How to Crowdsource the Syrian Cease-Fire

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Colum Lynch at Foreign Policy: “Can the wizards of Silicon Valley develop a set of killer apps to monitor the fragile Syria cease-fire without putting foreign boots on the ground in one of the world’s most dangerous countries?

They’re certainly going to try. The “cessation of hostilities” in Syria brokered by the United States and Russia last month has sharply reduced the levels of violence in the war-torn country and sparked a rare burst of optimism that it could lead to a broader cease-fire. But if the two sides lay down their weapons, the international community will face the challenge of monitoring the battlefield to ensure compliance without deploying peacekeepers or foreign troops. The emerging solution: using crowdsourcing, drones, satellite imaging, and other high-tech tools.

The high-level interest in finding a technological solution to the monitoring challenge was on full display last month at a closed-door meeting convened by the White House that brought together U.N. officials, diplomats, digital cartographers, and representatives of Google, DigitalGlobe, and other technology companies. Their assignment was to brainstorm ways of using high-tech tools to keep track of any future cease-fires from Syria to Libya and Yemen.

The off-the-record event came as the United States, the U.N., and other key powers struggle to find ways of enforcing cease-fires from Syria at a time when there is little political will to run the risk of sending foreign forces or monitors to such dangerous places. The United States has turned to high-tech weapons like armed drones as weapons of war; it now wants to use similar systems to help enforce peace.

Take the Syria Conflict Mapping Project, a geomapping program developed by the Atlanta-based Carter Center, a nonprofit founded by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to resolve conflict and promote human rights. The project has developed an interactive digital map that tracks military formations by government forces, Islamist extremists, and more moderate armed rebels in virtually every disputed Syrian town. It is now updating its technology to monitor cease-fires.

The project began in January 2012 because of a single 25-year-old intern, Christopher McNaboe. McNaboe realized it was possible to track the state of the conflict by compiling disparate strands of publicly available information — including the shelling and aerial bombardment of towns and rebel positions — from YouTube, Twitter, and other social media sites. It has since developed a mapping program using software provided by Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto-based big data company that does contract work for U.S. intelligence and defense agencies, from the CIA to the FBI….

Walter Dorn, an expert on technology in U.N. peace operations who attended the White House event, said he had promoted what he calls a “coalition of the connected.”

The U.N. or other outside powers could start by tracking social media sites, including Twitter and YouTube, for reports of possible cease-fire violations. That information could then be verified by “seeded crowdsourcing” — that is, reaching out to networks of known advocates on the ground — and technological monitoring through satellite imagery or drones.

Matthew McNabb, the founder of First Mile Geo, a start-up which develops geolocation technology that can be used to gather data in conflict zones, has another idea. McNabb, who also attended the White House event, believes “on-demand” technologies like SurveyMonkey, which provides users a form to create their own surveys, can be applied in conflict zones to collect data on cease-fire violations….(More)

Innovation Prizes in Practice and Theory

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Michael J. Burstein and Fiona Murray: “Innovation prizes in reality are significantly different from innovation prizes in theory. The former are familiar from popular accounts of historical prizes like the Longitude Prize: the government offers a set amount for a solution to a known problem, like £20,000 for a method of calculating longitude at sea. The latter are modeled as compensation to inventors in return for donating their inventions to the public domain. Neither the economic literature nor the policy literature that led to the 2010 America COMPETES Reauthorization Act — which made prizes a prominent tool of government innovation policy — provides a satisfying justification for the use of prizes, nor does either literature address their operation. In this article, we address both of these problems. We use a case study of one canonical, high profile innovation prize — the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize — to explain how prizes function as institutional means to achieve exogenously defined innovation policy goals in the face of significant uncertainty and information asymmetries. Focusing on the structure and function of actual innovation prizes as an empirical matter enables us to make three theoretical contributions to the current understanding of prizes. First, we offer a stronger normative justification for prizes grounded in their status as a key institutional arrangement for solving a specified innovation problem. Second, we develop a model of innovation prize governance and then situate that model in the administrative state, as a species of “new governance” or “experimental” regulation. Third, we derive from those analyses a novel framework for choosing among prizes, patents, and grants, one in which the ultimate choice depends on a trade off between the efficacy and scalability of the institutional solution….(More)”

