at the Open Institute: “There continues to be a great deal of dialogue and debate on what the data revolution from the report of the High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda is all about. However, some have raised concerns that the emerging narrative around opening up data, strengthening national statistics offices or building capacity for e-government may not be revolutionary enough. In thinking through this it becomes clear that revolutions are highly contextual events. The Arab spring happened due to the unique factors of the cultural and social-economic environment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). A similar ‘spring’ may not happen in the same way in sub-Sahara Africa due to the peculiarities of the region. Attempting to replicate it is therefore an exercise in futility for those hoping for regime change.
We have just published a think piece on the role of public participation in policy making and how a data revolution could play out in that space. None of the ideas are revolutionary. They have been proposed and piloted in various countries to various extents over time. For instance, in some contexts strengthening and safe guarding the autonomy of the national statistics office may not seem revolutionary to some, in some countries it may be unprecedented (this is not part of the report). And that is okay. Nation states should be allowed, in their efforts to build capable and developmental institutions, to interpret the revolution for themselves.
In sub-Sahara Africa the availability of underlying data used to develop public policy is almost non-existent. Even when citizens are expected to participate in the formulation process and implementation of the policies, the data is still difficult to find. This neuters public participation and is a disservice to open government. Therefore making this detailed data and the accompanying rationale publicly available would be a revolutionary change in both culture and policy on access to information and potentially empower citizens to participate.
The data revolution is an opportunity to mainstream statistics into public discourse on public policy in ways that citizens can understand and engage with. I hope African countries will be willing to put an effort in translating the data revolution into an African revolution. If not, there’s a risk we shall continue singing about a revolution and never actually have one.
Download the ThinkPiece here”
The Civil Service in an Age of Open Government
Tunji Olaopa at AllAfrica.com: “…The question then is: How does a bureaucratic administrative civil service structure respond to the challenge of modernisation? The first condition for modernisation is to target the loci of the governance or the centre of public administration.
Public administration as governance derives from the recent transformation of the economy and government of industrial societies that has led to (a) a radical change in the internal modes of functioning; and (b) the expansion of governmental activities into a ‘governance network’ that brings in non-state actors into the governance system. The second condition demanded by the modernising imperative is the urgency of opening up the government within the framework of an ‘open society’.
Both conditions are interrelated because governance requires the participation of non-state actors and the entire citizenry through a technologically-motivated open platform that facilitates transparency, collaboration and participation. The open society or open government paradigm has philosophical antecedent. Immediately after the horrors of the Second World War, the Austrian philosopher, Karl Popper, wrote a classic: Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).
The open society and open government dynamics speak to the need for eternal vigilance of the human race that guides their freedom and creativity to foreclose the multiplication of the Hitlers of this world and specifically, those that Popper regarded as Totalitarian ideologues namely, Hegel, Marx and Plato. And, the urgent and constant need to innovate and recreate ideas, paradigms and institutions in a way that transform our individual and collective wellbeing. The recent uproars generated by the Arab Spring in the Middle East constitute a negative indication of a refusal to open up the government or the society to constant interrogation.
In administrative reform terms, the ‘open society’ imagery simply challenges our civil services into a persistent and creative rethinking of our institutional and structural dynamics in a manner that transform the system into a world class performance mode. It insists that the principle that government–not just its laws and policies, but the reasons and processes of decisions that generated those policies and the flows of money that fund their implementation–should be open.
Open government gives the civil service clear advantages: (a) First, it is a critical attempt to challenge administrative closure that locks the people out of decisions and processes that governs their lives; (b) Second, open government deals with bureau-pathology by reversing the obscurity of brilliant public servants whose creative initiatives are usually left to disappear within the vast hierarchies that define the bureaucracy; (c) Third, open government helps the government redirect its citizens’ trust and respect; and (d) Lastly, the open government initiative enables the civil service to transcend itself away from its acute analogue/hierarchical/opaque status to becoming a cutting-edge digital/network/open system that works.
The governance and open government reform demand a reassessment of administrative reality especially within a third world context like Nigeria where our postcolonial predicament has left us burdened and in anguish. However, our reassessment goes deeper than opening up the processes and functioning of government. Gary Francione, the American philosopher, counsels that ‘If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.’ The open government initiative is just one indication of where we want to go. Other indication of needed transformation will necessarily include:
o From resource-based to competency-based HRM;
o From ‘input-process’ to ‘output-results’ orientation;
o From Weberianism to a new institutional philosophy tantalisingly typified by the assumptions of neo-Weberianism…”
Cluster mapping
“The U.S. Cluster Mapping Project is a national economic initiative that provides open, interactive data to understand regional clusters and support business, innovation and policy in the United States. It is based at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School, with support from a number of partners and a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration.
Research
The project provides a robust cluster mapping database grounded in the leading academic research. Professor Michael Porter pioneered the comprehensive mapping of clusters in the U.S. economy in the early 2000s. The research team from Harvard, MIT, and Temple used the latest Census and industry data to develop a new algorithm to define cluster categories that cover the entire U.S. economy. These categories enable comparative analyses of clusters across any region in the United States….
Impact
Research on the presence of regional clusters has recently oriented economic policy toward addressing the needs of clusters and mobilizing their potential. Four regional partners in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, and South Carolina produced a set of case studies that discuss how regions have organized economic policy around clusters. These cases form the core of a resource library that aims to disseminate insights and strengthen the community of practice in cluster-based economic development. The project will also take an international scope to benefit cross-border industries in North America and inform collective global dialogue around cluster-based economic development.”
