Government's Crowdsourcing Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John M. Kamensky  in Governing: “In a recent report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Brabham says that an important distinction between crowdsourcing and other forms of online participation is that crowdsourcing “entails a mix of top-down, traditional, hierarchical process and a bottom-up, open process involving an online community.”
Crowdsourcing in the public sector can be done within government, among employees as a way to surface ideas — such as the New York City government’s “Simplicity” initiative — or it can be done by nonprofit groups in ways that influence government operations. For example, a transportation advocacy group in New York City has created a site where citizens can report “near miss” accidents, which are then mapped to determine patterns. The idea is that, while the city government already maps accidents that have happened, hazardous traffic zones can be detected and resolved faster by mapping near-misses without waiting for a large number of actual accidents.
Brabham offers a strategic view of crowdsourcing and when it is useful to address public problems. His report also identifies four specific approaches, describing which is most useful for a given category of problem:
• Knowledge discovery and management. This approach is best for information-gathering and cataloguing problems through an online community, such as the reporting of earth tremors or potholes to a central source. This approach could also be used to report conditions of parks or hiking trails or for cataloging public art projects as have been done in several cities across the country.
• Distributed human-intelligence tasking: This approach is most useful when human intelligence is more effective than computer analysis. It involves distributing “micro-tasks” that require human intelligence to solve, such as transcribing handwritten historical documents into electronic files. For example, when the handwritten 1940 census records were publicly released in 2012, the National Archives catalyzed the electronic tagging of more than 130 million records so they could be searchable online. More than 150,000 people volunteered.
• Broadcast search: This approach is most useful when an agency is attempting to find creative solutions to problems. It involves broadcasting a problem-solving challenge widely on the Internet and offering an award for the best solution. NASA, for example, offered a prize for an algorithm to predict solar flares. The federal government sponsors a contest and awards Web platform, Challenge.gov, that various federal agencies can use to post their challenges. To date, hundreds of diverse challenges have been posted, with thousands of people proposing solutions.
• Peer-vetted creative production: This approach is most useful when an agency is looking for innovative ideas that must meet a test of taste or market support. It involves an online community that both proposes possible solutions and is empowered to collectively choose among them. For example, the Utah Transit Authority sponsored the Next Stop Design project, allowing citizens to design and vote on an ideal bus-stop shelter. Nearly 3,200 people participated, submitting 260 high-quality architectural renderings, and there were more than 10,000 votes leading to a final selection….”

When the wisdom of crowds meets the kindness of strangers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Kelsey (NHS) on why patient and citizen participation is fundamental to high quality health and care services: “…But above all my priority is to improve the way in which health and care services listen to people  – and can therefore act and change. The work of entrepreneurs and apps developers like Patients Like Me, Patient Opinion and iwantgreatcare confirms the benefits of real time patient and citizen participation. The challenge is to do this at scale: open the doors, invite the whole community into the job of improving our national health service. Share decision making. Everybody needs the opportunity – and should be encouraged – to participate.
In April, the NHS did something unprecedented – it launched the Friends and Family Test (FFT), the first time a health service has reported a single measure of patient satisfaction for every hospital. It asked people to say whether they would recommend local inpatient and A&E services; the results are published every month on NHS Choices. By October more than 1m people had participated and hundreds of thousands had volunteered additional real time comments and feedback to local hospitals. ‘Great news’, said David Cameron – who has championed FFT from the start – in a tweet to mark the milestone, ‘giving patients a stronger voice in the NHS’.
This is the boldest move yet to promote patient voice at volume in the NHS and to concentrate our collective focus on improvement in care. At Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Trust, patients reported they could not sleep at night so staff have launched a ‘comfort at night’ campaign and developed a protocol for patient experience ‘never events’. In Lewisham, patients complained about poor communication and staff attitudes. They now plan daily visits for each patient. In Hull, bereaved families complained they had to pay car parking fees; the Trust has now given free passes to relatives in mourning. Routine feedback enables a different kind of conversation between the patient and the clinician. It is a catalyst for change. Commissioners will have to demonstrate how they are improving FFT for local communities to qualify for Quality Premium incentives.
This kind of customer insight is fundamental to the way we make choices as consumers. The NHS is not a hotel chain, nor a city authority: but there are vital lessons it can learn from Amazon and Trip Adviser about the power of transparency and feedback. In New York, more than 90,000 people every day share their views by phone, email and tweet on rubbish collections, potholes and dangerous buildings – and the city has become safer and cleaner.
Friends and family has its critics: people worry about the potential for gaming, for example. But the evidence, after six months, is of overwhelming human benefit and that’s why every maternity unit started to offer FFT to patients in October and why every NHS service will do so from 2015. It’s also why we are now requiring that every local organisation should offer people the chance to comment on, as well as rate, services from next year (most already do).
Some people ask me how we are ensuring the focus on transparency and participation is inclusive. We have launched Care Connect, a pilot project to test how giving people access by telephone and social media could improve feedback and complaints.  Recognising that digital exclusion is an issue in some of our communities, we have started a partnership with the Tinder Foundation to help 100,000 people learn how to go online for health benefit. None of these initiatives exist in isolation, nor do I see them as ‘silver bullets’.  My aim is to work with and build on existing good practice to make people’s voices heard and help the NHS act on them.
In a characteristically thoughtful talk last week, MT Rainey, social activist and former marketing guru, issued this challenge to the NHS: ‘How will we make the wisdom of the crowd meet the kindness of strangers?’ How do the tools of our age – big data, the internet, the mobile phone – meet the values of our species: compassion and honesty and doing our best for others? Friends and family is a good start. We are witnessing the birth of a new knowledge economy and a new social movement. The future is open.”

