mySidewalk

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “With vast amounts of data now publicly available, the answers to many questions lie buried in the numbers, and we already saw a publishing platform helping entrepreneurs visualize government data. For an organization as passionate about civic engagement asmySidewalk, this open data is a treasure trove of compelling stories.

mySidewalk was founded by city planners who recognized the potential force for change contained in local communities. Yet without a compelling reason to get involved, many individuals remain ‘interested bystanders’ — something mySidewalk is determined to change.

Using the latest available data, mySidewalk creates dashboards that are customized for every project to help local public officials make the most informed decisions possible. The dashboards present visualizations of a wide range of socioeconomic and demographic datasets, as well as provide local, regional and national comparisons, all of which help to tell the stories behind the numbers.

It is those stories that mySidewalk believes will provide enough motivation for the ‘interested bystanders’ to get involved. As it says on the mySidewalk website, “Share your ideas. Shape your community.” Organizations of all types have taken notice of the power of data, with businesses using geo-tagging to analyze social media content, and real-time information sharing helping humanitarians in crises….(More)”

From Stalemate to Solutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Karen Abrams Gerber & Andrea Jacobs  at Stanford Social Innovation Review: “….We waste time asking, “How can we change the way people think?” when we should be asking, “How do we change the way we do things?”

Changing how we do things isn’t just about reworking laws, policies, and systems; it means rethinking the very act of problem-solving. We believe there are five basic tenets to successful collaboration:

  1. Engaging unlikely bedfellows
  2. Creating a resonant vision
  3. Cultivating relationships
  4. Communicating across worldviews
  5. Committing to ongoing learning

Over the past two years, we’ve researched an organization that embodies all of these: Convergence Center for Policy Resolution “convenes people and groups with conflicting views to build trust, identify solutions, and form alliances for action on critical national issues.” Its projects include reimagining K-12 education, addressing economic mobility and poverty, reforming the federal budget process, financing long-term care, and improving the dietary choices and wellness of Americans.

The organization’s unique approach to collaboration enables adversaries to work together and develop breakthrough solutions. It starts with targeting and framing an issue, and then enrolling a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Over an extended period of time, these stakeholders attend a series of expertly facilitated meetings to explore the issue and identify solutions, and finally take joint action….

Foundational to Convergence’s success is the principle of engaging unlikely bedfellows. Stakeholder diversity helps eliminate the “echo chamber” effect (also described by Witter and Mikulsky) created when like-minded groups talk only with one another. The organization vets potential stakeholders to determine their capacity for working with the tensions and complexities of diverse perspectives and their willingness to participate in an emergent process, believing that each ideological camp holds a crucial piece of the puzzle and that the tension of differing views actually creates better solutions.

Convergence exemplifies the power of creating a resonant vision in its approach to tackling big social issues. Framing the issue in a way that galvanizes all stakeholders takes tremendous time, energy, and skill. For example, when the organization decided to focus on addressing K-12 education in the United States, it engaged in hundreds of interviews to identify the best way to frame the project. While everyone agreed the system did not serve the needs of many students, they had difficulty finding consensus about how to move forward. One stakeholder commented that the current system was based on a 19th-century factory model that could never meet the needs of 21st-century students. This comment sparked a new narrative that excited stakeholders across the ideological spectrum: “reimagining education for the 21st century!”

It’s important to note that Convergence focuses on framing the problem, not formulating the solution(s). Rather, it believes the solution emerges through the process of authentic collaboration. This differs significantly from an advocacy-based approach, in which a group agrees on a solution and then mobilizes as much support for that solution as possible. As a result, solutions created through Convergence’s collaborative approach are better able to weather the resistance that all change efforts face, because some of that resistance is built into the process.

Change takes time, and so does cultivating relationships. In an article last year, Jane Wei-Skillern, David Ehrlichman, and David Sawyer wrote, “The single most important factor behind all successful collaborations is trust-based relationships among participants.”…..