The Social Intranet: Insights on Managing and Sharing Knowledge Internally

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

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

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

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

States’ using iwaspoisoned.com for outbreak alerts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Dan Flynn at Food Safety News: “The crowdsourcing site iwaspoisoned.com has collected thousands of reports of foodborne illnesses from individuals across the United States since 2009 and is expanding with a custom alert service for state health departments.

“There are now 26 states signed up, allowing government (health) officials and epidemiologists to receive real time, customized alerts for reported foodborne illness incidents,” said iwaspoisoned.com founder Patrick Quade.
Quade said he wanted to make iwaspoisoned.com data more accessible to health departments and experts in each state.

“This real time information provides a wider range of information data to help local agencies better manage food illness outbreaks,” he said. “It also supplements existing reporting channels and serves to corroborate their own reporting systems.”

The Florida Department of Health, Food and Waterborne Disease Program (FWDP) began receiving iwaspoisoned.com alerts beginning in December 2015.

“The FWDP has had an online complaint form for individuals to report food and waterborne illnesses,” a spokesman said. “However, the program has been looking for ways to expand their reach to ensure they are investigating all incidents. Partnering with iwaspoisoned.com was a logical choice for this expansion.”…

Quade established iwaspoisoned.com in New York City seven years ago to give people a place to report their experiences of being sickened by restaurant food. It gives such people a place to report the restaurants, locations, symptoms and other details and permits others to comment on the report….

The crowdsourcing site has played an increasing role in recent nationally known outbreaks, including those associated with Chipotle Mexican Grill in the last half of 2015. For example, CBS News in Los Angeles first reported on the Simi Valley, Calif., norovirus outbreak after noticing that about a dozen Chipotle customers had logged their illness reports on iwaspoisoned.com.

Eventually, health officials confirmed at least 234 norovirus illnesses associated with a Chipotle location in Simi Valley…(More)”

Nudging voters

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John Hasnas and Annette Hasnas at the Hill: “A perennial complaint about our democracy is that too large a portion of the electorate is poorly informed about important political issues. This is the problem of the ignorant voter. Especially this year, with its multiplicity of candidates, keeping track of the candidates’ various, and often shifting, policy positions can be extraordinarily difficult. As a result, many of those voting in the presidential primaries will cast their ballots with little idea of where the candidates stand on several important issues.

Isn’t there some way to nudge the voters into making more informed choices? Well, actually, yes, there is. But in making this claim, we use the word nudge advisedly.

Among contemporary policy analysts, “nudge” is a term of art. It refers to creating a context within which people make choices–a “choice architecture”–that makes it more likely that people will select one option rather than another. The typical example of a nudge is a school cafeteria in which fruits and vegetables are placed in front in easy to reach locations and less healthy fare is placed in less visible and harder to reach locations. No one is forced to select the fruit or vegetables, but the choice architecture makes it more likely that people will.
The key feature of a nudge is that it is not coercive. It is an effort to influence choice, not to impose it. People are always able to “opt out” of the nudge. Thus, to nudge is to design the context in which individuals make decisions so as to influence their choice without eliminating any options.

We think that nudging can be employed to help voters make more informed decisions in the voting booth.

Imagine the following scenario. A bipartisan good government group creates a list of the most significant contemporary policy issues. It then invites all candidates to state their positions on the issues. In the current campaign, candidates could be invited to state where they stand on gay marriage, immigration, intervention in Syria, climate change, tax reform, the minimum wage, gun control, income inequality, etc. This information would be collected and fed into the relevant election commission computer. When voters enter the voting booth, they would have the option of electronically recording their policy preferences on the same form that the candidates completed. The computer would display a ranking of the candidates on the basis of how closely their positions aligned with the voter’s. After receiving this information, voters would cast their ballots.

