Transforming governance: how can technology help reshape democracy?


Research Briefing by Matt Leighninger: “Around the world, people are asking how we can make democracy work in new and better ways. We are frustrated by political systems in which voting is the only legitimate political act, concerned that many republics don’t have the strength or appeal to withstand authoritarian figures, and disillusioned by the inability of many countries to address the fundamental challenges of health, education and economic development.

We can no longer assume that the countries of the global North have ‘advanced’ democracies, and that the nations of the global South simply need to catch up. Citizens of these older democracies have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions; Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other valuable democratic innovations have emerged. The stage is set for a more equitable, global conversation about what we mean by democracy.

How can we adjust our democratic formulas so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the parts of this equation may come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organisations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as ‘civic technology’ or ‘civic tech’, these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts, and help neighbours remain connected. If we want to create democracies in which citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, we should be asking a number of questions about civic tech, including:

  • How can online tools best support new forms of democracy?
  • What are the examples of how this has happened?
  • What are some variables to consider in comparing these examples?
  • How can we learn from each other as we move forward?

This background note has been developed to help democratic innovators explore these questions and examine how their work can provide answers….(More)”

Soon Your City Will Know Everything About You


Currently, the biggest users of these sensor arrays are in cities, where city governments use them to collect large amounts of policy-relevant data. In Los Angeles, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze collects data that helps residents navigate the city’s choked highway networks. In Chicago, an ambitious program makes public data available to startups eager to build apps for residents. The city’s 49th ward has been experimenting with participatory budgeting and online votingto take the pulse of the community on policy issues. Chicago has also been developing the “Array of Things,” a network of sensors that track, among other things, the urban conditions that affect bronchitis.

Edmonton uses the cloud to track the condition of playground equipment. And a growing number of countries have purpose-built smart cities, like South Korea’s high tech utopia city of Songdo, where pervasive sensor networks and ubiquitous computing generate immense amounts of civic data for public services.

The drive for smart cities isn’t restricted to the developed world. Rio de Janeiro coordinates the information flows of 30 different city agencies. In Beijing and Da Nang (Vietnam), mobile phone data is actively tracked in the name of real-time traffic management. Urban sensor networks, in other words, are also developing in countries with few legal protections governing the usage of data.

These services are promising and useful. But you don’t have to look far to see why the Internet of Things has serious privacy implications. Public data is used for “predictive policing” in at least 75 cities across the U.S., including New York City, where critics maintain that using social media or traffic data to help officers evaluate probable cause is a form of digital stop-and-frisk. In Los Angeles, the security firm Palantir scoops up publicly generated data on car movements, merges it with license plate information collected by the city’s traffic cameras, and sells analytics back to the city so that police officers can decide whether or not to search a car. In Chicago, concern is growing about discriminatory profiling because so much information is collected and managed by the police department — an agency with a poor reputation for handling data in consistent and sensitive ways. In 2015, video surveillance of the police shooting Laquan McDonald outside a Burger King was erased by a police employee who ironically did not know his activities were being digitally recorded by cameras inside the restaurant.

Since most national governments have bungled privacy policy, cities — which have a reputation for being better with administrative innovations — will need to fill this gap. A few countries, such as Canada and the U.K., have independent “privacy commissioners” who are responsible for advocating for the public when bureaucracies must decide how to use or give out data. It is pretty clear that cities need such advocates too.

What would Urban Privacy Commissioners do? They would teach the public — and other government staff — about how policy algorithms work. They would evaluate the political context in which city agencies make big data investments. They would help a city negotiate contracts that protect residents’ privacy while providing effective analysis to policy makers and ensuring that open data is consistently serving the public good….(more)”.

Improving patient care by bridging the divide between doctors and data scientists


 at the Conversation: “While wonderful new medical discoveries and innovations are in the news every day, doctors struggle daily with using information and techniques available right now while carefully adopting new concepts and treatments. As a practicing doctor, I deal with uncertainties and unanswered clinical questions all the time….At the moment, a report from the National Academy of Medicine tells us, most doctors base most of their everyday decisions on guidelines from (sometimes biased) expert opinions or small clinical trials. It would be better if they were from multicenter, large, randomized controlled studies, with tightly controlled conditions ensuring the results are as reliable as possible. However, those are expensive and difficult to perform, and even then often exclude a number of important patient groups on the basis of age, disease and sociological factors.

Part of the problem is that health records are traditionally kept on paper, making them hard to analyze en masse. As a result, most of what medical professionals might have learned from experiences was lost – or at least was inaccessible to another doctor meeting with a similar patient.