Change is complex and certainly not linear. Convergence’s approach “lives” this complexity and uncertainty. In its own words, the organization is “building the ship while sailing it.” Its success is due in part to actively and simultaneously engaging each of the five tenets of authentic collaboration, and its work demonstrates the powerful possibilities of authentic collaboration at a time when partisan rancor and stalemate feel inevitable. It proves we can change the world—collaboratively—without anyone relinquishing their core values….(More)”

UN-Habitat Urban Data Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Driven Journalism: “UN-Habitat has launched a new web portal featuring a wealth of city data based on its repository of research on urban trends.

Launched during the 25th Governing Council, the Urban Data Portal allows users to explore data from 741 cities in 220 countries, and compare these for 103 indicators such as slum prevalence and city prosperity.

compare.PNG
Image: A comparison of share in national urban population and average annual rate of urban population change for San Salvador, El Salvador, and Asuncion, Paraguay.

The urban indicators data available are analyzed, compiled and published by UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory, which supports governments, local authorities and civil society organizations to develop urban indicators, data and statistics.

Leveraging GIS technology, the Observatory collects data by taking aerial photographs, zooming into particular areas, and then sending in survey teams to answer any remaining questions about the area’s urban development.

The Portal also contains data collected by national statistics authorities, via household surveys and censuses, with analysis conducted by leading urbanists in UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities and the Global Report on Human Settlements report series.

For the first time, these datasets are available for use under an open licence agreement, and can be downloaded in straightforward database formats like CSV and JSON….(More)

The Open Data Barometer (3rd edition)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Open Data Barometer: “Once the preserve of academics and statisticians, data has become a development cause embraced by everyone from grassroots activists to the UN Secretary-General. There’s now a clear understanding that we need robust data to drive democracy and development — and a lot of it.

Last year, the world agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — seventeen global commitments that set an ambitious agenda to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change by 2030. Recognising that good data is essential to the success of the SDGs, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the International Open Data Charter were launched as the SDGs were unveiled. These alliances mean the “data revolution” now has over 100 champions willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, Africa adopted the African Data Consensus — a roadmap to improving data standards and availability in a region that has notoriously struggled to capture even basic information such as birth registration.

But while much has been made of the need for bigger and better data to power the SDGs, this year’s Barometer follows the lead set by the International Open Data Charter by focusing on how much of this data will be openly available to the public.

Open data is essential to building accountable and effective institutions, and to ensuring public access to information — both goals of SDG 16. It is also essential for meaningful monitoring of progress on all 169 SDG targets. Yet the promise and possibilities offered by opening up data to journalists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, and citizens at large go far beyond even these….

At a glance, here are this year’s key findings on the state of open data around the world:

