Elizabeth Shepherd in The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs: “Many national governments have adopted the idea of the ‘right to access information’ (RTI) or ‘freedom of information’ (FOI) as an essential element of the rights of citizens to freedom of opinion and expression, human rights, trust in public discourse and transparent, accountable and open government. Over 100 countries worldwide have introduced access to information legislation: 50+ in Europe; a dozen in Africa; 20 in the Americas and Caribbean; more than 15 in Asia and the Pacific; and two in the Middle East (Banisar, 2014). This article will provide an overview of access to information legislation and focus on the UK Freedom of Information Act 2000 as a case example. It will discuss the impact of the UK FOI Act on public authorities, with particular attention to records management implications, drawing on research undertaken by University College London. In the final section, it will reflect on relationships between access to information and open government data. If governments are moving to more openness, what implications might this have for those charged with implementing FOI and RTI policies, including for records management professionals?…(More)”
Does Open Data Need Journalism?
Paper by Jonathan Stoneman at Reuters Institute for Journalism: “The Open Data movement really came into being when President Obama issued his first policy paper, on his first day in office in January 2009. The US government opened up thousands of datasets to scrutiny by the public, by journalists, by policy-makers. Coders and developers were also invited to make the data useful to people and businesses in all manner of ways. Other governments across the globe followed suit, opening up data to their populations.
Opening data in this way has not resulted in genuine openness, save in a few isolated cases. In the USA and a few European countries, developers have created apps and websites which draw on Open Data, but these are not reaching a mass audience.
At the same time, journalists are not seen by government as the end users of these data. Data releases, even in the best cases, are uneven, and slow, and do not meet the needs of journalists. Although thousands of journalists have been learning and adopting the new skills of datajournalism they have tended to work with data obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation.
Stories which have resulted from datajournalists’ efforts have rarely been front page news; in many cases data-driven stories have ended up as lesser stories on inside pages, or as infographics, which relatively few people look at.
In this context, therefore, Open Data remains outside the mainstream of journalism, and out of the consciousness of the electorate, begging the question, “what are Open Data for?”, or as one developer put it – “if Open Data is the answer, what was the question?” Openness is seen as a badge of honour – scores of national governments have signed pledges to make data open, often repeating the same kind of idealistic official language as the previous announcement of a conversion to openness. But these acts are “top down”, and soon run out of momentum, becoming simply openness for its own sake. Looking at specific examples, the United States is the nearest to a success story: there is a rich ecosystem – made up of government departments, interest groups and NGOs, the media, civil society – which allows data driven projects the space to grow and the airtime to make an impact. (It probably helped that the media in the US were facing an existential challenge urgent enough to force them to embrace new, inexpensive, ways of carrying out investigative reporting).
Elsewhere data are making less impact on journalism. In the UK the new openness is being exploited by a small minority. Where data are made published on the data.gov.uk website they are frequently out of date, incomplete, or of limited new value, so where data do drive stories, these tend to be data released under FOI legislation, and the resulting stories take the form of statistics and/or infographics.
In developing countries where Open Data Portals have been launched with a fanfare – such as Kenya, and more recently Burkina Faso – there has been little uptake by coders, journalists, or citizens, and the number of fresh datasets being published drops to a trickle, and are soon well out of date. Small, apparently randomly selected datasets are soon outdated and inertia sets in.
The British Conservative Party, pledging greater openness in its 2010 manifesto, foresaw armies of “Armchair Auditors” who would comb through the data and present the government with ideas for greater efficiency in the use of public funds. Almost needless to say, these armies have never materialised, and thousands of datasets go unscrutinised by anybody. 2 In countries like Britain large amounts of data are being published but going (probably) unread and unscrutinised by anybody. At the same time, the journalists who want to make use of data are getting what they need through FOI, or even by gathering data themselves. Open Data is thus being bypassed, and could become an irrelevance. Yet, the media could be vital agents in the quest for the release of meaningful, relevant, timely data.
Governments seem in no hurry to expand the “comfort zone” from which they release the data which shows their policies at their most effective, and keeping to themselves data which paints a gloomier picture. Journalists seem likely to remain in their comfort zone, where they make use of FOI and traditional sources of information. For their part, journalists should push for better data and use it more, working in collaboration with open data activists. They need to change the habits of a lifetime and discuss their sources: revealing the source and quality of data used in a story would in itself be as much a part of the advocacy as of the actual reporting.
