.” Scholarly works can “influence practitioners’ understandings of what is possible or desirable in a particular policy field or set of circumstances,” he believes, by “creating operational frameworks for … identifying options and implementing policies.”

It is sometimes claimed that think tanks should play the main role in conveying scholarly insights to policymakers. But, however they may have mastered the sound bite, the putative role of think tanks as effective transmission belts for policy-relevant ideas is limited by their lack of academic rigor and systematic peer review. There is also a tendency, particularly among some “Inside the Beltway” experts, to trim their sails to the prevailing political winds and engage in self-censorship to keep employment options open in current or future presidential administrations. Scholarship’s comparative advantage in the marketplace of ideas is also evident in terms of its anticipatory function—the ability to loosen the intellectual bolts for promising policies not quite ready for implementation. A classic example is Swedish Nobel laureate Gunner Myrdal’s 1944 study of race relations, The American Dilemma, which was largely ignored and even disavowed by its sponsors for over a decade until it proved essential to the landmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Moreover, it should also be noted, rather than providing a detailed game plan for addressing the problem of race in the country, Myrdal’s work was a quintessential example of the power of scholarship to frame critically important issues.

To bridge the scholarship–policy gap, academics must balance rigor and relevance with a third “R”—readability. There is no shortage of important scholarly work that goes unnoticed or unread because of its presentation. Scholars interested in having influence beyond the ivory tower need to combine their pursuit of disciplinary requirements with efforts to make their work more intelligible and accessible to a broader audience. For example, new forms of dissemination, such as blogs and other social media innovations, provide policy-relevant scholars with ample opportunities to supplement more traditional academic outlets. The recent pushback from the editors of the International Studies Association’s journals to the announced prohibition on their blogging is one indication that the cracks in the old system are already appearing.

At the risk of oversimplification, there are three basic tribes populating the political science field. One tribe comprises those who “get it” when it comes to the importance of policy relevance, a second eschews such engagement with the real world in favor of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and a third is made up of anxious untenured assistant professors who seek to follow the path that will best provide them with secure employment. If war, as was famously said, is too important to be left to the generals, then the future of the political science field is too important to be left to the intellectual ostriches who bury their heads in self-referential esoterica. However, the first tribe needs to be supported, and the third tribe needs to be shown that there is professional value in engaging with the world, both to enlighten and, perhaps more importantly, to provoke—a sentiment the policy-relevant scholar and inveterate provocateur, Huntington, would surely have endorsed…(More)”

The Platform for Political Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Platform for Political Innovation …”is a project aiming to strengthen the role and efficiency of Civil Society in Greece, focusing on the imperative need for innovation in policy-making. The project is based on the collaboration of three Greek Civil Society Organizations which combine and build on their experience and know-how in order to maximize the impact of activities for Political Innovation. From October 2014 to May 2015, experimental applications of innovative processes and tools are initiated  in different Greek cities, focusing on the re-design of decision-making processes at local and national level. The proposed action plan constitutes the phase B of the wider social project POLITEIA 2.0 which won the Audience Award in the 2012 European Investment Bank Social Innovation Tournament.

The activities of the Platform for Political Innovation focus on Research, Networking, Training, Digital Tools and Innovation Workshops Development in 4 Greek cities….including:

Syntagma 2.0: workshops for the participatory design of a new Constitution for Greece by its citizens.

Pedio_Agora: workshops for the participatory design of a public space. Focus area: Varvakeios Square, Athens….(More)”

How’s the Weather There? Crowdsourcing App Promises Better Forecasts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rachel Metz  at MIT Technology Review: “An app called Sunshine wants you to help it create more accurate, localized weather forecasts.
The app, currently in a private beta test, combines data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with atmospheric pressure readings captured by a smartphone. The latest iPhones, and some Android smartphones, include barometers for measuring atmospheric pressure. These sensors are generally used to determine elevation for navigation, but changes in air pressure can also signal changes in the weather.
Sunshine will also rely on users to report sudden weather hazards like fog, cofounder Katerina Stroponiati says. About 250 people spread out among the Bay Area, New York, and Dallas are now using Sunshine, she says, and the team behind it plans to release the app publicly at the end of March for the iPhone. It will be free, though some features may eventually cost extra.
While weather predictions have gotten more accurate over the years, they’re far from perfect. Weather information usually isn’t localized, either. The goal of Sunshine is to better serve places like its home base of San Francisco, where weather can be markedly different over just a few blocks.
Stroponiati aims for Sunshine to get enough people sending in data—three per square mile would be needed, according to experiments the team has conducted—that the app can be used to make weather prediction more accurate than it tends to be today. Some other apps, like PressureNet and WeatherSignal, already gather data entered manually by users, but they don’t yet offer crowdsourced forecasts….(More)”
 