    • Open data is entering the mainstream.The majority of the countries in the survey (55%) now have an open data initiative in place and a national data catalogue providing access to datasets available for re-use. Moreover, new open data initiatives are getting underway or are promised for the near future in a number of countries, including Ecuador, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nepal, Thailand, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. Demand is high: civil society and the tech community are using government data in 93% of countries surveyed, even in countries where that data is not yet fully open.
    • Despite this, there’s been little to no progress on the number of truly open datasets around the world.Even with the rapid spread of open government data plans and policies, too much critical data remains locked in government filing cabinets. For example, only two countries publish acceptable detailed open public spending data. Of all 1,380 government datasets surveyed, almost 90% are still closed — roughly the same as in the last edition of the Open Data Barometer (when only 130 out of 1,290 datasets, or 10%, were open). What is more, much of the approximately 10% of data that meets the open definition is of poor quality, making it difficult for potential data users to access, process and work with it effectively.
    • “Open-washing” is jeopardising progress. Many governments have advertised their open data policies as a way to burnish their democratic and transparent credentials. But open data, while extremely important, is just one component of a responsive and accountable government. Open data initiatives cannot be effective if not supported by a culture of openness where citizens are encouraged to ask questions and engage, and supported by a legal framework. Disturbingly, in this edition we saw a backslide on freedom of information, transparency, accountability, and privacy indicators in some countries. Until all these factors are in place, open data cannot be a true SDG accelerator.
    • Implementation and resourcing are the weakest links.Progress on the Barometer’s implementation and impact indicators has stalled or even gone into reverse in some cases. Open data can result in net savings for the public purse, but getting individual ministries to allocate the budget and staff needed to publish their data is often an uphill battle, and investment in building user capacity (both inside and outside of government) is scarce. Open data is not yet entrenched in law or policy, and the legal frameworks supporting most open data initiatives are weak. This is a symptom of the tendency of governments to view open data as a fad or experiment with little to no long-term strategy behind its implementation. This results in haphazard implementation, weak demand and limited impact.
    • The gap between data haves and have-nots needs urgent attention.Twenty-six of the top 30 countries in the ranking are high-income countries. Half of open datasets in our study are found in just the top 10 OECD countries, while almost none are in African countries. As the UN pointed out last year, such gaps could create “a whole new inequality frontier” if allowed to persist. Open data champions in several developing countries have launched fledgling initiatives, but too often those good open data intentions are not adequately resourced, resulting in weak momentum and limited success.
    • Governments at the top of the Barometer are being challenged by a new generation of open data adopters. Traditional open data stalwarts such as the USA and UK have seen their rate of progress on open data slow, signalling that new political will and momentum may be needed as more difficult elements of open data are tackled. Fortunately, a new generation of open data adopters, including France, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Korea and the Philippines, are starting to challenge the ranking leaders and are adopting a leadership attitude in their respective regions. The International Open Data Charter could be an important vehicle to sustain and increase momentum in challenger countries, while also stimulating renewed energy in traditional open data leaders….(More)”

Foreign Policy has lost its creativity. Design thinking is the answer.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Radziszewski at The Wilson Quaterly: “Although the landscape of threats has changed in recent years, U.S. strategies bear striking resemblance to the ways policymakers dealt with crises in the past. Whether it involves diplomatic overtures, sanctions, bombing campaigns, or the use of special ops and covert operations, the range of responses suffers from innovation deficit. Even the use of drones, while a new tool of warfare, is still part of the limited categories of responses that focus mainly on whether or not to kill, cooperate, or do nothing. To meet the evolving nature of threats posed by nonstate actors such as ISIS, the United States needs a strategy makeover — a creative lift, so to speak.

Sanctions, diplomacy, bombing campaigns, special ops, covert operations — the range of our foreign policy responses suffers from an innovation deficit.

Enter the business world. Today’s top companies face an increasingly competitive marketplace where innovative approaches to product and service development are a necessity. Just as the market has changed for companies since the forces of globalization and the digital economy took over, so has the security landscape evolved for the world’s leading hegemon. Yet the responses of top businesses to these changes stand in stark contrast to the United States’ stagnant approaches to current national security threats. Many of today’s thriving businesses have embraced design thinking (DT), an innovative process that identifies consumer needs through immersive ethnographic experiences that are melded with creative brainstorming and quick prototyping.

What would happen if U.S. policymakers took cues from the business world and applied DT in policy development? Could the United States prevent the threats from metastasizing with more proactive rather than reactive strategies — by discovering, for example, how ideas from biology, engineering, and other fields could help analysts inject fresh perspective into tired solutions? Put simply, if U.S. policymakers want to succeed in managing future threats, then they need to start thinking more like business innovators who integrate human needs with technology and economic feasibility.

In his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon made the first connection between design and a way of thinking. But it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Stanford scientists began to see the benefits of design practices used by industrial designers as a method for creative thinking. At the core of DT is the idea that solving a challenge requires a deeper understanding of the problem’s true nature and the processes and people involved. This approach contrasts greatly with more standard innovation styles, where a policy solution is developed and then resources are used to fit the solution to the problem. DT reverses the order.