If Open Data are to be part of a new system of democratic accountability, they need to be more than a gesture of openness. Nor should Open Data remain largely the preserve of companies using them for commercial purposes. Governments should improve the quality and relevance of published data, making them genuinely useful for journalists and citizens alike….(More)”
Remaking Participation: Science, Environment and Emergent Publics
Book edited by Jason Chilvers and Matthew Kearnes: “Changing relations between science and democracy – and controversies over issues such as climate change, energy transitions, genetically modified organisms and smart technologies – have led to a rapid rise in new forms of public participation and citizen engagement. While most existing approaches adopt fixed meanings of ‘participation’ and are consumed by questions of method or critiquing the possible limits of democratic engagement, this book offers new insights that rethink public engagements with science, innovation and environmental issues as diverse, emergent and in the making. Bringing together leading scholars on science and democracy, working between science and technology studies, political theory, geography, sociology and anthropology, the volume develops relational and co-productionist approaches to studying and intervening in spaces of participation. New empirical insights into the making, construction, circulation and effects of participation across cultures are illustrated through examples ranging from climate change and energy to nanotechnology and mundane technologies, from institutionalised deliberative processes to citizen-led innovation and activism, and from the global north to global south. This new way of seeing participation in science and democracy opens up alternative paths for reconfiguring and remaking participation in more experimental, reflexive, anticipatory and responsible ways….(More)”
Using Crowdsourcing to Track the Next Viral Disease Outbreak
The TakeAway: “Last year’s Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed more than 11,000 people. The pandemic may be diminished, but public health officials think that another major outbreak of infectious disease is fast-approaching, and they’re busy preparing for it.
Boston public radio station WGBH recently partnered with The GroundTruth Project and NOVA Next on a series called “Next Outbreak.” As part of the series, they reported on an innovative global online monitoring system called HealthMap, which uses the power of the internet and crowdsourcing to detect and track emerging infectious diseases, and also more common ailments like the flu.
Researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital are the ones behind HealthMap (see below), and they use it to tap into tens of thousands of sources of online data, including social media, news reports, and blogs to curate information about outbreaks. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-founder of HealthMap, says that smarter data collection can help to quickly detect and track emerging infectious diseases, fatal or not.
“Traditional public health is really slowed down by the communication process: People get sick, they’re seen by healthcare providers, they get laboratory confirmed, information flows up the channels to state and local health [agencies], national governments, and then to places like the WHO,” says Dr. Brownstein. “Each one of those stages can take days, weeks, or even months, and that’s the problem if you’re thinking about a virus that can spread around the world in a matter of days.”
The HealthMap team looks at a variety of communication channels to undo the existing hierarchy of health information.
“We make everyone a stakeholder when it comes to data about outbreaks, including consumers,” says Dr. Brownstein. “There are a suite of different tools that public health officials have at their disposal. What we’re trying to do is think about how to communicate and empower individuals to really understand what the risks are, what the true information is about a disease event, and what they can do to protect themselves and their families. It’s all about trying to demystify outbreaks.”
In addition to the map itself, the HealthMap team has a number of interactive tools that individuals can both use and contribute to. Dr. Brownstein hopes these resources will enable the public to care more about disease outbreaks that may be happening around them—it’s a way to put the “public” back in “public health,” he says.
“We have a app called Outbreaks Near Me that allows people to know about what disease outbreaks are happening in their neighborhood,” Dr. Brownstein says. “Flu Near You is a an app that people use to self report on symptoms; Vaccine Finder is a tool that allows people to know what vaccines are available to them and their community.”
In addition to developing their own app, the HealthMap has partnered with existing tech firms like Uber to spread the word about public health.
“We worked closely with Uber last year and actually put nurses in Uber cars and delivered vaccines to people,” Dr. Brownstein says. “The closest vaccine location might still be only a block away for people, but people are still hesitant to get it done.”…(More)”
How big data and The Sims are helping us to build the cities of the future
The Next Web: “By 2050, the United Nations predicts that around 66 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. It is expected that the greatest expansion will take place in developing regions such as Africa and Asia. Cities in these parts will be challenged to meet the needs of their residents, and provide sufficient housing, energy, waste disposal, healthcare, transportation, education and employment.
So, understanding how cities will grow – and how we can make them smarter and more sustainable along the way – is a high priority among researchers and governments the world over. We need to get to grips with the inner mechanisms of cities, if we’re to engineer them for the future. Fortunately, there are tools to help us do this. And even better, using them is a bit like playing SimCity….
Cities are complex systems. Increasingly, scientists studying cities have gone from thinking about “cities as machines”, to approaching “cities as organisms”. Viewing cities as complex, adaptive organisms – similar to natural systems like termite mounds or slime mould colonies – allows us to gain unique insights into their inner workings. …So, if cities are like organisms, it follows that we should examine them from the bottom-up, and seek to understand how unexpected large-scale phenomena emerge from individual-level interactions. Specifically, we can simulate how the behaviour of individual “agents” – whether they are people, households, or organisations – affect the urban environment, using a set of techniques known as “agent-based modelling”….These days, increases in computing power and the proliferation of big datagive agent-based modelling unprecedented power and scope. One of the most exciting developments is the potential to incorporate people’s thoughts and behaviours. In doing so, we can begin to model the impacts of people’s choices on present circumstances, and the future.