Data isn't a four-letter word

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda: “I want to talk about data too: the opportunity as well as the threat.
Making data the engine of the European economy: safeguarding fundamental rights capturing the data boost, and strengthening our defences.
Data is at a cross-roads. We have opportunities; open data, big data, datamining, cloud computing. Tim Berners Lee, creator of the world wide web, saw the massive potential of open data. As he put it, if you put that data online, it will be used by other people to do wonderful things, in ways that you could never imagine.
On the other hand, we have threats: to our privacy and our values, and to the openness that makes it possible to innovate, trade and exchange.
Get it right and we can safeguard a better economic future. Get it wrong, and we cut competitiveness without protecting privacy. So we remain dependent on the digital developments of others: and just as vulnerable to them.
How do we find that balance? Not with hysteria; nor by paralysis. Not by stopping the wonderful things, simply to prevent the not-so-wonderful. Not by seeing data as a dirty word.
We are seeing a whole economy develop around data and cloud computing. Businesses using them, whole industries depending on them, data volumes are increasing exponentially. Data is not just an economic sideshow, it is a whole new asset class; requiring new skills and creating new jobs.
And with a huge range of applications. From decoding human genes to predicting the traffic, and even the economy. Whatever you’re doing these days, chances are you’re using big data (like translation, search, apps, etc).
There is increasing recognition of the data boost on offer. For example, open data can make public administrations more transparent and stimulate a rich innovative market. That is what the G8 Leaders recognised in June, with their Open Data Charter. For scientists too, open data and open access offer new ways to research and progress.
That is a philosophy the Commission has shared for some time. And that is what our ‘Open Data’ package of December 2011 is all about. With new EU laws to open up public administrations, and a new EU Open Data Portal. And all EU-funded scientific publications available under open access.
Now not just the G8 and the Commission are seeing this data opportunity: but the European Council too. Last October, they recognised the potential of big data innovation, the need for a single market in cloud computing; and the urgency of Europe capitalising on both.
We will be acting on that. Next spring, I plan a strategic agenda for research on data. Working with private partners and national research funders to shape that agenda, and get the most bang for our research euro.
And, beyond research, there is much we can do to align our work and support secure big data. From training skilled workers, to modernising copyright for data and text mining, to different actors in the value chain working together: for example through a public-private partnership.
…Empowering people is not always easy in this complex online world. I want to see technical solutions emerge that can do that, give users control over their desired level of privacy, how their data will be used, and making it easier to verify online rights are respected.
How can we do that? How can we ensure systems that are empowering, transparent, and secure? There are a number of subtleties in play. Here’s my take.
First, companies engaged in big data will need to start thinking about privacy protection at every stage: and from system development, to procedures and practices.
This is the principle of “privacy by design”, set out clearly in the proposed Data Protection Regulation. In other words, from now on new business ideas have two purposes: delivering a service and protecting privacy at the right level.
Second, also under the regulation, big data applications that might put fundamental rights at risk would require the company to carry out a “Privacy Impact Assessment”. This is another good way to combine innovation and privacy: ensuring you think about any risks from the start.
Third, sometimes, particularly for personal data, a company might realise they need user consent. Consent is a cornerstone of data protection rules, and should stay that way.
But we need to get smart, and apply common sense to consent. Users can’t be expected to know everything. Nor asked to consent to what they cannot realistically understand. Nor presented with false dilemmas, a black-and-white choice between consenting or getting shut out of services.
Fourth, we can also get smart when it comes to anonymisation. Sometimes, full anonymisation means losing important information, so you can no longer make the links between data. That could make the difference between progress or paralysis. But using pseudonyms can let you to analyse large amounts of data: to spot, for example, that people with genetic pattern X also respond well to therapy Y.
So it is understandable why the European Parliament has proposed a more flexible data protection regime for this type of data. Companies would be able to process the data on grounds of legitimate interest, rather than consent. That could make all the positive difference to big data: without endangering privacy.
Of course, in those cases, companies still to minimise privacy risks. Their internal processes and risk assessments must show how they comply with the guiding principles of data protection law. And – if something does go wrong – the company remains accountable.
Indeed company accountability is another key element of our proposal. And here again we welcome the European Parliament’s efforts to reinforce that. Clearly, you might assure accountability in different ways for different companies. But standards for compliance and processes could make a real difference.
A single data protection law for Europe would be a big step forward. National fortresses and single market barriers just make it harder for Europe to lead in digital, harder for Europe to become the natural home of secure online services. Data protection cannot mean data protectionism. Rather, it means safeguarding privacy does not come at the expense of innovation: with laws both flexible and future proof, pragmatic and proportionate, for a changing world….
But data protection rules are really just the start. They are only part of our response to the Snowden revelations….”

