Why transparency can be a dirty word

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times: “It is hard to think of a political good that is more universally praised than government transparency. Whereas secrecy shelters corruption, abuse of power, undue influence and a host of other evils, transparency allows citizens to keep their rulers accountable. Or that is the theory.

It is clear that there are vast areas in which modern governments should reveal more. Edward Snowden’s revelations of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency has encouraged belief that the US government has been not nearly transparent enough. But is it possible to have too much transparency? The answer is clearly yes: demands for certain kinds of transparency have hurt government effectiveness, particularly with regard to its ability to deliberate.

The US has a number of statutes mandating transparency passed decades ago in response to perceived government abuses, and motivated by perfectly reasonable expectations that the government should operate under greater scrutiny. Yet they have had a number of unfortunate consequences.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act, for example, places onerous requirements on any public agency seeking to consult a group outside the government, requiring that they are formally approved and meet various criteria for political balance. Meetings must be held in public. The Government in the Sunshine Act stipulates that, with certain exceptions, “every portion of every meeting of an agency shall be open to public observation”.

These obligations put a serious damper on informal consultations with citizens, and even make it difficult for officials to talk to one another. Deliberation, whether in the context of a family or a federal agency, require people to pose hypotheticals and, when trying to reach agreement, make concessions.

When the process itself is open to public scrutiny, officials fear being hounded for a word taken out of context. They resort to cumbersome methods of circumventing the regulations, such as having one-on-one discussions so as not to trigger a group rule, or having subordinates do all the serious work.

The problem with the Freedom of Information Act is different. It was meant to serve investigative journalists looking into abuses of power. But today a large number of FOIA requests are filed by corporate sleuths trying to ferret out secrets for competitive advantage, or simply by individuals curious to find out what the government knows about them. The FOIA can be “weaponised”, as when the activist group Judicial Watch used it to obtain email documents on the Obama administration’s response to the 2012 attack on the US compound in Benghazi…..

National security aside, the federal government’s executive branch is probably one of the most transparent organisations on earth — no corporation, labour union, lobbying group or non-profit organisation is subject to such scrutiny. The real problem, as Professor John DiIulio of Pennsylvania university has pointed out, is that most of the work of government has been outsourced to contractors who face none of the transparency requirements of the government itself. It is an impossible task even to establish the number of such contractors in a single American city, much less how they are performing their jobs.

In Europe, where there is no equivalent to the FACA or the Sunshine Act, governments can consult citizens’ groups more flexibly. There is, of course, a large and growing distrust of European institutions by citizens. But America’s experience suggests that greater transparency requirements do not necessarily lead to more trust in government….(More)”

 

The New Science of Sentencing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Maria Barry-Jester et al at the Marshall Project: “Criminal sentencing has long been based on the present crime and, sometimes, the defendant’s past criminal record. In Pennsylvania, judges could soon consider a new dimension: the future.

Pennsylvania is on the verge of becoming one of the first states in the country to base criminal sentences not only on what crimes people have been convicted of, but also on whether they are deemed likely to commit additional crimes. As early as next year, judges there could receive statistically derived tools known as risk assessments to help them decide how much prison time — if any — to assign.

Risk assessments have existed in various forms for a century, but over the past two decades, they have spread through the American justice system, driven by advances in social science. The tools try to predict recidivism — repeat offending or breaking the rules of probation or parole — using statistical probabilities based on factors such as age, employment history and prior criminal record. They are now used at some stage of the criminal justice process in nearly every state. Many court systems use the tools to guide decisions about which prisoners to release on parole, for example, and risk assessments are becoming increasingly popular as a way to help set bail for inmates awaiting trial.

But Pennsylvania is about to take a step most states have until now resisted for adult defendants: using risk assessment in sentencing itself. A state commission is putting the finishing touches on a plan that, if implemented as expected, could allow some offenders considered low risk to get shorter prison sentences than they would otherwise or avoid incarceration entirely. Those deemed high risk could spend more time behind bars.

Pennsylvania, which already uses risk assessment in other phases of its criminal justice system, is considering the approach in sentencing because it is struggling with an unwieldy and expensive corrections system. Pennsylvania has roughly 50,000 people in state custody, 2,000 more than it has permanent beds for. Thousands more are in local jails, and hundreds of thousands are on probation or parole. The state spends $2 billion a year on its corrections system — more than 7 percent of the total state budget, up from less than 2 percent 30 years ago. Yet recidivism rates remain high: 1 in 3inmates is arrested again or reincarcerated within a year of being released.