Our proposal is a nudge. It is completely non-coercive. No candidate would be required to complete the list of his or her policy positions, although refusing to do so might be viewed negatively by voters. No voter would be required to utilize the option. All would remain free to simply walk into the booth and cast their vote. Even those who utilize the option remain free to disregard its results and vote for whomever they please. The proposal simply alters the choice architecture of voting to build in access to a source of information about the candidates. Yet, it makes it more likely that citizens will cast more informed votes than they do at present….(More)”

Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Worldbank/DEET: “With growing demand for transparency, accountability and citizen participation in policy making and service provision, engagement between citizens and government, as well as with donors and the private sector that deliver government services, is increasingly important.1 Within this, the rapid proliferation of digital tools is opening up a new era of Digital Citizen Engagement (DCE). Initiatives such as online participatory budgeting, SMS voting and the use of handheld digital devices for beneficiary feedback are growing in use. Increased use of technology brings both opportunities and challenges to citizen engagement processes, including opportunities for collecting, analyzing and evaluating data about these processes.

This guide offers a means of assessing the extent to which digital tools have contributed to citizen engagement2 and to help understand the impacts—positive or negative, intended or unintended—that the introduction of technology has had on the engagement processes. It addresses specific questions: Does adding digital technology to the citizen engagement process really provide quicker, cheaper, easier ways for citizens to engage with the state or other service providers? Can digital technologies lower interaction costs for governments and deliver improved, more targeted development outcomes? What risks come with this new technology—have certain citizens been excluded (intentionally or unintentionally) from the engagement process? Has the way in which people engage and communicate altered, for better or for worse? Has the technology affected the previously existing groups and institutions that were intermediating engagement processes before the technology was introduced? The guide is designed to help people understand when the use of DCE is appropriate and under what circumstances, how to use it more effectively and what to expect from its use. It introduces the key issues relating to Digital Citizen Engagement and offers advice and guidance on how to evaluate it— including methods, indicators, challenges and course corrections that apply to the digital aspect of citizen engagement….(More)”

How tech is forcing firms to be better global citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Catherine Lawson at the BBC: “…technology is forcing companies to up their game and interact with communities more directly and effectively….

Platforms such as Kritical Mass have certainly given a fillip to the idea of crowd-supported philanthropy, attracting individuals and corporate sponsors to its projects, whether that’s saving vultures in Kenya or bringing solar power to rural communities in west Africa.

Sponsors can offer funding, volunteers, expertise or marketing. So rather than imposing corporate ideas of “do-gooding” on communities in a patronising manner, firms can simply respond to demand.

HelpfulPeeps has pushed its volunteering platform into more than 40 countries worldwide, connecting people who want to share their time, knowledge and skills with each other for free.

In the UK, online platform Neighbourly connects community projects and charities with companies and people willing to volunteer their resources. For example, Starbucks has pledged 2,500 days of volunteering and has so far backed 70 community projects….

Judging by the strong public appetite for supporting good causes and campaigning against injustice on sites such as Change.org, Avaaz.org, JustGiving andGoFundMe, his assessment appears to be correct.

And LinkedIn says millions of members have signalled on their profiles that they want to serve on a non-profit board or use their skills to volunteer….

Tech companies in particular are offering expertise and skills to good causes as way of making a tangible difference.

For example, in January, Microsoft announced that through its new organisation,Microsoft Philanthropies, it will donate $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to serve non-profits and university researchers over the next three years…

And data analytics specialist Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) has offered its data-crunching skills to help the Capital Area Food Bank charity distribute food more efficiently to hungry people around the Washington DC area.

APT used data to develop a “hunger heat map” to help CAFB target resources and plan for future demand better.

In another project, APT helped The Cara Program – a Chicago-based charity providing training and job placements to people affected by homelessness or poverty – evaluate what made its students more employable….

And Launch, an open platform jointly founded by Nasa, Nike, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of State aims to provide support for start-ups and “inspire innovation”.