Book Review: Three Harbingers of Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Howard Rheingold reviews the following books in Strategy and Business:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013)
Marina Gorbis
The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World
(Free Press, 2013)
Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green
Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture
(New York University Press, 2013)
“Whether you invest, build, teach, research, regulate, investigate, heal, entertain, or sell, major changes in how you do what you do are looming. “Big data,” much in the media spotlight recently—particularly for the revelations of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) surveillance of “metadata”—is probably already changing how you do your work. But socialstructing and spreadable media, two new terms that signal similarly momentous shifts, may still be unfamiliar. This year’s best business books on digitization can equip you to better understand all three phenomena and the changes that they will enable and engender….”

The Age of Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Xavier Marquez at Abandoned Footnotes: “This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases.
Here is a figure I’ve been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project). The figure shows all countries that have ever had some kind of identifiable constitutional document (broadly defined) that mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (in any context – new constitution, amendment, interim constitution, bill of rights, etc.), arranged from earliest to latest mention. Each symbol represents a “constitutional event” – a new constitution adopted, an amendment passed, a constitution suspended, etc. – and colored symbols indicate that the text associated with the constitutional event in question mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic”…
The earliest mentions of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional document occurred in Switzerland and France in 1848, as far as I can tell.[1] Participatory Switzerland and revolutionary France look like obvious candidates for being the first countries to embrace the “democratic” self-description; yet the next set of countries to embrace this self-description (until the outbreak of WWI) might seem more surprising: they are all Latin American or Caribbean (Haiti), followed by countries in Eastern Europe (various bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain), Russia, and Cuba. Indeed, most “core” countries in the global system did not mention democracy in their constitutions until much later, if at all, despite many of them having long constitutional histories; even French constitutions after the fall of the Second Republic in 1851 did not mention “democracy” until after WWII. In other words, the idea of democracy as a value to be publicly affirmed seems to have caught on first not in the metropolis but in the periphery. Democracy is the post-imperial and post-revolutionary public value par excellence, asserted after national liberation (as in most of the countries that became independent after WWII) or revolutions against hated monarchs (e.g., Egypt 1956, Iran 1979, both of them the first mentions of democracy in these countries but not their first constitutions).