A digital system would collect and store as much clinical data as possible from as many patients as possible. It could then use information from the past – such as blood pressure, blood sugar levels, heart rate and other measurements of patients’ body functions – to guide future doctors to the best diagnosis and treatment of similar patients.

Industrial giants such as Google, IBM, SAP and Hewlett-Packard have also recognized the potential for this kind of approach, and are now working on how to leverage population data for the precise medical care of individuals.

Collaborating on data and medicine

At the Laboratory of Computational Physiology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, we have begun to collect large amounts of detailed patient data in the Medical Information Mart in Intensive Care (MIMIC). It is a database containing information from 60,000 patient admissions to the intensive care units of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Boston teaching hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. The data in MIMIC has been meticulously scoured so individual patients cannot be recognized, and is freely shared online with the research community.

But the database itself is not enough. We bring together front-line clinicians (such as nurses, pharmacists and doctors) to identify questions they want to investigate, and data scientists to conduct the appropriate analyses of the MIMIC records. This gives caregivers and patients the best individualized treatment options in the absence of a randomized controlled trial.

Bringing data analysis to the world

At the same time we are working to bring these data-enabled systems to assist with medical decisions to countries with limited health care resources, where research is considered an expensive luxury. Often these countries have few or no medical records – even on paper – to analyze. We can help them collect health data digitally, creating the potential to significantly improve medical care for their populations.

This task is the focus of Sana, a collection of technical, medical and community experts from across the globe that is also based in our group at MIT. Sana has designed a digital health information system specifically for use by health providers and patients in rural and underserved areas.

At its core is an open-source system that uses cellphones – common even in poor and rural nations – to collect, transmit and store all sorts of medical data. It can handle not only basic patient data such as height and weight, but also photos and X-rays, ultrasound videos, and electrical signals from a patient’s brain (EEG) and heart (ECG).

Partnering with universities and health organizations, Sana organizes training sessions (which we call “bootcamps”) and collaborative workshops (called “hackathons”) to connect nurses, doctors and community health workers at the front lines of care with technology experts in or near their communities. In 2015, we held bootcamps and hackathons in Colombia, Uganda, Greece and Mexico. The bootcamps teach students in technical fields like computer science and engineering how to design and develop health apps that can run on cellphones. Immediately following the bootcamp, the medical providers join the group and the hackathon begins…At the end of the day, though, the purpose is not the apps….(More)

How to implement “open innovation” in city government


Victor Mulas at the Worldbank: “City officials are facing increasingly complex challenges. As urbanization rates grow, cities face higher demand for services from a larger and more densely distributed population. On the other hand, rapid changes in the global economy are affecting cities that struggle to adapt to these changes, often resulting in economic depression and population drain.

“Open innovation” is the latest buzz word circulating in forums on how to address the increased volume and complexity of challenges for cities and governments in general.

But, what is open innovation?

Traditionally, public services were designed and implemented by a group of public officials. Open innovation allows us to design these services with multiple actors, including those who stand to benefit from the services, resulting in more targeted and better tailored services, often implemented through partnership with these stakeholders. Open innovation allows cities to be more productive in providing services while addressing increased demand and higher complexity of services to be delivered.

New York, Barcelona, Amsterdam and many other cities have been experimenting with this concept, introducing challenges for entrepreneurs to address common problems or inviting stakeholders to co-create new services.   Open innovation has gone from being a “buzzword” to another tool in the city officials’ toolbox.

However, even cities that embrace open innovation are still struggling to implement it beyond a few specific areas.  This is understandable, as introducing open innovation practically requires a new way of doing things for city governments, which tend to be complex and bureaucratic organizations.

Counting with an engaged mayor is not enough to bring this kind of transformation. Changing the behavior of city officials requires their buy-in, it can’t be done top down

We have been introducing open innovation to cities and governments for the last three years in Chile, Colombia, Egypt and Mozambique. We have addressed specific challenges and iteratively designed and tested a systematic methodology to introduce open innovation in government through both a top-down and a bottom-up approaches. We have tested this methodology in Colombia (Cali, Barranquilla and Manizales) and Chile (metropolitan area of Gran Concepción).   We have identified “internal champions” (i.e., government officials who advocate the new methodology), and external stakeholders organized in an “innovation hub” that provides long-term sustainability and scalability of interventions. We believe that this methodology is easily applicable beyond cities to other government entities at the regional and national levels. …To understand how the methodology practically works, we describe in this report the process and its results in its application in the city area of Gran Concepción, in Chile. For this activity, the urban transport sector was selected and the target of intervention were the regional and municipal government departments in charge or urban transport in the area of Gran Concepción. The activity in Chile resulted in a threefold impact:

  1. It catalyzed the adoption of the bottom-up smart city model following this new methodology throughout Chile; and
  2. It expanded the implementation and mainstreaming of the methodologies developed and tested through this activity in other World Bank projects.