DT encourages divergent thinking, the process of generating many ideas before converging to select the most feasible ones, including making connections between different-yet-related worlds. Finally, the top ideas are quickly prototyped and tested so that early solutions can be modified without investing many resources and risking the biggest obstacle to real innovation: the impulse to try fitting an idea, product, policy to the people, rather of the other way around…

If DT has reenergized the innovative process in the business and nonprofit sector, a systematic application of its methodology could just as well revitalize U.S. national security policies. Innovation in security and foreign policy is often framed around the idea of technological breakthroughs. Thanks toDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense has been credited with such groundbreaking inventions as GPS, the Internet, and stealth fighters — all of which have created rich opportunities to explore new military strategies. Reflecting this infatuation with technology, but with a new edge, is Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an initiative to scout for new technologies, improve outreach to startups, and form deeper relationships between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. The new DIUE effort signals what businesses have already noticed: the need to be more flexible in establishing linkages with people outside of the government in search for new ideas.

Yet because the primary objective of DIUE remains technological prowess, the effort alone is unlikely to drastically improve the management of national security. Technology is not a substitute for an innovative process. When new invention is prized as the sole focus of innovation, it can, paradoxically, paralyze innovation. Once an invention is adopted, it is all too tempting to mold subsequent policy development around emergent technology, even if other solutions could be more appropriate….(More)”

EU e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020. Accelerating the digital transformation of government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Q and A: “The e-Government Action Plan includes 20 initiatives to be launched in 2016 and 2017 (full list). Several of them aim to accelerate the implementation of existing legislation and related take-up of online public services. The Commission will notably support the transition of Member States towards full e-procurement, use of contract registers and interoperable e-signatures.

Another part of this set of initiatives focuses on cross-border digital public services. For example, the Commission will submit a proposal to create a Single Digital Gateway as a one-stop entry point for business and people to all Digital Single Market related information, assistance, advice and problem-solving services and making sure that the most frequently used procedures for doing business across borders can be completed fully online. The ESSI (Electronic Exchange of Social Security Information) will help national administrations to electronically share personal social information between Member States, thereby making it easier for people to live and work across borders.

Finally, the action plan aims to ensure that high-quality digital public services are designed for users and encourage their participation.

The plan will be regularly reviewed and if needed completed. An online platform for users will ensure that ideas and feedback are collected.

What is the “once-only” principle?

The “once-only” principle means that citizens and businesses should supply the same information only once to a public administration. Public administration internally shares this data, so that no additional burden falls on citizens and businesses. It calls for a reorganisation of public sector internal processes, rather than forcing businesses and citizens to fit around these processes.

The Commission will launch a pilot project with Member States to apply once-only principle across borders, with €8 million funding from Horizon 2020. This pilot will test out a technical once-only solution for businesses working in different EU Member States. Another activity will explore the once-only concept for citizens, and support networking and discussions on how this could be implemented, in due respect of the legal framework on personal data protection and privacy.

What is the digitisation of company law?

A number of EU company rules were conceived in a pre-digital era, when every form had to be completed on paper. As a result, many companies cannot fully benefit from digital tools where it comes to fulfilling company law requirements or interacting with business registers because many of the rules and processes are still paper-based.

The Commission will work on ways to achieve simpler and less burdensome solutions for companies, by facilitating the use of digital solutions throughout a company’s lifecycle in the interaction between companies and business registers, including in cross-border situations.

For instance, in order to set up as a company in a Member State, it is necessary to register that company in a business register. The Commission will look at how and in what ways online registration procedures could be made available in order to reduce the administrative burden and costs of founding a new company. Also, under EU law, companies are obliged to file a number of documents and information in business registers. Cost and time savings for companies could be generated through better use of digital tools when a company needs to submit and disclose new documents or up-date those throughout its lifecycle, for instance when the company name changes.

How will the Single Digital Gateway help European businesses and citizens?

The Single Digital Gateway will link up (not replace) relevant EU and national websites, portals, assistance services and procedures in a seamless and user-friendly way. Over time it will offer users a streamlined, comprehensive portal to find information, initiate and complete transactions with Member States’ administrations across the EU. The most frequently used administrative procedures will be identified and be brought fully online, so that no offline steps like printing and sending documents on paper will be needed.