The Data Disclosure Decision

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The CIO Council Innovation Committee has released its first Open Data case study, The Data Disclosure Decision, showcasing the Department of Education (Education) Disclosure Review Board.
The Department of Education is a national warehouse for open data across a decentralized educational system, managing and exchanging education related data from across the country. Education collects large amounts of aggregate data at the state, district, and school level, disaggregated by a number of demographic variables. A majority of the data Education collects is considered personally identifiable information (PII), making data disclosure avoidance plans a mandatory component of Education’s data releases. With their expansive data sets and a need to protect sensitive information, Education quickly realized the need to organize and standardize their data disclosure protocol.
Education formally established the Data Disclosure Board with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan signing their Charter in August 2013. Since its inception, the Disclosure Review Board has recognized substantial successes and has greatly increased the volume and quality of data being released. Education’s Disclosure Review Board is continually learning through its open data journey and improving their approach through cultural change and leadership buy-in.
Learn more about Education’s Data Review Board’s story by reading The Data Disclosure Decision where you will find the full account of their experience and what they learned along the way. Read The Data Disclosure Decision “

Index: Prizes and Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on prizes and challenges and was originally published in 2015.

This index highlights recent findings about two key techniques in shifting innovation from institutions to the general public:

  • Prize-Induced Contests – using monetary rewards to incentivize individuals and other entities to develop solutions to public problems; and
  • Grand Challenges – posing large, audacious goals to the public to spur collaborative, non-governmental efforts to solve them.

You can read more about Governing through Prizes and Challenges here. You can also watch Alph Bingham, co-founder of Innocentive, answer the GovLab’s questions about challenge authoring and defining the problem here.

Previous installments of the Index include Measuring Impact with Evidence, The Data Universe, Participation and Civic Engagement and Trust in Institutions. Please share any additional statistics and research findings on the intersection of technology in governance with us by emailing shruti at thegovlab.org.

Prize-Induced Contests

  • Year the British Government introduced the Longitude Prize, one of the first instances of prizes by government to spur innovation: 1714
  • President Obama calls on “all agencies to increase their use of prizes to address some of our Nation’s most pressing challenges” in his Strategy for American Innovation: September 2009
  • The US Office of Management and Budget issues “a policy framework to guide agencies in using prizes to mobilize American ingenuity and advance their respective core missions”:  March 2010
  • Launch of Challenge.gov, “a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs and citizen solvers can find public-sector prize competitions”: September 2010
    • Number of competitions currently live on Challenge.gov in February 2015: 22 of 399 total
    • How many competitions on Challenge.gov are for $1 million or above: 23
  • The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act is introduced, which grants “all Federal agencies authority to conduct prize competitions to spur innovation, solve tough problems, and advance their core missions”: 2010
  • Value of prizes authorized by COMPETES: prizes up to $50 million
  • Fact Sheet and Frequently Asked Questions memorandum issued by the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Office of Management and Budget to aid agencies to take advantage of authorities in COMPETES: August 2011
  • Number of prize competitions run by the Federal government from 2010 to April 2012: 150
  • How many Federal agencies have run prize competitions by 2012: 40
  • Prior to 1991, the percentage of prize money that recognized prior achievements according to an analysis by McKinsey and Company: 97%
    • Since 1991, percentage of new prize money that “has been dedicated to inducement-style prizes that focus on achieving a specific, future goal”: 78%
  • Value of the prize sector as estimated by McKinsey in 2009: $1-2 billion
  • Growth rate of the total value of new prizes: 18% annually
  • Growth rate in charitable giving in the US: 2.5% annually
  • Value of the first Horizon Prize awarded in 2014 by the European Commission to German biopharmaceutical company CureVac GmbH “for progress towards a novel technology to bring life-saving vaccines to people across the planet in safe and affordable ways”: €2 million
  • Number of solvers registered on InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing company: 355,000+ from nearly 200 countries
    • Total Challenges Posted: 2,000+ External Challenges
    • Total Solution Submissions: 40,000+
    • Value of the awards: $5,000 to $1+ million
    • Success Rate for premium challenges: 85%