More information about this activity in Chile can be found in the Smart City Gran Concepcion webpage…(More)”

Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action


Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab: “Next Monday, May 23rd, governments, non-profit organizations and citizen groups will gather in Istanbul at the first World Humanitarian Summit. A range of important issues will be on the agenda, not least of which the refugee crisis confronting the Middle East and Europe. Also on the agenda will be an issue of growing importance and relevance, even if it does not generate front-page headlines: the increasing potential (and use) of data in the humanitarian context.

To explore this topic, a new paper, “Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action,” is being released today, and will be presented tomorrow at the Understanding Risk Forum. This paper is the result of a collaboration between the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), The GovLab (NYU Tandon School of Engineering), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and Leiden UniversityCentre for Innovation. It seeks to identify the potential benefits and risks of using data in the humanitarian context, and begins to outline an initial framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian settings.

Both anecdotal and more rigorously researched evidence points to the growing use of data to address a variety of humanitarian crises. The paper discusses a number of data risk case studies, including the use of call data to fight Malaria in Africa; satellite imagery to identify security threats on the border between Sudan and South Sudan; and transaction data to increase the efficiency of food delivery in Lebanon. These early examples (along with a few others discussed in the paper) have begun to show the opportunities offered by data and information. More importantly, they also help us better understand the risks, including and especially those posed to privacy and security.

One of the broader goals of the paper is to integrate the specific and the theoretical, in the process building a bridge between the deep, contextual knowledge offered by initiatives like those discussed above and the broader needs of the humanitarian community. To that end, the paper builds on its discussion of case studies to begin establishing a framework for the responsible use of data in humanitarian contexts. It identifies four “Minimum Humanitarian standards for the Responsible use of Data” and four “Characteristics of Humanitarian Organizations that use Data Responsibly.” Together, these eight attributes can serve as a roadmap or blueprint for humanitarian groups seeking to use data. In addition, the paper also provides a four-step practical guide for a data responsibility framework (see also earlier blog)….(More)” Full Paper: Building Data Responsibility into Humanitarian Action

Big data’s ‘streetlight effect’: where and how we look affects what we see


 at the Conversation: “Big data offers us a window on the world. But large and easily available datasets may not show us the world we live in. For instance, epidemiological models of the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa using big data consistently overestimated the risk of the disease’s spread and underestimated the local initiatives that played a critical role in controlling the outbreak.

Researchers are rightly excited about the possibilities offered by the availability of enormous amounts of computerized data. But there’s reason to stand back for a minute to consider what exactly this treasure trove of information really offers. Ethnographers like me use a cross-cultural approach when we collect our data because family, marriage and household mean different things in different contexts. This approach informs how I think about big data.

We’ve all heard the joke about the drunk who is asked why he is searching for his lost wallet under the streetlight, rather than where he thinks he dropped it. “Because the light is better here,” he said.

This “streetlight effect” is the tendency of researchers to study what is easy to study. I use this story in my course on Research Design and Ethnographic Methods to explain why so much research on disparities in educational outcomes is done in classrooms and not in students’ homes. Children are much easier to study at school than in their homes, even though many studies show that knowing what happens outside the classroom is important. Nevertheless, schools will continue to be the focus of most research because they generate big data and homes don’t.

The streetlight effect is one factor that prevents big data studies from being useful in the real world – especially studies analyzing easily available user-generated data from the Internet. Researchers assume that this data offers a window into reality. It doesn’t necessarily.

Looking at WEIRDOs

Based on the number of tweets following Hurricane Sandy, for example, it might seem as if the storm hit Manhattan the hardest, not the New Jersey shore. Another example: the since-retired Google Flu Trends, which in 2013 tracked online searches relating to flu symptoms to predict doctor visits, but gave estimates twice as high as reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Without checking facts on the ground, researchers may fool themselves into thinking that their big data models accurately represent the world they aim to study.

The problem is similar to the “WEIRD” issue in many research studies. Harvard professor Joseph Henrich and colleagues have shown that findings based on research conducted with undergraduates at American universities – whom they describe as “some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth” – apply only to that population and cannot be used to make any claims about other human populations, including other Americans. Unlike the typical research subject in psychology studies, they argue, most people in the world are not from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies, i.e., WEIRD.

