national

The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally

Curated on March 23, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ines Mergel for IBM Center for the Business of Government: “While much of the federal government lags behind, some agencies are pioneers in the internal use of social media tools. What lessons and effective practices do they have to offer other agencies?

“Social intranets,” Dr. Mergel writes, “are in-house social networks that use technologies – such as automated newsfeeds, wikis, chats, or blogs – to create engagement opportunities among employees.” They also include the use of internal profile pages that help people identify expertise and interest (similar to Facebook or LinkedIn profiles), and that are used in combination with other social Intranet tools such as on-line communities or newsfeeds.

The report documents four case studies of government use of social intranets – two federal government agencies (the Department of State and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and two cross-agency networks (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the Government of Canada).

The author observes: “Most enterprise social networking platforms fail,” but identifies what causes these failures and how successful social intranet initiatives can avoid that fate and thrive. She offers a series of insights for successfully implementing social intranets in the public sector, based on her observations and case studies. …(More)”

Political Behavior and Big Data

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

Special issue of the International Journal of Sociology: “Interest in the use of “big data” in the social sciences is growing dramatically. Yet, adequate methodological research on what constitutes such data, and about their validity, is lacking. Scholars face both opportunities and challenges inherent in this new era of unprecedented quantification of information, including that related to political actions and attitudes. This special issue of the International Journal of Sociology addresses recent uses of “big data,” its multiple meanings, and the potential that this may have in building a stronger understanding of political behavior. We present a working definition of “big data” and summarize the major issues involved in their use. While the papers in this volume deal with various problems – how to integrate “big data” sources with cross-national survey research, the methodological challenges involved in building cross-national longitudinal network data of country memberships in international nongovernmental organizations, methods of detecting and correcting for source selection bias in event data derived from news and other online sources, the challenges and solutions to ex post harmonization of international social survey data – they share a common viewpoint. To make good on the substantive promise of “big data,” scholars need to engage with their inherent methodological problems. At this date, scholars are only beginning to identify and solve them….(More)”

UN statistics commission agrees starting point for SDG oversight

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

Emma Rumney at Public Finance: “The United Nations Statistical Commission agreed on a set of 230 preliminary indicators to measure progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals published last September.

Wu Hongbo, under secretary general of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, of which the UKSC is part, said “completing the indicator framework is not the end of the story – on the contrary, it is the beginning”.

Hongbo said it was necessary to acknowledge that developing a high-quality set of indicators is a technical and necessarily continuous process, “with refinements and improvements” made as “knowledge improves and new data sources become available”.

One challenge will entail the effective disaggregation of data, by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and more, to allow coverage of specific sectors of the population.

This will be essential if the SDGs are to be implemented successfully.

Hongbo said this will require “an unprecedented amount of data to be produced and analysed”, posing a significant challenge to national statistics systems in both the developing and developed world.

National and regional authorities will also have to develop their own indicators for regional, national and sub-national monitoring, as the global indicators won’t be able to account for different realities, capacities and levels of development.

The statistical commission will now submit its initial global indicator framework to the UN’s Economic and Social Council and General Assembly for adoption….(More)

Crowdsourcing Site Works to Detect Spread of Zika

Curated on March 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne Tracy at Scientific Computing Source: “Last month, the Flu Near You crowdsourcing tool expanded its data collection to include Zika, chikungunya and dengue symptoms, such as eye pain, yellow skin/eyes and joint/bone pain. Flu Near You is a free and anonymous Web site and mobile application that allows the public to report their health information by completing brief weekly surveys.

Created by epidemiologists at Harvard, Boston Children’s Hospital and The Skoll Global Threats Fund, the novel participatory disease surveillance tool is intended to complement existing surveillance systems by directly engaging the public in public health reporting. As such, it relies on voluntary participation from the general public, asking participants to take a few seconds each week to report whether they or their family members have been healthy or sick.

Using participant-reported symptoms, the site graphs and maps this information to provide local and national views of illness. Thousands of reports are analyzed and mapped to provide public health officials and researchers with real-time, anonymous information that could help prevent the next pandemic.

The survey, which launched in 2011, is conducted year-round for several reasons.

First, it is possible for an influenza outbreak to occur outside of the traditional flu season. For instance, the first wave of pandemic H1N1 hit in the spring of 2009. The project wants to capture any emerging outbreak, should something similar occur again.
Second, the project’s symptoms-based health forms allow it to monitor other diseases, such as the recently-added Zika, chikungunya and dengue, which may have different seasons than influenza….(More)

See also: http://flunearyou.org and video: Fight the flu. Save lives

How the FDA aims to speed review of medical devices

Curated on March 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathleen Hickey at GCN: “The Food and Drug Administration is piloting a new system to speed up the premarket review process for new medical devices.