Today only 16 countries have ever failed to mention their “democratic” character in their constitutional documents (Australia, Brunei, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Monaco, Nauru, Oman, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Vatican City).[2] And no country that has ever mentioned “democracy” in an earlier constitutional document fails to mention it in its current constitutional documents (though some countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries went back and forth – mentioning democracy in one constitution, not mentioning it in the next). Indeed, after WWII the first mention of democracy in constitutions tended to be contemporaneous with the first post-independence constitution of the country; and with time, even countries with old and settled constitutional traditions seem to be more and more likely to mention “democracy” or “democratic” in some form as amendments or bills of rights accumulate (e.g., Belgium in 2013, New Zealand in 1990, Canada in 1982, Finland in 1995). The probability of a new constitution mentioning “democracy” appears to be asymptotically approaching 1. To use the language of biology, the democratic “meme” has nearly achieved “fixation” in the population, despite short-term fluctuations, and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular correlation between a state calling itself democratic and actually being democratic, either today or in the past.[3]
Though the actual measured level of democracy around the world has trended upwards (with some ups and downs) over the last two centuries, I don’t think this is the reason why the idea of democracy has achieved near-universal recognition in public documents. Countries do not first become democratic and then call themselves democracies; if anything, most mentions of democracy seem to be rather aspirational, if not entirely cynical. (Though many constitutions that mention democracy were also produced by people who seem to have been genuinely committed to some such ideal, even if the regimes that eventually developed under these constitutions were not particularly democratic). What we see, instead, is a broad process in which earlier normative claims about the basis of authority – monarchical, imperial, etc. – get almost completely replaced, regardless of the country’s cultural context, by democratic claims, regardless of the latter’s effectiveness as an actual basis for authority or the existence of working mechanisms for participation or vertical accountability. (These democratic claims to authority also sometimes coexist in uneasy tension with other claims to authority based on divine revelation, ideological knowledge, or tradition, invented or otherwise; consider the Chinese constitution‘s claims about the “people’s democratic dictatorship” led by the CCP).
I thus suspect the conquest of ideological space by “democratic” language did not happen just because democratic claims to authority (especially in the absence of actual democracy) have proved more persuasive than other claims to authority. Rather, I think the same processes that resulted in the emergence of modern national communities – e.g. the rituals associated with nationalism, which tended to “sacralize” a particular kind of imagined community – led to the symbolic production of the nation not only as the proper object of government but also as its proper active agent (the people, actively ruling itself), regardless of whether or not “the people” had any ability to rule or even to exercise minimal control over the rulers.[4] There thus seems to have been a kind of co-evolution of symbols of nationality and symbols of democracy, helped along by the practice/ritual of drafting constitutions and approving them through plebiscites or other forms of mass politics, a ritual that already makes democratic assumptions about “social contracts.” The question is whether the symbolic politics of democracy eventually has any sort of impact on actual institutions. But more on this later….”

Britain’s Ministry of Nudges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the New York Times: “A 24-year-old psychologist working for the British government, Mr. Gyani was supposed to come up with new ways to help people find work. He was intrigued by an obscure 1994 study that tracked a group of unemployed engineers in Texas. One group of engineers, who wrote about how it felt to lose their jobs, were twice as likely to find work as the ones who didn’t. Mr. Gyani took the study to a job center in Essex, northeast of London, where he was assigned for several months. Sure, it seemed crazy, but would it hurt to give it a shot? Hayley Carney, one of the center’s managers, was willing to try.

Ms. Carney walked up to a man slumped in a plastic chair in the waiting area as Mr. Gyani watched from across the room. The man — 28, recently separated and unemployed for most of his adult life — was “our most difficult case,” Ms. Carney said later.

“How would you like to write about your feelings” about being out of a job? she asked the man. Write for 20 minutes. Once a week. Whatever pops into your head.

An awkward silence followed. Maybe this was a bad idea, Mr. Gyani remembers thinking.

But then the man shrugged. Why not? And so, every week, after seeing a job adviser, he would stay and write. He wrote about applying for dozens of jobs and rarely hearing back, about not having anything to get up for in the morning, about his wife who had left him. He would reread what he had written the week before, and then write again.