Twitter users are also atypical compared with the rest of humanity, giving rise to what our postdoctoral researcher Sarah Laborde has dubbed the “WEIRDO” problem of data analytics: most people are not Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic and Online.

Context is critical

Understanding the differences between the vast majority of humanity and that small subset of people whose activities are captured in big data sets is critical to correct analysis of the data. Considering the context and meaning of data – not just the data itself – is a key feature of ethnographic research, argues Michael Agar, who has written extensively about how ethnographers come to understand the world….(https://theconversation.com/big-datas-streetlight-effect-where-and-how-we-look-affects-what-we-see-58122More)”

Workplace innovation in the public sector


Eurofound: “Innovative organisational practices in the workplace, which aim to make best use of human capital, are traditionally associated with the private sector. The nature of the public sector activities makes it more difficult to identify these types of internal innovation in publicly funded organisations.

It is widely thought that public sector organisations are neither dynamic nor creative and are typified by a high degree of inertia. Yet the necessity of innovation ought not to be dismissed. The public sector represents a quarter of total EU employment, and it is of critical importance as a provider and regulator of services. Improving how it performs has a knock-on effect not only for private sector growth but also for citizens’ satisfaction. Ultimately, this improves governance itself.

So how can innovative organisation practices help in dealing with the challenges faced by the public sector? Eurofound, as part of a project on workplace innovation in European companies, carried out case studies of both private and public sector organisations. The findings show a number of interesting practices and processes used.

Employee participation

The case studies from the public sector, some of which are described below, demonstrate the central role of employee participation in the implementation of workplace innovation and its impacts on organisation and employees. They indicate that innovative practices have resulted in enhanced organisational performance and quality of working life.

It is widely thought that changes in the public sector are initiated as a response to government policies. This is often true, but workplace innovation may also be introduced as a result of well-designed initiatives driven by external pressures (such as the need for a more competitive public service) or internal pressures (such as a need to update the skills map to better serve the public).

Case study findings

The state-owned Lithuanian energy company Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba (140 KB PDF) encourages employee participation by providing a structured framework for all employees to propose improvements. This has required a change in managerial approach and has spread a sense of ownership horizontally and vertically in the company. The Polish public transport company Jarosław City Transport (191 KB PDF), when faced with serious financial stability challenges, as well as implementing operational changes, set up ways for employees’ voices to be heard, which enabled a contributory dialogue and strengthened partnerships. Consultation, development of mutual trust, and common involvement ensured an effective combination of top-down and bottom-up initiatives.

The Lithuanian Post, AB Lietuvos Pastas (136 KB PDF) experienced a major organisation transformation in 2010 to improve efficiency and quality of service. Through a programme of ‘Loyalty day’ monthly visits, both top and middle management of the central administration visit any part of the company and work with colleagues in other units. Under budgetary pressure to ‘earn their money’, the Danish Vej and Park Bornholm (142 KB PDF) construction services in roads, parks and forests had to find innovative solutions to deal with a merger and privatisation. Their intervention had the characteristics of workplace partnership with a new set of organisational values set from the bottom up. Self-managing teams are essential for the operation of the company.

The world of education has provided new structures that provide better outcomes for students. The South West University of Bulgaria (214 KB PDF) also operates small self-managing teams responsible for employee scheduling. Weekly round-tables encourage participation in collectively finding solutions, creating a more effective environment in which to respond to the competitive demands of education provision.

In Poland, an initiative by the Pomeranian Library (185 KB PDF) improved employee–management dialogue and communication through increased participation. The initiative is a response to the new frameworks for open access to knowledge for users, with the library mirroring the user experience through its own work practices.

Through new dialogue, government advisory bodies have also developed employee-led improvement. Breaking away from a traditional hierarchy is considered important in achieving a more flexible work organisation. Under considerable pressure, the top-heavy management of the British Geological Survey (89 KB PDF) now operates a flexible matrix that promotes innovative and entrepreneurial ways of working. And in Germany, Niersverband (138 KB PDF), a publicly owned water-management company innovated through training, learning, reflection partnerships and workplace partnerships. New occupational profiles were developed to meet external demands. Based on dialogue concerning workplace experiences and competences, employees acquired new qualifications that allowed the company to be more competitive.