States across the country are facing similar problems — Pennsylvania’s incarceration rate is almost exactly the national average — and many policymakers see risk assessment as an attractive solution. Moreover, the approach has bipartisan appeal: Among some conservatives, risk assessment appeals to the desire to spend tax dollars on locking up only those criminals who are truly dangerous to society. And some liberals hope a data-driven justice system will be less punitive overall and correct for the personal, often subconscious biases of police, judges and probation officers. In theory, using risk assessment tools could lead to both less incarceration and less crime.

There are more than 60 risk assessment tools in use across the U.S., and they vary widely. But in their simplest form, they are questionnaires — typically filled out by a jail staff member, probation officer or psychologist — that assign points to offenders based on anything from demographic factors to family background to criminal history. The resulting scores are based on statistical probabilities derived from previous offenders’ behavior. A low score designates an offender as “low risk” and could result in lower bail, less prison time or less restrictive probation or parole terms; a high score can lead to tougher sentences or tighter monitoring.

The risk assessment trend is controversial. Critics have raised numerous questions: Is it fair to make decisions in an individual case based on what similar offenders have done in the past? Is it acceptable to use characteristics that might be associated with race or socioeconomic status, such as the criminal record of a person’s parents? And even if states can resolve such philosophical questions, there are also practical ones: What to do about unreliable data? Which of the many available tools — some of them licensed by for-profit companies — should policymakers choose?…(More)”

How We’re Changing the Way We Respond to Petitions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Goldman (White House) at Medium: “…In 2011 (years before I arrived at the White House), the team here developed a petitions platform called We the People. It provided a clear and easy way for the American people to petition their government — along with a threshold for action. Namely — once a petition gains 100,000 signatures.

This was a new system for the United States government, announced as a flagship effort in the first U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Right now it exists only for the White House (Hey, Congress! We have anopen API! Get in touch!) Some other countries, including Germany and theUnited Kingdom, do online petitions, too. In fact, the European Parliamenthas even started its own online petitioning platform.

For the most part, we’ve been pretty good about responding — before today, the Obama Administration had responded to 255 petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. That’s more than 91 percent of the petitions that have met our threshold requiring a response. Some responses have taken a little longer than others. But now, I’m happy to say, we have caught up.

Today, the White House is responding to every petition in our We the Peoplebacklog — 20 in all.

This means that nearly 2.5 million people who had petitioned us to take action on something heard back today. And it’s our goal to make that response the start of the conversation, not the final page. The White House is made up of offices that research and analyze the kinds of policy issues raised by these petitions, and leaders from those offices will be taking questions today, and in the weeks to come, from petition signers, on topics such as vaccination policy, community policing, and other petition subjects.

Take a look at more We the People stats here.

We’ll start the conversation on Twitter. Follow @WeThePeople, and join the conversation using hashtag #WeThePeople. (I’ll be personally taking your questions on @Goldman44 about how we’re changing the platform specifically at 3:30 p.m. Eastern.)

We the People, Moving Forward

We’re going to be changing a few things about We the People.

  1. First, from now on, if a petition meets the signature goal within a designated period of time, we will aim to respond to it — with an update or policy statement — within 60 days wherever possible. You can read about the details of our policy in the We the People Terms of Participation.
  2. Second, other outside petitions platforms are starting to tap into the We the People platform. We’re excited to announce today that Change.org is choosing to integrate with the We the People platform, meaning the future signatures of its 100 million users will count toward the threshold for getting an official response from the Administration. We’re also opening up the code behind petitions.whitehouse.gov on Drupal.org and GitHub, which empowers other governments and outside organizations to create their own versions of this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies.
  3. Third, and most importantly, the process of hearing from us about your petition is going to look a little different. We’ve assembled a team of people responsible for taking your questions and requests and bringing them to the right people — whether within the White House or in an agency within the Administration — who may be in a position to say something about your request….(More)

Accelerating the Use of Prizes to Address Tough Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Kalil and Jenn Gustetic in DigitalGov: “Later this year, the Federal government will celebrate the fifth anniversary of Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop that has prompted tens of thousands of individuals, including engaged citizens and entrepreneurs, to participate in more than 400 public-sector prize competitions with more than $72 million in prizes.