One of the main bottlenecks in the medical device review process is finding the right expert reviewer. Currently the FDA relies on “the usual suspects” – a core group of reviewers from the FDA Office of Device Evaluation (ODE), according to a GovLab report on the pilot program. However, this pool of experts is limited and may not include those with knowledge of the specific technologies in new medical devices. Finding qualified reviewers outside this core group can take as long as nine months.

To combat the issue, the Department of Health and Human Services is creating a network database of experts — HHS Profiles — based on a customized version of theHarvard Profiles Research Networking Software, a National Institutes of Health-funded open source tool for finding researchers with specific areas of expertise.

Potential expert reviewers create profiles in the system describing their skills and experience. The software then imports and analyzes reviewer contact information, publications and other data sources to create and maintain a searchable library of electronic resumes of HHS experts. Representatives of the Office for Device Evaluation can then search the profiles to identify the most qualified individuals to participate in the regulatory review of a given medical device.

The pilot will compare the efficacy of picking expert reviewers from profiles versus the current methods, including determining whether matching individuals based on their published articles and academic degrees is the best method for finding the right reviewer; the time required for the panel to meet and review a device; and safety outcomes – e.g. product recalls and adverse event reports.

The FDA anticipates the new platform will increase the speed and effectiveness of the medical device regulatory review process and expand the pool of reviewers. Currently the premarket approval review process, done exclusively by internal staff, takes an average of 266 days. Reviewing unique devices takes an average of 18 months.

The pilot program is being conducted this year in partnership with GovLab and its MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance. Funding is provided by the General Services Administration from its The Great Pitch investment contest….(More)”

Accelerating Discovery with New Tools and Methods for Next Generation Social Science

Curated on March 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DARPA: “The explosive growth of global digital connectivity has opened new possibilities for designing and conducting social science research. Once limited by practical constraints to experiments involving just a few dozen participants—often university students or other easily available groups—or to correlational studies of large datasets without any opportunity for determining causation, scientists can now engage thousands of diverse volunteers online and explore an expanded range of important topics and questions. If new tools and methods for harnessing virtual or alternate reality and massively distributed platforms could be developed and objectively validated, many of today’s most important and vexing challenges in social science—such as identifying the primary drivers of social cooperation, instability and resilience—might be made more tractable, with benefits for domains as broad as national security, public health, and economics.

To begin to assess the research opportunities provided by today’s web-connected world and advanced technologies, DARPA today launched its Next Generation Social Science (NGS2) program. The program aims to build and evaluate new methods and tools to advance rigorous, reproducible social science studies at scales necessary to develop and validate causal models of human social behaviors. The program will draw upon and build across a wide array of disciplines—including social sciences like sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology, as well as information and computer sciences, physics, biology and math.

As an initial focus, NGS2 will challenge researchers to develop and use these new tools and methods to identify causal mechanisms of “collective identity” formation—how a group of individuals becomes a unified whole, and how under certain circumstances that community breaks down into a chaotic mix of disconnected individuals.

“Social science has done a remarkable job of helping us understand ourselves as the highly social creatures we are, but the field has long acknowledged and rued some frustrating research limitations, including technical and logistical limits to experimentally studying large, representative populations and the challenges of replicating key studies to better understand the limits of our knowledge,” said Adam Russell, DARPA program manager. “As a result, it’s been difficult for social scientists to determine what variables matter most in explaining their observations of human social systems and to move from documenting correlation to identifying causation.”

On top of those methodological and analytic limitations, Russell said, the field is inherently challenged because of its subject matter: human beings, with all their complex variability and seeming unpredictability. “Physicists have joked about how much more difficult their field would be if atoms or electrons had personalities, but that’s exactly the situation faced by social scientists,” he said.

By developing and applying new methods and models to larger, more diverse, and more representative groups of individuals—such as through web-based global gaming and alternate reality platforms—NGS2 seeks to validate new tools that may empower social science in the same way that sophisticated telescopes and microscopes have helped advance astronomy and biology….(More)”

Research and Evaluation of Participatory Budgeting in the U.S. and Canada

Curated on March 8, 2016October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Public Agenda: “Communities across the country are experimenting with participatory budgeting (PB), a democratic process in which residents decide together how to spend part of a public budget. Learning more about how these community efforts are implemented and with what results will help improve and expand successful forms of participatory budgeting across the U.S. and Canada.