For example, we might want to know how changes to the road layout might affect crime rates in certain areas. By modelling the activities of individuals who might try to commit a crime, we can see how altering the urban environment influences how people move around the city, the types of houses that they become aware of, and consequently which places have the greatest risk of becoming the targets of burglary.
To fully realise the goal of simulating cities in this way, models need a huge amount of data. For example, to model the daily flow of people around a city, we need to know what kinds of things people spend their time doing, where they do them, who they do them with, and what drives their behaviour.
Without good-quality, high-resolution data, we have no way of knowing whether our models are producing realistic results. Big data could offer researchers a wealth of information to meet these twin needs. The kinds of data that are exciting urban modellers include:
- Electronic travel cards that tell us how people move around a city.
- Twitter messages that provide insight into what people are doing and thinking.
- The density of mobile telephones that hint at the presence of crowds.
- Loyalty and credit-card transactions to understand consumer behaviour.
- Participatory mapping of hitherto unknown urban spaces, such as Open Street Map.
These data can often be refined to the level of a single person. As a result, models of urban phenomena no longer need to rely on assumptions about the population as a whole – they can be tailored to capture the diversity of a city full of individuals, who often think and behave differently from one another….(More)
Cleaning Up Lead Poisoning One Tweet at a Time
WorldPolicy Blog: “At first, no one knew why the children of Bagega in Zamfara state were dying. In the spring of 2010, hundreds of kids in and around the northern Nigerian village were falling ill, having seizures and going blind, many of them never to recover. A Médecins Sans Frontières team soon discovered the causes: gold and lead.
With the global recession causing the price of precious metals to soar, impoverished villagers had turned to mining the area’s gold deposits. But the gold veins were mingled with lead, and as a result the villagers’ low-tech mining methods were sending clouds of lead-laced dust into the air. The miners, unknowingly carrying the powerful toxin on their clothes and skin, brought it into their homes where their children breathed it in.
The result was perhaps the worst outbreak of lead poisoning in history, killing over 400 children in Bagega and neighboring villages. In response, the Nigerian government pledged to cleanup the lead-contaminated topsoil and provide medical care to the stricken children. But by mid-2012, there was no sign of the promised funds. Digitally savvy activists with the organization Connected Development (CODE) stepped in to make sure that the money was disbursed.
A group of young Nigerians founded CODE in 2010 in the capital Abuja, with the mission of empowering local communities to hold the government to account by improving their access to information and helping their voices to be heard. “In 2010, we were working to connect communities with data for advocacy programs,” says CODE co-founder Oludotun Babayemi, a former country director of a World Wildlife Fund project in Nigeria. “When we heard about Bagega, we thought this was an opportunity for us.”
In 2012, CODE launched a campaign dubbed ‘Follow the Money Nigeria’ aimed at applying pressure on the government to release the promised funds. “Eighty percent of the less developed parts of Nigeria have zero access to Twitter, let alone Facebook, so it’s difficult for them to convey their stories,” says Babayemi. “We collect all the videos and testimonies and take it global.”
CODE members travelled to the lead-afflicted area to gather information. They then posted their findings online, and publicized them with a #SaveBagegahashtag, which they tweeted to members of the government, local and international organizations and the general public. CODE hosted a 48-hour ‘tweet-a-thon’, joined by a senator, to support the campaign….
By July 2014, CODE reported that the clean-up was complete and that over 1,000 children had been screened and enrolled in lead treatment programs. Bagega’s health center has also been refurbished and the village’s roads improved. “There are thousands of communities like Bagega,” says Babayemi. “They just need someone to amplify their voice.”….
Key lessons
- Revealing information is not enough; change requires a real-world campaign driven by that information and civil society champions who can leverage their status and networks to draw international attention to the issues and maintain pressure.
- Building relationships with sympathetic members of government is key.
- Targeted online campaigns can help amplify the message of marginalized communities offline to achieve impact (More)”
Who Benefits From Civic Technology?
Report by Rebecca Rumbul at MySociety: “This research seeks to begin at the beginning, asking the most basic questions about who actually uses civic technology and why. Gathering data from civic technology groups from around the world, it shows the variations in usage of civic tech across four core countries (US, UK, Kenya and South Africa), and records the attitudes of users towards the platforms they are using.
Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?
Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.
Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.
Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?
Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.