In the Funen Village Museum in Odense, Denmark, (143 KB PDF) innovation came about at the request of staff looking for more flexibility in how they work. Formerly most of their work was maintenance tasks, but now they can now engage more with visitors. Control of schedules has moved to the team rather than being the responsibility of a single manager. As a result, museum employees are now hosts as well as craftspeople. They no longer feel ‘forgotten’ and are happier in their work….(More)”

The report Workplace innovation in European companies provides a full analysis of the case studies.

The 51 case studies and the  list of companies (PDF 119 KB) the case studies are based on are available for download.

Hail the maintainers


Andrew Russell & Lee Vinsel at AEON: “The trajectory of ‘innovation’ from core, valued practice to slogan of dystopian societies, is not entirely surprising, at a certain level. There is a formulaic feel: a term gains popularity because it resonates with the zeitgeist, reaches buzzword status, then suffers from overexposure and cooptation. Right now, the formula has brought society to a question: after ‘innovation’ has been exposed as hucksterism, is there a better way to characterise relationships between society and technology?

There are three basic ways to answer that question. First, it is crucial to understand that technology is not innovation. Innovation is only a small piece of what happens with technology. This preoccupation with novelty is unfortunate because it fails to account for technologies in widespread use, and it obscures how many of the things around us are quite old. In his book, Shock of the Old (2007), the historian David Edgerton examines technology-in-use. He finds that common objects, like the electric fan and many parts of the automobile, have been virtually unchanged for a century or more. When we take this broader perspective, we can tell different stories with drastically different geographical, chronological, and sociological emphases. The stalest innovation stories focus on well-to-do white guys sitting in garages in a small region of California, but human beings in the Global South live with technologies too. Which ones? Where do they come from? How are they produced, used, repaired? Yes, novel objects preoccupy the privileged, and can generate huge profits. But the most remarkable tales of cunning, effort, and care that people direct toward technologies exist far beyond the same old anecdotes about invention and innovation.

Second, by dropping innovation, we can recognise the essential role of basic infrastructures. ‘Infrastructure’ is a most unglamorous term, the type of word that would have vanished from our lexicon long ago if it didn’t point to something of immense social importance. Remarkably, in 2015 ‘infrastructure’ came to the fore of conversations in many walks of American life. In the wake of a fatal Amtrak crash near Philadelphia, President Obama wrestled with Congress to pass an infrastructure bill that Republicans had been blocking, but finally approved in December 2015. ‘Infrastructure’ also became the focus of scholarly communities in history and anthropology, even appearing 78 times on the programme of the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Artists, journalists, and even comedians joined the fray, most memorably with John Oliver’s hilarious sketch starring Edward Norton and Steve Buscemi in a trailer for an imaginary blockbuster on the dullest of subjects. By early 2016, the New York Review of Books brought the ‘earnest and passive word’ to the attention of its readers, with a depressing essay titled ‘A Country Breaking Down’.

Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work, the central fact of our industrial civilisation is labour, most of which falls far outside the realm of innovation

The best of these conversations about infrastructure move away from narrow technical matters to engage deeper moral implications. Infrastructure failures – train crashes, bridge failures, urban flooding, and so on – are manifestations of and allegories for America’s dysfunctional political system, its frayed social safety net, and its enduring fascination with flashy, shiny, trivial things. But, especially in some corners of the academic world, a focus on the material structures of everyday life can take a bizarre turn, as exemplified in work that grants ‘agency’ to material things or wraps commodity fetishism in the language of high cultural theory, slick marketing, and design. For example, Bloomsbury’s ‘Object Lessons’ series features biographies of and philosophical reflections on human-built things, like the golf ball. What a shame it would be if American society matured to the point where the shallowness of the innovation concept became clear, but the most prominent response was an equally superficial fascination with golf balls, refrigerators, and remote controls.

Third, focusing on infrastructure or on old, existing things rather than novel ones reminds us of the absolute centrality of the work that goes into keeping the entire world going…..

 

We organised a conference to bring the work of the maintainers into clearer focus. More than 40 scholars answered a call for papers asking, ‘What is at stake if we move scholarship away from innovation and toward maintenance?’ Historians, social scientists, economists, business scholars, artists, and activists responded. They all want to talk about technology outside of innovation’s shadow.

One important topic of conversation is the danger of moving too triumphantly from innovation to maintenance. There is no point in keeping the practice of hero-worship that merely changes the cast of heroes without confronting some of the deeper problems underlying the innovation obsession. One of the most significant problems is the male-dominated culture of technology, manifest in recent embarrassments such as the flagrant misogyny in the ‘#GamerGate’ row a couple of years ago, as well as the persistent pay gap between men and women doing the same work.