The May 2015 report to Congress on the Implementation of Federal Prize Authority for Fiscal Year 2014 highlights that Challenge.gov is a critical component of the Federal government’s use of prize competitions to spur innovation. Federal agencies have used prize competitions to improve the accuracy of lung cancer screenings,develop environmentally sustainable brackish water desalination technologies, encourage local governments to allow entrepreneurs to launch new startups in a day, and increase the resilience of communities in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Numerous Federal agencies have discovered that prizes allow them to:

  • Pay only for success and establish an ambitious goal without having to predict which team or approach is most likely to succeed.
  • Reach beyond the “usual suspects” to increase the number of citizen solvers and entrepreneurs tackling a problem.
  • Bring out-of-discipline perspectives to bear.
  • Increase cost-effectiveness to maximize the return on taxpayer dollars.
  • Inspire risk-taking by offering a level playing field through credible rules and robust judging mechanisms.

To build on this momentum, the Administration will hold an event this fall to highlight the role that prizes play in solving critical national and global issues. The event will showcase public- and private-sector relevant commitments from Federal, state, and local agencies, companies, foundations, universities, and non-profits. Individuals and organizations interested in participating in this event or making commitments should send us a note at challenges [at] ostp.gov by August 28, 2015.

Commitments may include the announcement of specific, ambitious incentive prizes and/or steps that will increase public- and/or private-sector capacity to design high-impact prizes and challenges. For example:….

  • Foundations could sponsor fellowships for prize designers in the public sector to encourage the development and implementation of ambitious prizes in areas of national importance. Foundations could also sponsor workshops that bring together companies, university researchers, non-profits, and government agencies to identify potential high-impact incentive prizes.
  • Universities could establish courses and online material to help students and mid-career professionals learn to design effective prizes and challenges.
  • Researchers could conduct empirical research on incentive prizes and other market-shaping techniques (e.g. Advance Market Commitments, milestone payments) to increase our understanding of how and under what circumstances these approaches can best be used to accelerate progress on important problems.
    Working together, we can use incentive prizes to inspire people to solve some of our toughest challenges. (More)”

Accur8Africa

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“Accur8Africa aims to be the leading platform supporting the accuracy of data in the continent. If we intend to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the next fifteen years, accurate data remains a non-negotiable necessity. Accur8Africa recognizes that nothing less than a data revolution is required. To achieve this we are building the statistical capacity of institutions across Africa and encouraging the use of data-driven decisions alongside better development metrics for key sectors such as gender equality, climate change, equity and social inclusion and health.

Africa has data in abundance but it exists in a fragmented and disorganized manner. As a result, the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals will be largely unquantifiable. As we transition from the MDG’s to the Sustainable Development Goals, and national governments meet to discuss the 17 goals that could transform the world by 2030, we believe that the African Continent deserves better and more accurate data…..Africa has a great role to play in the next fifteen years. The United Nations development agenda has generated momentum for a worldwide “data revolution,” shining a much-needed light on the need for better development data in Africa and elsewhere. Governments, international institutions, and donors need accurate data on basic development metrics such as inflation, vaccination coverage, and school enrolment in order to accurately plan, budget, and evaluate their activities. Governments, citizens, and civil society can then use this data as a “currency” for accountability. When statistical systems function properly, good-quality data are exchanged freely amongst all stakeholders ensuring that funding and development efforts are producing the desired results….(More)”

Harnessing Mistrust for Civic Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ethan Zuckerman: “…One predictable consequence of mistrust in institutions is a decrease in participation. Fewer than 37% of eligible US voters participated in the 2014 Congressional election. Participation in European parliamentary and national elections across Europe is higher than the US’s dismal rates, but has steadily declined since 1979, with turnout for the 2014 European parliamentary elections dropping below 43%. It’s a mistake to blame low turnout on distracted or disinterested voters, when a better explanation exists: why vote if you don’t believe the US congress or European Parliament is capable of making meaningful change in the world?

In his 2012 book, “Twilight of the Elites”, Christopher Hayes suggests that the political tension of our time is not between left and right, but between institutionalists and insurrectionists. Institutionalists believe we can fix the world’s problems by strengthening and revitalizing the institutions we have. Insurrectionists believe we need to abandon these broken institutions we have and replace them with new, less corrupted ones, or with nothing at all. The institutionalists show up to vote in elections, but they’re being crowded out by the insurrectionists, who take to the streets to protest, or more worryingly, disengage entirely from civic life.