So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”
The big cost of using big data in elections
Michael McDonald, Peter Licari and Lia Merivaki in the Washington Post: “In modern campaigns, buzzwords like “microtargeting” and “big data” are often bandied about as essential to victory. These terms refer to the practice of analyzing (or “microtargeting”) millions of voter registration records (“big data”) to predict who will vote and for whom.
If you’ve ever gotten a message from a campaign, there’s a good chance you’ve been microtargeted. Serious campaigns use microtargeting to persuade voters through mailings, phone calls, knocking on doors, and — in our increasingly connected world — social media.
But the big data that fuels such efforts comes at a big price, which can create a serious barrier to entry for candidates and groups seeking to participate in elections — that is, if they are allowed to buy the data at all.
When we asked state election officials about prices and restrictions on who can use their voter registration files, we learned that the rules are unsettlingly arbitrary.
Contrast Arizona and Washington. Arizona sells its statewide voter file for an estimated $32,500, while Washington gives its file away for free. Before jumping to the conclusion that this is a red- state/blue-state thing, consider that Oklahoma gives its file away, too.
A number of states base their prices on a per-record formula, which can massively drive up the price despite the fact that files are often delivered electronically. Alabama sells its records for 1 cent per voter , which yields an approximately $30,000 charge for the lot. Seriously, in this day and age, who prices an electronic database by the record?
Some states will give more data to candidates than to outside groups. Delaware will provide phone numbers to candidates but not to nonprofit organizations doing nonpartisan voter mobilization.
In some states, the voter file is not even available to the general public. States such as South Carolina and Maryland permit access only to residents who are registered voters. States including Kentucky and North Dakota grant access only to campaigns, parties and other political organizations.
We estimate that it would cost roughly $140,000 for an independent presidential campaign or national nonprofit organization to compile a national voter file, and this would not be a one-time cost. Voter lists frequently change as voters are added and deleted.
Guess who most benefits from all the administrative chaos? Political parties and their candidates. Not only are they capable of raising the vast amounts of money needed to purchase the data, but, adding insult to injury, they sometimes don’t even have to. Some states literally bequeath the data to parties at no cost. Alabama goes so far as to give parties a free statewide copy for every election.
Who is hurt by this? Independent candidates and nonprofit organizations that want to run national campaigns but don’t have deep pockets. If someone like Donald Trump launched an independent presidential run, he could buy the necessary data without much difficulty. But a nonprofit focused on mobilizing low-income voters could be stretched thin….(More)”
Weak States, Poor Countries
Angus Deaton in Project Syndicate: “Europeans tend to feel more positively about their governments than do Americans, for whom the failures and unpopularity of their federal, state, and local politicians are a commonplace. Yet Americans’ various governments collect taxes and, in return, provide services without which they could not easily live their lives.
Americans, like many citizens of rich countries, take for granted the legal and regulatory system, the public schools, health care and social security for the elderly, roads, defense and diplomacy, and heavy investments by the state in research, particularly in medicine. Certainly, not all of these services are as good as they might be, nor held in equal regard by everyone; but people mostly pay their taxes, and if the way that money is spent offends some, a lively public debate ensues, and regular elections allow people to change priorities.
All of this is so obvious that it hardly needs saying – at least for those who live in rich countries with effective governments. But most of the world’s population does not.
In much of Africa and Asia, states lack the capacity to raise taxes or deliver services. The contract between government and governed – imperfect in rich countries – is often altogether absent in poor countries. The New York cop was little more than impolite (and busy providing a service); in much of the world, police prey on the people they are supposed to protect, shaking them down for money or persecuting them on behalf of powerful patrons.
Even in a middle-income country like India, public schools and public clinics face mass (unpunished) absenteeism. Private doctors give people what (they think) they want – injections, intravenous drips, and antibiotics – but the state does not regulate them, and many practitioners are entirely unqualified.
Throughout the developing world, children die because they are born in the wrong place – not of exotic, incurable diseases, but of the commonplace childhood illnesses that we have known how to treat for almost a century. Without a state that is capable of delivering routine maternal and child health care, these children will continue to die.
Likewise, without government capacity, regulation and enforcement do not work properly, so businesses find it difficult to operate. Without properly functioning civil courts, there is no guarantee that innovative entrepreneurs can claim the rewards of their ideas.
The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty.
Unfortunately, the world’s rich countries currently are making things worse. Foreign aid – transfers from rich countries to poor countries – has much to its credit, particularly in terms of health care, with many people alive today who would otherwise be dead. But foreign aid also undermines the development of local state capacity….
One thing that we can do is to agitate for our own governments to stop doing those things that make it harder for poor countries to stop being poor. Reducing aid is one, but so is limiting the arms trade, improving rich-country trade and subsidy policies, providing technical advice that is not tied to aid, and developing better drugs for diseases that do not affect rich people. We cannot help the poor by making their already-weak governments even weaker….(More)”