This will save time and thereby costs for businesses and citizens when they want to engage in cross-border activities like setting up a business, exporting, moving or studying in another EU Member State.

How will interconnecting businesses registers, insolvency registers, and making the e-Justice portal a one-stop shop for justice help businesses?

These initiatives will help businesses trade within the EU with much more confidence. Not only will they be able to find the relevant information on other businesses themselves, but also on their possible insolvency, through the different interconnections of registers. This will increase transparency and enhance confidence in the Digital Single Market.

Interconnecting business registers will also ensure that business registers can communicate to each other electronically in a safe and secure way and that information is up-to-date without any additional red tape for companies.

The European e-Justice Portal provides a lot of additional information in case of problems, including tools to find a lawyer or notary, and tools for the exercise of their rights. It gives businesses easy access to information needed before entering into a business arrangement, as well as the confidence that if things go wrong, a solution is near at hand…. (More)”

See also  Communication on an EU e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020. Accelerating the digital transformation of government

The era of development mutants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Guilo Quaggiotto at Nesta: “If you were looking for the cutting edge of the development sector, where would you go these days? You would probably look at startups like Premise who have predicted food trends 25 days faster than national statistics in Brazil, or GiveDirectly who are pushing the boundaries on evidence – from RCTs to new ways of mapping poverty – to fast track the adoption of cash transfers.

Or perhaps you might draw your attention to PetaJakarta who are experimenting with new responses to crises by harnessing human sensor networks. You might be tempted to consider Airbnb’s Disaster Response programme as an indicator of an emerging alternative infrastructure for disaster response (and perhaps raising questions about the political economy of this all).

And could Bitnation’s Refugee Emergency programme in response to the European refugee crisis be the possible precursor of future solutions for transnational issues – among the development sector’s hardest challenges? Are the business models of One Acre Fund, which provides services for smallholder farmers, or Floodtags, which analyses citizen data during floods for water and disaster managers, an indicator of future pathways to scale – that elusive development unicorn?

If you want to look at the future of procuring solutions for the development sector, should you be looking at initiatives like Citymart, which works with municipalities across the world to rethink traditional procurement and unleash the expertise and innovation capabilities of their citizens? By the same token, projects like Pathogen Box, Poverty Stoplight or Patient Innovation point to a brave new world where lead-user innovation and harnessing ‘sticky’ local knowledge becomes the norm, rather than the exception. You would also be forgiven for thinking that social movements across the world are the place to look for signs of future mechanisms for harnessing collective intelligence – Kawal Pamilu’s “citizen experts” self-organising around the Indonesian elections in 2014 is a textbook case study in this department.

The list could go on and on: welcome to the era of development mutants. While established players in the development sector are engrossed in soul-searching and their fitness for purpose is being scrutinised from all quarters, a whole new set of players is emerging, unfettered by legacy and borrowing from a variety of different disciplines. They point to a potentially different future – indeed, many potentially different futures – for the sector…..

But what if we wanted to invert this paradigm? How could we move from denial to fruitful collaboration with the ‘edgeryders’ of the development sector and accelerate its transformation?

Adopting new programming principles

Based on our experience working with development organisations, we believe that partnering with the mutants involves two types of shifts for traditional players: at the programmatic and the operational level. At the programmatic level, our work on the ground led us to articulate the following emerging principles:

  1. Mapping what people have, not what they need: even though approaches like jugaad and positive deviance have been around for a long time, unfortunately the default starting point for many development projects is still mapping needs, not assets. Inverting this paradigm allows for potentially disruptive project design and partnerships to emerge. (Signs of the future: Patient Innovation, Edgeryders, Community Mirror, Premise)