Conventional wisdom suggests that insurrectionists will grow up, stop protesting and start voting. But we may have reached a tipping point where the cultural zeitgeist favors insurrection. My students at MIT don’t want to work for banks, for Google or for universities – they want to build startups that disrupt banks, Google and universities.

The future of democracy depends on finding effective ways for people who mistrust institutions to make change in their communities, their nations and the world as a whole. The real danger is not that our broken institutions are toppled by a wave of digital disruption, but that a generation disengages from politics and civics as a whole.

It’s time to stop criticizing youth for their failure to vote and time to start celebrating the ways insurrectionists are actually trying to change the world. Those who mistrust institutions aren’t just ignoring them. Some are building new systems designed to make existing institutions obsolete. Others are becoming the fiercest and most engaged critics of of our institutions, while the most radical are building new systems that resist centralization and concentration of power.

Those outraged by government and corporate complicity in surveillance of the internet have the option of lobbying their governments to forbid these violations of privacy, or building and spreading tools that make it vastly harder for US and European governments to read our mail and track our online behavior. We need both better laws and better tools. But we must recognize that the programmers who build systems like Tor, PGP and Textsecure are engaged in civics as surely as anyone crafting a party’s political platform. The same goes for entrepreneurs building better electric cars, rather than fighting to legislate carbon taxes. As people lose faith in institutions, they seek change less through passing and enforcing laws, and more through building new technologies and businesses whose adoption has the same benefits as wisely crafted and enforced laws….(More)”

Weathernews thinks crowdsourcing is the future of weather

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Andrew Freedman at Mashable: “The weather forecast of the future will be crowdsourced, if one Japanese weather firm sees its vision fulfilled.

On Monday, Weathernews Inc. of Japan announced a partnership with the Chinese firm Moji to bring Weathernews’ technology to the latter company’s popular MoWeather app.

The benefit for Weathernews, in addition to more users and entry into the Chinese market, is access to more data that can then be turned into weather forecasts.

The company says that this additional user base, when added to its existing users, will make Weathernews “the largest crowdsourced weather service in the world,” with 420 million users across 175 countries.

 

…So far, though, mobile phones have not proven to be more reliable weather sensors than the network of thousands of far more expensive and specialized surface weather observation sites throughout the world, but crowdsourcing’s day in the sun may be close at hand. As Weathernews leaders were quick to point out to Mashable in an interview, the existing weather observing network on which most forecasts rely has significant drawbacks that makes crowdsourcing especially appealing outside the U.S.

For example, most surface weather stations are in wealthy nations, primarily in North America and Europe. There’s a giant forecasting blind spot over much of Africa, where many countries lack a national weather agency. However, these countries do have rapidly growing mobile phone networks that, if utilized in certain ways, could provide a way to fill in data gaps and make weather forecasts more accurate, too.

“At Weathernews, we have a core belief that more weather data is better,” said Weathernews managing director Tomohiro Ishibashi.

“So having access to the additional datasets from MoWeather’s vast user community allows us to provide more accurate and safer weather forecasting for all,” he said. “Our advanced algorithms analyze these new datasets and put them in our existing computer forecasting models.”

Weathernews is trying to use observations that most weather companies might regard as interesting but not worth the effort to tailor for computer modeling. For example, photos of clouds are a potential way to ground truth weather satellite imagery, Ishibashi told Mashable.

“For us the picture of the sky… has a lot of information,” he said. (The company’s website refers to such observations as “eye-servation.”)…

Compared to Weathernews’ ambitions, AccuWeather’s recent decision to incorporate crowdsourced data into its iOS app seems more traditional, like a TV weather forecaster adding a few new “weather watchers” to their station’s network during local television’s heyday in the 1980s and 90s.

Now, we’re all weather watchers….(More)”

We are data: the future of machine intelligence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times: “…But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.

The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20 years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government — to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)

The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.

. . .

To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)…(More)”

The Art of Changing a City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Antanas Mockus in the New York Times: “Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia’s capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could be fixed.