Over several weeks, his words became less jumbled. He started to gain confidence, and his job adviser noticed the change. Before the month was out, he got a full-time job in construction — his first.

An Idea Born in America

Did the writing exercise help the man find a job? Even now it’s hard for Mr. Gyani to say for sure. But it was the start of a successful research trial at the Essex job center — one that is part of a much larger social experiment underway in Britain. A small band of psychologists and economists is quietly working to transform the nation’s policy making. Inspired by behavioral science, the group fans out across the country to job centers, schools and local government offices and tweaks bureaucratic processes to better suit human nature. The goal is to see if small interventions that don’t cost much can change behavior in large ways that serve both individuals and society.

It is an American idea, refined in American universities and popularized in 2008 with the best seller “Nudge,” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Professor Thaler, a contributor to the Economic View column in Sunday Business, is an economist at the University of Chicago, and Mr. Sunstein was a senior regulatory official in the Obama administration, where he applied behavioral findings to a range of regulatory policies, but didn’t have the mandate or resources to run experiments.

But it is in Britain that such experiments have taken root.  Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced the idea of testing the power of behavioral change to devise effective policies, seeing it not just as a way to help people make better decisions, but also to help government do more for less.

In 2010, Mr. Cameron set up the Behavioral Insights Team or nudge unit, as it’s often called. Three years later, the team has doubled in size and is about to announce a joint venture with an external partner to expand the program.

The unit has been nudging people to pay taxes on time, insulate their attics, sign up for organ donation, stop smoking during pregnancy and give to charity — and has saved taxpayers tens of millions of pounds in the process, said David Halpern, its director. Every civil servant in Britain is now being trained in behavioral science. The nudge unit has a waiting list of government departments eager to work with it, and other countries, from Denmark to Australia, have expressed interest.

In fact, five years after it arrived in Washington, nudging appears to be entering the next stage, with a new team in the White House planning to run policy trials inspired in part by Britain’s program. “First the idea traveled to Britain and now the lessons are traveling back,” said Professor Thaler, who is an official but unpaid adviser to the nudge unit. “Britain is the first country that has mainstreamed this on a national level.”

See also: A Few Findings of Britain’s Nudge

The United States Releases its Second Open Government National Action Plan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai and Gayle Smith at the White House: “Since his first full day in office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration, and transparency in government. Today, the Obama Administration released the second U.S. Open Government National Action Plan, announcing 23 new or expanded open-government commitments that will advance these efforts even further.
…, in September 2011, the United States released its first Open Government National Action Plan, setting a series of ambitious goals to create a more open government. The United States has continued to implement and improve upon the open-government commitments set forth in the first Plan, along with many more efforts underway across government, including implementing individual Federal agency Open Government Plans. The second Plan builds on these efforts, in part through a series of key commitments highlighted in a preview report issued by the White House in October 2013, in conjunction with the Open Government Partnership Annual Summit in London.
Among the highlights of the second National Action Plan:

  • “We the People”: The White House will introduce new improvements to the We the People online petitions platform aimed at making it easier to collect and submit signatures and increase public participation in using this platform. Improvements will enable the public to perform data analysis on the signatures and petitions submitted to We the People, as well as include a more streamlined process for signing petitions and a new Application Programming Interface (API) that will allow third-parties to collect and submit signatures from their own websites.
  • Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Modernization: The FOIA encourages accountability through transparency and represents an unwavering national commitment to open government principles. Improving FOIA administration is one of the most effective ways to make the U.S. Government more open and accountable. Today, we announced five commitments to further modernize FOIA processes, including launching a consolidated online FOIA service to improve customers’ experience, creating and making training resources available to FOIA professionals and other Federal employees, and developing common FOIA standards for agencies across government.
  • The Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT): The United States will join GIFT, an international network of governments and non-government organizations aimed at enhancing financial transparency, accountability, and stakeholder engagement. The U.S. Government will actively participate in the GIFT Working Group and seek opportunities to collaborate with stakeholders and champion greater fiscal openness and transparency in domestic and global spending.
  • Open Data to the Public: Over the past few years, government data has been used by journalists to uncover variations in hospital billings, by citizens to learn more about the social services provided by charities in their communities, and by entrepreneurs building new software tools to help farmers plan and manage their crops.  Building on the U.S. Government’s ongoing open data efforts, new commitments will make government data even more accessible and useful for the public, including by reforming how Federal agencies manage government data as a strategic asset, launching a new version of Data.gov to make it even easier to discover, understand, and use open government data, and expanding access to agriculture and nutrition data to help farmers and communities.
  • Participatory Budgeting: The United States will promote community-led participatory budgeting as a tool for enabling citizens to play a role in identifying, discussing, and prioritizing certain local public spending projects, and for giving citizens a voice in how taxpayer dollars are spent in their communities. This commitment will include steps by the U.S. Government to help raise awareness of the fact that participatory budgeting may be used for certain eligible Federal community development grant programs.