In the age of internet transparency, it seems corporates no longer have anywhere to hide – a spot of CSR whitewashing is not going to cut it anymore….(More)”.

The Opportunity Project: Utilizing Open Data to Build Stronger Ladders of Opportunity for All

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

White House Factsheet: “In the lead up to the President’s historic visit to SxSW, today the Administration is announcing the launch of “The Opportunity Project,” a new open data effort to improve economic mobility for all Americans. As the President said in his State of the Union address, we must harness 21st century technology and innovation to expand access to opportunity and tackle our greatest challenges.

The Opportunity Project will put data and tools in the hands of civic leaders, community organizations, and families to help them navigate information about critical resources such as access to jobs, housing, transportation, schools, and other neighborhood amenities. This project is about unleashing the power of data to help our children and our children’s children access the resources they need to thrive. Today, the Administration is releasing a unique package of Federal and local datasets in an easy-to-use format and accelerating a new way for the federal government to collaborate with local leaders, technologists, and community members to use data and technology to tackle inequities and strengthen their communities.

Key components of this announcement include:

·         The launch of “The Opportunity Project” and Opportunity.Census.gov to provide easy access to the new package of Opportunity Project data, a combination of Federal and local data, on key assets that determine access to opportunity at the neighborhood level. This data can now be used by technologists, community groups, and local governments in order to help families find affordable housing, help businesses identify services they need, and help policymakers see inequities in their communities and make investments to expand fair housing and increase economic mobility.

·         The release of a dozen new private sector and non-profit digital tools that were built in collaboration with eight cities and using the Opportunity Project data to help families, local leaders, advocates, and the media navigate information about access to jobs, housing, transportation, schools, neighborhood amenities, and other critical resources. Participating cities include Baltimore, Detroit, Kansas City, MO, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., as well as organizations and companies such as Redfin, Zillow, GreatSchools, PolicyLink andStreetwyze.

·         More than thirty additional non-profits, community organizations, coding boot camps, academic institutions, and local governments have already committed to use the Opportunity Project data to build stronger ladders of opportunity in communities across the country.

·         The Administration is issuing a Call to Action to the public to develop new tools, offer additional sources of data, deepen community engagement through the use of the data, and other actions. We want to hear about what new steps you are taking or programs you are implementing to address these topics.

This project represents an important continuation of how the Federal government is working with communities and technologists to enhance the power of open data by making it more accessible to a wide variety of users across the country, and by facilitating collaborations between software developers and community members to build digital tools that make it easier for communities and families to solve their greatest challenges….(More)”

The Governing Cancer of Our Time

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Brooks in The New York Times: “We live in a big, diverse society. There are essentially two ways to maintain order and get things done in such a society — politics or some form of dictatorship. Either through compromise or brute force. Our founding fathers chose politics.

Politics is an activity in which you recognize the simultaneous existence of different groups, interests and opinions. You try to find some way to balance or reconcile or compromise those interests, or at least a majority of them. You follow a set of rules, enshrined in a constitution or in custom, to help you reach these compromises in a way everybody considers legitimate.

The downside of politics is that people never really get everything they want. It’s messy, limited and no issue is ever really settled. Politics is a muddled activity in which people have to recognize restraints and settle for less than they want. Disappointment is normal.

But that’s sort of the beauty of politics, too. It involves an endless conversation in which we learn about other people and see things from their vantage point and try to balance their needs against our own. Plus, it’s better than the alternative: rule by some authoritarian tyrant who tries to govern by clobbering everyone in his way.

As Bernard Crick wrote in his book, “In Defence of Politics,” “Politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence.”

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.

Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.

This antipolitics tendency has had a wretched effect on our democracy. It has led to a series of overlapping downward spirals:

The antipolitics people elect legislators who have no political skills or experience. That incompetence leads to dysfunctional government, which leads to more disgust with government, which leads to a demand for even more outsiders.

The antipolitics people don’t accept that politics is a limited activity. They make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations. When those expectations are not met, voters grow cynical and, disgusted, turn even further in the direction of antipolitics.