Grand Challenges

  • Value of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, sponsored in part by DOE to develop production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: $10 million
    • Number of teams around the world who took part in the challenge “to develop a new generation of technologies” for production-capable super fuel-efficient vehicles: 111 teams
  • Time it took for the Air Force Research Laboratory to receive a workable solution on “a problem that had vexed military security forces and civilian police for years” by opening the challenge to the world: 60 days
  • Value of the HHS Investing in Innovation initiative to spur innovation in Health IT, launched under the new COMPETES act: $5 million program
  • Number of responses received by NASA for its Asteroid Grand Challenge RFI which seeks to identify and address all asteroid threats to the human population: over 400
  • The decreased cost of sequencing a single human genome as a result of the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge: $7000 from $100 million
  • Amount the Human Genome Project Grand Challenge has contributed to the US economy for every $1 invested by the US federal government: $141 for every $1 invested
  • The amount of funding for research available for the “Brain Initiative,” a collaboration between the National Institute of Health, DARPA and the National Science Foundation, which seeks to uncover new prevention and treatment methods for brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, autism and schizophrenia: $100 million
  • Total amount offered in cash awards by the Department of Energy’s “SunShot Grand Challenge,” which seeks to eliminate the cost disparity between solar energy and coal by the end of the decade: $10 million

Sources

Civic Media Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Site and Book edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis: “Civic life is comprised of the attention and actions an individual devotes to a common good. Participating in a human rights rally, creating and sharing a video online about unfair labor practices, connecting with neighbors after a natural disaster: these are all civic actions wherein the actor seeks to benefit a perceived common good. But where and how civic life takes place, is an open question. The lines between the private and the public, the self-interested and the civic are blurring as digital cultures transform means and patterns of communication around the world.

As the definition of civic life is in flux, there is urgency in defining and questioning the mediated practices that compose it. Civic media are the mediated practices of designing, building, implementing or using digital tools to intervene in or participate in civic life. The Civic Media Project (CMP) is a collection of short case studies from scholars and practitioners from all over the world that range from the descriptive to the analytical, from the single tool to the national program, from the enthusiastic to the critical. What binds them together is not a particular technology or domain (i.e. government or social movements), but rather the intentionality of achieving a common good. Each of the case studies collected in this project reflects the practices associated with the intentional effort of one or many individuals to benefit or disrupt a community or institution outside of one’s intimate and professional spheres.

As the examples of civic media continue to grow every day, the Civic Media Project is intended as a living resource. New cases will be added on a regular basis after they have gone through an editorial process. Most importantly, the CMP is meant to be a place for conversation and debate about what counts as civic, what makes a citizen, what practices are novel, and what are the political, social and cultural implications of the integration of technology into civic lives.

How to Use the Site

Case studies are divided into four sections: Play + Creativity, Systems + Design, Learning + Engagement, and Community + Action. Each section contains about 25 case studies that address the themes of the section. But there is considerable crossover and thematic overlap between sections as well. For those adventurous readers, the Tag Cloud provides a more granular entry point to the material and a more diverse set of connections.

We have also developed a curriculum that provides some suggestions for educators interested in using the Civic Media Project and other resources to explore the conceptual and practical implications of civic media examples.

One of the most valuable elements of this project is the dialogue about the case studies. We have asked all of the project’s contributors to write in-depth reviews of others’ contributions, and we also invite all readers to comment on cases and reviews. Do not be intimidated by the long “featured comments” in the Disqus section—these formal reviews should be understood as part of the critical commentary that makes each of these cases come alive through discussion and debate.

The Book

Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice is forthcoming from MIT Press and will serve as the print book companion to the Civic Media Project. The book identifies the emerging field of Civic Media by brining together leading scholars and practitioners from a diversity of disciplines to shape theory, identify problems and articulate opportunities.  The book includes 19 chapters (and 25 case studies) from fields as diverse as philosophy, communications, education, sociology, media studies, art, policy and philanthropy, and attempts to find common language and common purpose through the investigation of civic media….(More)”

New portal to crowdsource captions, transcripts of old photos, national archives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Irene Tham at The Straits Times: “Wanted: history enthusiasts to caption old photographs and transcribe handwritten manuscripts that contain a piece of Singapore’s history.

They are invited to contribute to an upcoming portal that will carry some 3,000 unidentified photographs dating back to the late 1800s, and 3,000 pages of Straits Settlement records including letters written during Sir Stamford Raffles’ administration of Singapore.

These are collections from the Government and individuals waiting to be “tagged” on the new portal – The Citizen Archivist Project at www.nas.gov.sg/citizenarchivist….

Without tagging – such as by photo captioning and digital transcription – these records cannot be searched. There are over 140,000 photos and about one million pages of Straits Settlements Records in total that cannot be searched today.

These records date back to the 1800s, and include letters written during Sir Stamford Raffles’ administration in Singapore.

“The key challenge is that they were written in elaborate cursive penmanship which is not machine-readable,” said Dr Yaacob, adding that the knowledge and wisdom of the public can be tapped on to make these documents more accessible.

Mr Arthur Fong (West Coast GRC) had asked how the Government could get young people interested in history, and Dr Yaacob said this initiative was something they would enjoy.