As a professor of philosophy, I had little patience with conventional wisdom. When I was threatened by the leftist guerrilla group known as FARC, as hundreds of Colombian mayors were, I decided to wear a bulletproof vest. But mine had a hole cut in the shape of a heart over my chest. I wore that symbol of confidence, or defiance, for nine months.

Here’s what I learned: People respond to humor and playfulness from politicians. It’s the most powerful tool for change we have.

Bogotá’s traffic was chaotic and dangerous when I came to office. We decided the city needed a radical new approach to traffic safety. Among various strategies, we printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of “citizens’ cards,” which had a thumbs-up image on one side to flash at courteous drivers, and a thumbs-down on the other to express disapproval. Within a decade, traffic fatalities fell by more than half.

Another initiative in a small area of the city was to replace corrupt traffic police officers with mime artists. The idea was that instead of cops handing out tickets and pocketing fines, these performers would “police” drivers’ behavior by communicating with mime — for instance, pretending to be hurt or offended when a vehicle ignored the pedestrian right of way in a crosswalk. Could this system, which boiled down to publicly signaled approval or disapproval, really work?

We had plenty of skeptics. At a news conference, a journalist asked, “Can the mimes serve traffic fines?” That is legally impermissible, I answered. “Then it won’t work,” he declared.

But change is possible. People began to obey traffic signals and, for the first time, they respected crosswalks. Within months, I was able to dissolve the old, corrupt transit police force of about 1,800 officers, arranging with the national police service to replace them.

….

This illustrates another lesson we learned. It helps to develop short, pleasing experiences for people that generate stories of delightful surprise, moments of mutual admiration among citizens and the welcome challenge of understanding something new. But then you need to consolidate those stories with good statistical results obtained through cold, rational measurement. That creates a virtuous cycle, so that congenial new experiences lead to statistically documented improvements, and the documentation raises expectations for more welcome change.

The art of politics is a curious business. It combines, as no other profession or occupation does, rigorous reasoning, sincere emotions and extroverted body language, with what are sometimes painfully cold, slow and planned strategic interactions. It is about leading, but not directing: What people love most is when you write on the blackboard a risky first half of a sentence and then recognize their freedom to write the other half.

My main theoretical and practical concern has been how to use the force of social and moral regulation to obtain the rule of law. This entailed a fundamental respect for human lives, expressed in the dictum “Life is sacred.” My purpose was to create a cosmopolitan culture of citizenship in which expressions like “crimes against humanity” would find a precise operational meaning….(More)”

Setting High and Compatible Standards

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network:  “…Standards enable interoperability, replicability, and efficiency. Airplane travel would be chaotic at best and deadly at worst if flights and air traffic control did not use common codes for call signs, flight numbers, location, date, and time. Trains that cross national borders need tracks built to a standard gauge as evidenced by Spain’s experience in making its trains interoperable with the rest of the continent’s.

Standards matter in data collection and publication as well.  This is especially true for those datasets that matter most to people’s lives, such as health, education, agriculture, and water. Disparate standards for basic category definitions like geography and organizations mean that data sources cannot be easily or cost-effectively analyzed for cross-comparison and decision making.

Compatible data standards that enable data being ‘joined up,’ would enable more efficacious logging and use of immunization records, controlling the spread of infectious disease, helping educators prioritize spending based on the greatest needs, and identifying the beneficial owners of companies to help ensure transparent and legal business transactions.

Data: More Valuable When Joined Up

Lots of efforts, time, and money are poured into the generation and publication of open data. And where open data is important in itself, the biggest return on investment is potentially from the inter-linkages among datasets. However, it is very difficult to yield this return because of the now-missing standards and building blocks (e.g., geodata, organizational identifiers, project identifiers) that would enable joining up of data.

Omidyar Network currently supports open data standards for contracting, extractives, budgets, and others. If “joining up” work is not considered and executed at early stages, these standards 1) could evolve in silos and 2) may not reach their full capacity.

Interoperability will not happen automatically; specific investments and efforts must be made to develop the public good infrastructure for the joining up of key datasets….The two organizations leading this project have an impressive track record working in this area. Development Initiatives is a global organization working to empower people to make more effective use of information. In 2013, it commissioned Open Knowledge Foundation to publish a cross-initiative scoping study, Joined-Up Data: Building Blocks for Common Standards, which recommended focus areas, shared learning, and the adoption of joined-up data and common standards for all publishers. Partnering with Development Initiatives is Publish What You Fund,…(More)”