Public Agenda is supporting local evaluation efforts and sharing research on participatory budgeting. Specifically, we are:

Building a community of practice among PB evaluators and researchers.
Working with evaluators and researchers to make data and research findings comparable across communities that use participatory budgeting.
Developing key metrics and research tools to help evaluate participatory budgeting (download these documents here).
Publishing a “Year in Participatory Budgeting Research” review based on data, findings, experiences and challenges from sites in the U.S. and Canada.
Conducting original, independent research on elected officials’ views of and experiences with participatory budgeting.
Convening the North American Participatory Budgeting Research Board.

…Below, you will find evaluation tools and resources we developed in close collaboration with PB evaluators and researchers in the U.S. and Canada. We also included the local evaluation reports from communities around the U.S. and Canada using PB in budget decisions.

To be the first to hear about new PB resources and news, join our email list. We also invite you to email us to join our listserv and participate in discussion about evaluation and research of participatory budgeting in the U.S. and Canada.

New to PB and looking to introduce it to your community? You should start here instead! Once your PB effort is under way, come back to this page for tools to evaluate how you’re doing.

15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting: A Toolkit for Evaluators and Implementers

Evaluation is a critical component of any PB effort. Systematic and formal evaluation can help people who introduce, implement, participate in or otherwise have a stake in PB understand how participatory budgeting is growing, what its reach is, and how it’s impacting the community and beyond.

We developed the 15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting toolkit for people interested in evaluating PB efforts in their communities. It is meant to encourage and support some common research goals across PB sites and meaningfully inform local and national discussions about PB in the U.S. and Canada. It is the first iteration of such a toolkit and especially focused on providing practical and realistic guidance for the evaluation of new and relatively new PB processes.

Anyone involved in public engagement or participation efforts other than participatory budgeting may also be interested in reviewing the toolkit for research and evaluation ideas.

The toolkit requires registration before you can download.

The toolkit includes the following sections:

15 Key Metrics for Evaluating Participatory Budgeting: 15 indicators (“metrics”) that capture important elements of each community-based PB process and the PB movement in North America overall. Click here for a brief description of these metrics….(More)”

Opening Up Government: Citizen Innovation and New Modes of Collaboration

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

Chapter by Stefan Etzelstorfer, Thomas Gegenhuber and, Dennis Hilgers in Open Tourism: Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing and Co-Creation Challenging the Tourism Industry: “Companies use crowdsourcing to solve problems by using a widely dispersed and large group of individuals. Crowdsourcing and open innovation are not restricted to businesses. Governments also increasingly rely on open innovation principles to harness the expert knowledge of citizens and use citizens’ contributions to the public value creation process. While a large body of literature has examined the open government paradigm at the national level, we still know relatively little about how open government initiatives play out at the local level. Even less is known about whether open government initiatives may create positive spill overs, for example by having a trickle-down effect onto local tourism sectors. In this article, we present the City of Linz’s open government activities. More specifically, we review how the public administration implemented the interactive mapping and reporting application “Schau auf Linz“ (“Look at Linz“). Through our analysis of this case study, we show what role the local context and prior policies play in implementing open government initiatives on a local level. In addition, we discuss how this initiative, like others, leads to positive spill overs for the tourism sector….(More)”

Private Data and Public Value: Governance, Green Consumption, and Sustainable Supply Chains

Curated on March 5, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Jarman, Holly and Luna-Reyes, Luis F: “This book investigates the ways in which these systems can promote public value by encouraging the disclosure and reuse of privately-held data in ways that support collective values such as environmental sustainability. Supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the authors’ research team has been working on one such system, designed to enhance consumers ability to access information about the sustainability of the products that they buy and the supply chains that produce them. Pulled by rapidly developing technology and pushed by budget cuts, politicians and public managers are attempting to find ways to increase the public value of their actions. Policymakers are increasingly acknowledging the potential that lies in publicly disclosing more of the data that they hold, as well as incentivizing individuals and organizations to access, use, and combine it in new ways. Due to technological advances which include smarter phones, better ways to track objects and people as they travel, and more efficient data processing, it is now possible to build systems which use shared, transparent data in creative ways. The book adds to the current conversation among academics and practitioners about how to promote public value through data disclosure, focusing particularly on the roles that governments, businesses and non-profit actors can play in this process, making it of interest to both scholars and policy-makers….(More)”