Portal users must first log in using their existing Facebook, Google or National Library Board accounts. Contributions will be saved in users’ profiles, automatically created upon signing in.

Transcript contributions on the portal work in similar ways to Wikipedia; contributed text will be uploaded immediately on the portal.

However, the National Archives will take up to three days to review photo caption contributions. Approved captions will be uploaded on its website at www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline….(More)”

Tweets Can Predict Health Insurance Exchange Enrollment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

PennMedicine: “An increase in Twitter sentiment (the positivity or negativity of tweets) is associated with an increase in state-level enrollment in the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) health insurance marketplaces — a phenomenon that points to use of the social media platform as a real-time gauge of public opinion and provides a way for marketplaces to quickly identify enrollment changes and emerging issues. Although Twitter has been previously used to measure public perception on a range of health topics, this study, led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and published online in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, is the first to look at its relationship with the new national health insurance marketplace enrollment.

The study examined 977,303 ACA and “Obamacare”-related tweets — along with those directed toward the Twitter handle for HealthCare.gov and the 17 state-based marketplace Twitter accounts — in March 2014, then tested a correlation of Twitter sentiment with marketplace enrollment by state. Tweet sentiment was determined using the National Research Council (NRC) sentiment lexicon, which contains more than 54,000 words with corresponding sentiment weights ranging from positive to negative. For example, the word “excellent” has a positive sentiment weight, and is more positive than the word “good,” but the word “awful” is negative. Using this lexicon, researchers found that a .10 increase in the sentiment of tweets was associated with a nine percent increase in health insurance marketplace enrollment at the state level. While a .10 increase may seem small, these numbers indicate a significant correlation between Twitter sentiment and enrollment based on a continuum of sentiment scores that were examined over a million tweets.

“The correlation between Twitter sentiment and the number of eligible individuals who enrolled in a marketplace plan highlights the potential for Twitter to be a real-time monitoring strategy for future enrollment periods,” said first author Charlene A. Wong, MD, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and Fellow in Penn’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. “This would be especially valuable for quickly identifying emerging issues and making adjustments, instead of having to wait weeks or months for that information to be released in enrollment reports, for example.”…(More)”

Crowdsourcing America’s cybersecurity is an idea so crazy it might just work

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post: “One idea that’s starting to bubble up from Silicon Valley is the concept of crowdsourcing cybersecurity. As Silicon Valley venture capitalist Robert R. Ackerman, Jr. has pointed out, due to “the interconnectedness of our society in cyberspace,” cyber networks are best viewed as an asset that we all have a shared responsibility to protect. Push on that concept hard enough and you can see how many of the core ideas from Silicon Valley – crowdsourcing, open source software, social networking, and the creative commons – can all be applied to cybersecurity.

Silicon Valley venture capitalists are already starting to fund companies that describe themselves as crowdsourcing cybersecurity. For example, take Synack, a “crowd security intelligence” company that received $7.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins (one of Silicon Valley’s heavyweight venture capital firms), Allegis Ventures, and Google Ventures in 2014. Synack’s two founders are ex-NSA employees, and they are using that experience to inform an entirely new type of business model. Synack recruits and vets a global network of “white hat hackers,” and then offers their services to companies worried about their cyber networks. For a fee, these hackers are able to find and repair any security risks.

So how would crowdsourced national cybersecurity work in practice?

For one, there would be free and transparent sharing of computer code used to detect cyber threats between the government and private sector. In December, the U.S. Army Research Lab added a bit of free source code, a “network forensic analysis network” known as Dshell, to the mega-popular code sharing site GitHub. Already, there have been 100 downloads and more than 2,000 unique visitors. The goal, says William Glodek of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, is for this shared code to “help facilitate the transition of knowledge and understanding to our partners in academia and industry who face the same problems.”

This open sourcing of cyber defense would be enhanced with a scaled-up program of recruiting “white hat hackers” to become officially part of the government’s cybersecurity efforts. Popular annual events such as the DEF CON hacking conference could be used to recruit talented cyber sleuths to work alongside the government.

There have already been examples of communities where people facing a common cyber threat gather together to share intelligence. Perhaps the best-known example is the Conficker Working Group, a security coalition that was formed in late 2008 to share intelligence about malicious Conficker malware. Another example is the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, which was created by presidential mandate in 1998 to share intelligence about cyber threats to the nation’s financial system.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to this crowdsourcing idea. For one, such a collaborative approach to cybersecurity might open the door to government cyber defenses being infiltrated by the enemy. Ackerman makes the point that you never really know who’s contributing to any community. Even on a site such as Github, it’s theoretically possible that an ISIS hacker or someone like Edward Snowden could download the code, reverse engineer it, and then use it to insert “Trojan Horses” intended for military targets into the code….  (More)