Other initiatives launched or expanded today include: increasing open innovation by encouraging expanded use of challenges, incentive prizes, citizen science, and crowdsourcing to harness American ingenuity, as well as modernizing the management of government records by leveraging technology to make records less burdensome to manage and easier to use and share. There are many other exciting open-government initiatives described in the second Plan — and you can view them all here.”

Index: Measuring Impact with Evidence

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 measuring impact with evidence and was originally published in 2013.

United States

  • Amount per $100 of government spending that is backed by evidence that the money is being spent wisely: less than $1
  • Number of healthcare treatments delivered in the U.S. that lack evidence of effectiveness: more than half
  • How much of total U.S. healthcare expenditure is spent to determine what works: less than 0.1 percent
  • Number of major U.S. federal social programs evaluated since 1990 using randomized experiments and found to have “weak or no positive effects”: 9 out of 10
  • Year the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy was set up to work with federal policymakers to advance evidence-based reforms in major U.S. social programs: 2001
  • Year the Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) was introduced by President Bush’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB): 2002
    • Out of about 1,000 programs assessed, number found to be effective in 2008: 19%
    • Percentage of programs that could not be assessed due to insufficient data: 17%
    • Amount spent on the Even Start Family Literacy Program, rated ineffective by PART, over the life of the Bush administration: more than $1 billion
  •  Year Washington State legislature began using Washington State Institute for Public Policy’s estimates on how “a portfolio of evidence-based and economically sound programs . . . could affect the state’s crime rate, the need to build more prisons, and total criminal-justice spending”: 2007
    • Amount invested by legislature in these programs: $48 million
    • Amount saved by the legislature: $250 million
  • Number of U.S. States in a pilot group working to adapt The Pew-MacArthur Results First Initiative, based on the Washington State model, to make performance-based policy decisions: 14
  • Net savings in health care expenditure by using the Transitional Care Model, which meets the Congressionally-based Top Tier Evidence Standard: $4,000 per patient
  • Number of states that conducted “at least some studies that evaluated multiple program or policy options for making smarter investments of public dollars” between 2008-2011: 29
  • Number of states that reported that their cost-benefit analysis influenced policy decisions or debate: 36
  • Date the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum proposing new evaluations and advising agencies to include details on determining effectiveness of their programs, link disbursement to evidence, and support evidence-based initiatives: 2007
  • Percentage increase in resources for innovation funds that use a tiered model for evidence, according to the President’s FY14 budget: 44% increase
  • Amount President Obama proposed in his FY 2013 budget to allocate in existing funding to Performance Partnerships “in which states and localities would be given the flexibility to propose better ways to combine federal resources in exchange for greater accountability for results”:  $200 million
  • Amount of U.S. federal program funding that Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman suggests be directed towards evaluations of outcomes: 1%
  • Amount of funding the City of New York has committed for evidence-based research and development initiatives through its Center for Economic Opportunity: $100 million a year