There is an urgent need to reckon more squarely and honestly with our machines and ourselves. Ultimately, emphasising maintenance involves moving from buzzwords to values, and from means to ends. In formal economic terms, ‘innovation’ involves the diffusion of new things and practices. The term is completely agnostic about whether these things and practices are good. Crack cocaine, for example, was a highly innovative product in the 1980s, which involved a great deal of entrepreneurship (called ‘dealing’) and generated lots of revenue. Innovation! Entrepreneurship! Perhaps this point is cynical, but it draws our attention to a perverse reality: contemporary discourse treats innovation as a positive value in itself, when it is not.

Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end? A focus on maintenance provides opportunities to ask questions about what we really want out of technologies. What do we really care about? What kind of society do we want to live in? Will this help get us there? We must shift from means, including the technologies that underpin our everyday actions, to ends, including the many kinds of social beneficence and improvement that technology can offer. Our increasingly unequal and fearful world would be grateful….(More)”

Impact of open government: Mapping the research landscape


Stephen Davenport at OGP Blog: “Government reformers and development practitioners in the open government space are experiencing the heady times associated with a newly-defined agenda. The opportunity for innovation and positive change can at times feel boundless. Yet, working in a nascent field also means a relative lack of “proven” tools and solutions (to such extent as they ever exist in development).

More research on the potential for open government initiatives to improve lives is well underway. However, keeping up with the rapidly evolving landscape of ongoing research, emerging hypotheses, and high-priority knowledge gaps has been a challenge, even as investment in open government activities has accelerated. This becomes increasing important as we gather to talk progress at the OGP Africa Regional Meeting 2016(link is external) and GIFT(link is external) consultations in Cape Town next week (May 4-6) .

Who’s doing what?
To advance the state of play, a new report commissioned by the World Bank, “Open Government Impact and Outcomes: Mapping the Landscape of Ongoing Research”(link is external), categorizes and takes stock of existing research. The report represents the first output of a newly-formed consortium (link is external) that aims to generate practical, evidence-based guidance for open government stakeholders, building on and complementing the work of organizations across the academic-practitioner spectrum.

The mapping exercise led to the creation of an interactive platform (link is external) with detailed information on how to find out more about each of the research projects covered, organized by a new typology for open government interventions. The inventory is limited in scope given practical and other considerations. It includes only projects that are currently underway. It is meant to be a forward-looking overview, rather than a literature review–and are relatively large and international in nature.

Charting a course: How can the World Bank add value?
The scope for increasing the open government knowledge base remains vast. The report suggests that, given its role as a lender, convener, and a policy advisor the World Bank is well positioned to complement and support existing research in a number of ways, such as:

  • Taking a demand-driven approach, focusing on specific areas where it can identify lessons for stakeholders seeking to turn open government enthusiasm into tangible results.
  • Linking researchers with governments and practitioners to study specific areas of interest (in particular, access to information and social accountability interventions).
  • Evaluating the impact of open government reforms against baseline data that may not be public yet, but that are accessible to the World Bank.
  • Contributing to a better understanding of the role and impact of ICTs through work like the recently-published study (link is external)that examines the relationship between digital citizen engagement and government responsiveness.
  • Ensuring that World Bank loans and projects are conceived as opportunities for knowledge generation, while incorporating the most relevant and up-to-date evidence on what works in different contexts.
  • Leveraging its involvement in the Open Government Partnership to help stakeholders make evidence-based reform commitments….(More)

Beyond the Digital Divide: Towards a Situated Approach to Open Data


Paper by Bezuidenhout, L, Rappert, B, Kelly, A and Leonelli, S: “Poor provision of information and communication technologies in low/middle-income countries represents a concern for promoting Open Data. This is often framed as a “digital divide” and addressed through initiatives that increase the availability of information and communication technologies to researchers based in low-resourced environments, as well as the amount of resources freely accessible online, including data themselves. Using empirical data from a qualitative study of lab-based research in Africa we highlight the limitations of such framing and emphasize the range of additional factors necessary to effectively utilize data available online. We adopt the ‘Capabilities Approach’ proposed by Sen to highlight the distinction between simply making resources available, and doing so while fostering researchers’ ability to use them. This provides an alternative orientation that highlights the persistence of deep inequalities within the seemingly egalitarian-inspired Open Data landscape. The extent and manner of future data sharing, we propose, will hinge on the ability to respond to the heterogeneity of research environments…(More)