The antipolitics people refuse compromise and so block the legislative process. The absence of accomplishment destroys public trust. The decline in trust makes deal-making harder….

This isn’t just an American phenomenon. Politics is in retreat and authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide. The answer to Trump is politics. It’s acknowledging other people exist. It’s taking pleasure in that difference and hammering out workable arrangements. As Harold Laski put it, “We shall make the basis of our state consent to disagreement. Therein shall we ensure its deepest harmony.”…(More)”

Sticky-note strategy: How federal innovation labs borrow from Silicon Valley

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carten Cordell in the Federal Times: “The framework for an integrated security solution in the Philippines is built on a bedrock of sticky notes. So is the strategy for combating piracy in East Africa and a handful of other plans that Zvika Krieger is crafting in a cauldron of collaboration within the State Department.

More specifically, Krieger, a senior adviser for strategy within the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, is working in the bureau’s Strategy Lab, just one pocket of federal government where a Silicon Valley-playbook for innovation is being used to develop policy solutions….

Krieger and a host of other policy thinkers learned a new way to channel innovation for policy solutions called human-centered design, or design thinking. While arguably new in government, the framework has long been in use by the tech sector to design products that will serve the needs of their customers. The strategy of group thinking towards a policy — which is more what these innovation labs seek to achieve — has been used before as well….Where the government has started to use HCD is in developing new policy solutions within a multifaceted group of stakeholders that can contribute a well-rounded slate of expertise. The product is a strategy that is developed from the creative thoughts of a team of experts, rather than a single specialized source….

The core tenet of HCD is to establish a meritocracy of ideas that is both empathetic of thought and immune to hierarchy. In order to get innovative solutions for a complex problem, Krieger forms a team of experts and stakeholders. He then mixes in outside thought leaders he calls “wild cards” to give the group outside perspective.

The delicate balance opens discussion and the mix of ideas ultimately form a strategy for handling the problem. That strategy might involve a technology; but it could also be a new partnership, a new function within an office, or a new acquisition program. Because the team is comprised of multiple experts, it can navigate the complexity more thoroughly, and the wild cards can offer their expertise to provide solutions the stakeholders may not have considered….

Human-centered design has been working its way through pockets of the federal government for a few years now. The Office of Personnel Management opened its Innovation Lab in 2012 and was tasked with improving the USAJobs website. The Department of Health and Human Services opened the IDEA Lab in 2013 to address innovation in its mission. The Department of Veteran Affairs has a Center of Innovation to identify new approaches to meet the current and future needs of veterans, and the departments of Defense and State both have innovation labs tackling policy solutions.

The concept is gaining momentum. This fall, the Obama administration released a strategy report calling for a network of innovation labs throughout federal agencies to develop new policy solutions through HCD.

“I think the word is spreading. It’s kind of like a whisper campaign, in the most positive way,” said an administration official with knowledge of innovation labs and HCD strategies, who was not authorized to speak to the press. “I think, again, the only constraint here is that we don’t have enough of them to be able to imbue this knowledge across government. We need many more people.”

A March 2014 GAO report said that the OPM Innovation Lab had not developed consistent performance targets that would allow it to assess the success of its projects. The report recommended more consistent milestones to assess progress, which the agency addressed through a series of pilot programs….

In the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, an innovation lab called the Collaboratory is in its second year of existence, using HCD strategies to improve projects like the Fulbright program and other educational diplomacy efforts.

The Education Diplomacy initiative, for example, used HCD to devise ways to increase education access abroad using State resources. Defining U.S. embassies as the end user, the Collaboratory then analyzed the areas of need at the installations and began crafting policies.

“We identified a couple of area where we thought we could make substantial gains quite quickly and in a budget neutral way,” Collaboratory Deputy Director Paul Kruchoski said. The process allowed multiple stakeholders like the U.S. Agency for International Development, Peace Corps and the Department of Education to help craft the policy and create what Kruchoski called “feedback loops” to refine throughout the embassies…(More)”