  2. Getting ready for multiple futures: When distributed across an organisation and not limited to a centralised function, the discipline of scanning the horizon for emergent solutions that contradict the dominant paradigm can help move beyond the denial phase and develop new interfaces to collaborate with the mutants. Here the link between analysis (to understand not only what is probable, but also what is possible) and action is critical – otherwise this remains purely an academic exercise. (Signs of the future: OpenCare, Improstuctures, Seeds of Good Anthropocene, Museum of the Future)

  3. Running multiple parallel experiments: According to Dave Snowden, in order to intervene in a complex system “you need multiple parallel experiments and they should be based on different and competing theories/hypotheses”. Unfortunately, many development projects are still based on linear narratives and assumptions such as “if only we run an awareness raising campaign citizens will change their behaviour”. Turning linear narratives into hypotheses to be tested (without becoming religious on a specific approach) opens up the possibility to explore the solution landscape and collaborate with non-obvious partners that bring new approaches to the table. (Signs of the future: Chukua Hakua, GiveDirectly, Finnish PM’s Office of Experiments, Ideas42, Cognitive Edge)

  4. Embracing obliquity: A deep, granular understanding of local assets and dynamics along with system mapping (see point 5 below) and pairing behavioural experts with development practitioners can help identify entry points for exploring new types of intervention based on obliquity principles. Mutants are often faster in adopting this approach and partnering with them is a way to bypass organisational inertia and explore nonlinear interventions. (Signs of the future: Sardex, social prescriptions, forensic architecture)

  5. From projects to systems: development organisations genuinely interested in developing new partnerships need to make the shift from the project logic to system investments. This involves, among other things, shifting the focus from providing solutions to helping every actor in the system to develop a higher level of consciousness about the issues they are facing and to take better decisions over time. It also entails partnering with mutants to explore entirely new financial mechanisms. (Signs of the future: Lankelly Chase, Indonesia waste banks, Dark Matter Labs)

Adopting new interfaces for working with the mutants

Harvard Business School professor Carliss Baldwin argued that most bureaucracies these days have a ‘non-contractible’ problem: they don’t know where smart people are, or how to evaluate how good they are. Most importantly, most smart people don’t want to work for them because they find them either too callous, unrewarding or slow (or a combination of all of these)….(More)”

Why our peer review system is a toothless watchdog

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus at StatNews: “While some — namely, journal editors and publishers — would like us to consider it the opposable thumb of scientific publishing, the key to differentiating rigor from rubbish, some of those very same people seem to think it’s good for nothing. Here is a partial list of the things that editors, publishers, and others have told the world peer review is not designed to do:

1. Detect irresponsible practices

Don’t expect peer reviewers to figure out if authors are “using public data as if it were the author’s own, submitting papers with the same content to different journals, or submitting an article that has already been published in another language without reference to the original,” said the InterAcademy Partnership, a consortium of national scientific academies.

2. Detect fraud

“Journal editors will tell you that peer review is not designed to detect fraud — clever misinformation will sail right through no matter how scrupulous the reviews,” Dan Engber wrote in Slate in 2005.

3. Pick up plagiarism

Peer review “is not designed to pick up fraud or plagiarism, so unless those are really egregious it usually doesn’t,” according to the Rett Syndrome Research Trust.

4. Spot ethics issues

“It is not the role of the reviewer to spot ethics issues in papers,” said Jaap van Harten, executive publisher of Elsevier (the world’s largest academic imprint)in a recent interview. “It is the responsibility of the author to abide by the publishing ethics rules. Let’s look at it in a different way: If a person steals a pair of shoes from a shop, is this the fault of the shop for not protecting their goods or the shoplifter for stealing them? Of course the fault lies with the shoplifter who carried out the crime in the first place.”

5. Spot statistical flaccidity

“Peer reviewers do not check all the datasets, rerun calculations of p-values, and so forth, except in the cases where statistical reviewers are involved — and even in these cases, statistical reviewers often check the methodologies used, sample some data, and move on.” So wrote Kent Anderson, who has served as a publishing exec at several top journals, including Science and the New England Journal of Medicine, in a recent blog post.