Internationally

  • How many of the 30 OECD countries in 2005-6 have a formal requirement by law that the benefits of regulation justify the costs: half
    • Number of 30 OECD member countries in 2008 that reported quantifying benefits to regulations: 16
    • Those who reported quantifying costs: 24
  • How many members make up the Alliance for Useful Evidence, a network that “champion[s]  evidence, the opening up of government data for interrogation and use, alongside the sophistication in research methods and their applications”: over 1,000
  • Date the UK government, the ESRC and the Big Lottery Fund announced plans to create a network of ‘What Works’ evidence centres: March 2013
  • Core funding for the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth: £1m p.a. over an initial three year term
  • How many SOLACE Summit members in 2012 were “very satisfied” with how Research and Intelligence resources support evidence-based decision-making: 4%
    • Number of areas they identified for improving evidence-based decision-making: 5
    • Evaluation of the impact of past decisions: 46% of respondents
    • Benchmarking data with other areas: 39%
    • assessment of options available: 33% 
    • how evidence is presented: 29% 
    • Feedback on public engagement and consultation: 25%
  •  Number of areas for improvement for Research and Intelligence staff development identified at the SOLACE Summit: 6
    • Strengthening customer insight and data analysis: 49%
    • Impact evaluation: 48%
    • Strategic/corporate thinking/awareness: 48%
    • Political acumen: 46%
    • Raising profile/reputation of the council for evidence-based decisions: 37%
    • Guidance/mentoring on use of research for other officers: 25%

Sources

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of smart disclosure was originally published in 2013.

While much attention is paid to open data, data transparency need not be managed by a simple On/Off switch: It’s often desirable to make specific data available to the public or individuals in targeted ways. A prime example is the use of government data in Smart Disclosure, which provides consumers with data they need to make difficult marketplace choices in health care, financial services, and other important areas. Governments collect two kinds of data that can be used for Smart Disclosure: First, governments collect information on services of high interest to consumers, and are increasingly releasing this kind of data to the public. In the United States, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services collects and releases online data on health insurance options, while the Department of Education helps consumers understand the true cost (after financial aid) of different colleges. Second, state, local, or national governments hold information on consumers themselves that can be useful to them. In the U.S., for example, the Blue Button program was launched to help veterans easily access their own medical records.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy. Progress Report. Consumer Empowerment Strategy. United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills, December 2012. http://bit.ly/17MqnL3.

  • The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.
  • The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.
Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.
  • This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.
  • Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

Brodi, Elisa. “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2012. http://bit.ly/17hssEK.

  • This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.
  • The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”
National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.
    • This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.
  • In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

“Policies in Practice: The Download Capability.” Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement, August 2010. http://bit.ly/HhMJyc.

  • This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”
  • To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
    • Make the download capability a common practice
    • Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
    • Collaborate on sample data sets
    • Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
    • Include the download capability in procurement requirements.
  • The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
    • Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
    • Patients need and want the information
    • The download capability would encourage innovation
    • A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
    • A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.
Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.
  • This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.
  • Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

Thaler, Richard H., and Will Tucker. “Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.” Harvard Business Review January – February 2013. The Big Idea. http://bit.ly/18gimxw.

  • In this article, Thaler and Tucker make three key observations regarding the challenges related to smart disclosure:
    • “We are constantly confronted with information that is highly important but extremely hard to navigate or understand.”
    • “Repeated attempts to improve disclosure, including efforts to translate complex contracts into “plain English,” have met with only modest success.”
    • “There is a fundamental difficulty of explaining anything complex in simple terms. Most people find it difficult to write instructions explaining how to tie a pair of shoelaces.

Fort McMoney Online Game-Documentary Puts Fate Of Alberta Oilsands In Players' Hands

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Huffington Post: “The fate of the Alberta oilsands is now in the hands of the people. An interactive web documentary-game, titled “Fort McMoney,” launched Monday, inviting players into an immersive online experience set far north in the oil town of Fort McMurray, Alta.
Players explore the city and connect with key players in the oil industry, environmental activists as well as those living and working in the city and surrounding oil patch. Players learn the town’s environmental, cultural, political, social and economic concerns.
Every week for four weeks, players will explore different themes and issues of concern in the oil patch, virtually walking through the city to interview residents, executives and activists. At the end of each week, players vote in a referendum and try to convince other players of their opinions. The results of the referendum will decide the course of the game – for instance, users may decide to make the environment a priority over economy, or vice versa.
Votes will be tallied each Sunday evening, and Fort McMurray will change accordingly…
Fort McMoney, a joint project by the National Film Board and Montreal-based Toxa and Franco-German TV network Arte, is available in English, French and German. It can be played on a computer browser or tablet and requires players to register with Facebook or Twitter beyond the first segment.”