6. Prevent really bad research from seeing the light of day

Again, Kent Anderson: “Even the most rigorous peer review at a journal cannot stop a study from being published somewhere. Peer reviewers can’t stop an author from self-promoting a published work later.”

But …

Even when you lower expectations for peer review, it appears to come up short. Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, reviewed research showing that the system may be worse than no review at all, at least in biomedicine. “Peer review is supposed to be the quality assurance system for science, weeding out the scientifically unreliable and reassuring readers of journals that they can trust what they are reading,” Smith wrote. “In reality, however, it is ineffective, largely a lottery, anti-innovatory, slow, expensive, wasteful of scientific time, inefficient, easily abused, prone to bias, unable to detect fraud and irrelevant.”

So … what’s left? And are whatever scraps that remain worth the veneration peer review receives? Don’t write about anything that isn’t peer-reviewed, editors frequently admonish us journalists, even creating rules that make researchers afraid to talk to reporters before they’ve published. There’s a good chance it will turn out to be wrong. Oh? Greater than 50 percent? Because that’s the risk of preclinical research in biomedicine being wrong after it’s been peer-reviewed.

With friends like these, who needs peer review? In fact, we do need it, but not just only in the black box that happens before publication. We need continual scrutiny of findings, at sites such as PubMed Commons and PubPeer, in what is known as post-publication peer review. That’s where the action is, and where the scientific record actually gets corrected….(More)”

E-Government Strategy, ICT and Innovation for Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Brief by Dennis Anderson, Robert Wu, Dr. June-Suh Cho, and Katja Schroeder: “This book discusses three levels of e-government and national strategies to reach a citizen-centric participatory e-government, and examines how disruptive technologies help shape the future of e-government. The authors examine how e-government can facilitate a symbiotic relationship between the government and its citizens. ICTs aid this relationship and promote transparencies so that citizens can place greater trust in the activities of their government. If a government can manage resources more effectively by better understanding the needs of its citizens, it can create a sustainable environment for citizens. Having a national strategy on ICT in government and e-government can significantly reduce government waste, corruption, and inefficiency. Businesses, CIOs and CTOs in the public sector interested in meeting sustainability requirements will find this book useful. …(More)”

Foundation Openness: A Critical Component of Foundation Effectiveness

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lindsay Louie at PhilanthroFiles: “We created the Fund for Shared Insight—a funder collaborative with diverse support from 30 different funders—to increase foundation openness. We believe that if foundations are more open—which we define as how they share about their goals and strategies; make decisions and measure progress; listen and engage in dialogue with others; act on what they hear; and share what they themselves have learned—they will be more effective.

WPhilanthropy Lessonse were so pleased to support Exponent Philanthropy’s video series featuring philanthropists being more open about their work: Philanthropy Lessons. To date, Exponent Philanthropy has released 5 of the total 9 videos, including:

Future video releases include:

  • Who Knows More? (expected 4/27/16)
  • Being Transparent (expected 4/27/16)
  • Value Beyond Dollars (expected 5/25/16)
  • Getting Out of the Office (expected 6/22/16)

We would love to see many more foundations make videos like these; engage in conversation with each other about these philanthropy lessons online and in person; share their experiences live at regional grantmaker association meetings or a national conferences like those Exponent Philanthropy hosts; and find other ways to be more open.

Why is this so important?

Recent research from the Center for Effective Philanthropy (report on CEP’s website here, full disclosure we funded this research) found that foundation CEOs see grantees, nonprofits that are considering applying for a grant, and other foundations working on similar issues as the top three audiences who benefit from a foundation being open about its work. Further, 86% of foundation CEOs who responded to the survey said they believe transparency is necessary for building strong relationships with grantees.

It was great to learn from this research that many foundations are open about their criteria for nonprofits seeking funding, their programmatic goals, and their strategies; and share about who makes decisions about the grantee selection process. Yet the research also found that foundations are not as open about sharing what they are achieving, how they assess their work, and their experiences with what has and hasn’t worked—and that foundation CEOs believe it would be beneficial for foundations to share more in these specific areas….(More)”