New Book on 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting
Tiago Peixoto at Democracy Spot: “A little while ago I mentioned the launch of the Portuguese version of the book organized by Nelson Dias, “Hope for Democracy: 25 Years of Participatory Budgeting Worldwide”.
The good news is that the English version is finally out. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:
This book represents the effort of more than forty authors and many other direct and indirect contributions that spread across different continents seek to provide an overview on the Participatory Budgeting (PB) in the World. They do so from different backgrounds. Some are researchers, others are consultants, and others are activists connected to several groups and social movements. The texts reflect this diversity of approaches and perspectives well, and we do not try to influence that.
(….)
The pages that follow are an invitation to a fascinating journey on the path of democratic innovation in very diverse cultural, political, social and administrative settings. From North America to Asia, Oceania to Europe, from Latin America to Africa, the reader will find many reasons to closely follow the proposals of the different authors.
The book can be downloaded here [PDF]. I had the pleasure of being one of the book’s contributors, co-authoring an article with Rafael Sampaio on the use of ICT in PB processes: “Electronic Participatory Budgeting: False Dilemmas and True Complexities” [PDF]...”
Who Influences Whom? Reflections on U.S. Government Outreach to Think Tanks
Jeremy Shapiro at Brookings: “The U.S. government makes a big effort to reach out to important think tanks, often through the little noticed or understood mechanism of small, private and confidential roundtables. Indeed, for the ambitious Washington think-tanker nothing quite gets the pulse racing like the idea of attending one of these roundtables with the most important government officials. The very occasion is full of intrigue and ritual.
When the Government Calls for Advice
First, an understated e-mail arrives from some polite underling inviting you in to a “confidential, off-the-record” briefing with some official with an impressive title—a deputy secretary or a special assistant to the president, maybe even (heaven forfend) the secretary of state or the national security advisor. The thinker’s heart leaps, “they read my article; they finally see the light of my wisdom, I will probably be the next national security advisor.”
He clears his schedule of any conflicting brown bags on separatism in South Ossetia and, after a suitable interval to keep the government guessing as to his availability, replies that he might be able to squeeze it in to his schedule. Citizenship data and social security numbers are provided for security purposes, times are confirmed and ground rules are established in a multitude of emails with a seemingly never-ending array of staffers, all of whose titles include the word “special.” The thinker says nothing directly to his colleagues, but searches desperately for opportunities to obliquely allude to the meeting: “I’d love to come to your roundtable on uncovered interest rate parity, but I unfortunately have a meeting with the secretary of defense.”
On the appointed day, the thinker arrives early as instructed at an impressively massive and well-guarded government building, clears his ways through multiple layers of redundant security, and is ushered into a wood-paneled room that reeks of power and pine-sol. (Sometimes it is a futuristic conference room filled with television monitors and clocks that give the time wherever the President happens to be.) Nameless peons in sensible suits clutch government-issue notepads around the outer rim of the room as the thinker takes his seat at the center table, only somewhat disappointed to see so many other familiar thinkers in the room—including some to whom he had been obliquely hinting about the meeting the day before.
At the appointed hour, an officious staffer arrives to announce that “He” (the lead government official goes only by personal pronoun—names are unnecessary at this level) is unfortunately delayed at another meeting on the urgent international crisis of the day, but will arrive just as soon as he can get break away from the president in the Situation Room. He is, in fact, just reading email, but his long career has taught him the advantage of making people wait.
After 15 minutes of stilted chit-chat with colleagues that the thinker has the misfortune to see at virtually every event he attends in Washington, the senior government official strides calmly into the room, plops down at the head of the table and declares solemnly what a honor it is to have such distinguished experts to help with this critical area of policy. He very briefly details how very hard the U.S. government is working on this highest priority issue and declares that “we are in listening mode and are anxious to hear your sage advice.” A brave thinker raises his hand and speaks truth to power by reciting the thesis of his latest article. From there, the group is off to races as the thinkers each struggle to get in the conversation and rehearse their well-worn positions.
Forty-three minutes later, the thinkers’ “hour” is up because, the officious staffer interjects, “He” must attend a Principals Committee meeting. The senior government official thanks the experts for coming, compliments them on their fruitful ideas and their full and frank debate, instructs a nameless peon at random to assemble “what was learned here” for distribution in “the building” and strides purposefully out of the room.
The pantomime then ends and the thinker retreats back to his office to continue his thoughts. But what precisely has happened behind the rituals? Have we witnessed the vaunted academic-government exchange that Washington is so famous for? Is this how fresh ideas re-invigorate stale government groupthink?..”
Open government: getting beyond impenetrable online data
Jed Miller in The Guardian: “Mathematician Blaise Pascal famously closed a long letter by apologising that he hadn’t had time to make it shorter. Unfortunately, his pithy point about “download time” is regularly attributed to Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau, probably because the public loves writers more than it loves statisticians. Scientists may make things provable, but writers make them memorable.
The World Bank confronted a similar reality of data journalism earlier this month when it revealed that, of the 1,600 bank reports posted online on from 2008 to 2012, 32% had never been downloaded at all and another 40% were downloaded under 100 times each.
Taken together, these cobwebbed documents represent millions of dollars in World Bank funds and hundreds of thousands of person-hours, spent by professionals who themselves represent millions of dollars in university degrees. It’s difficult to see the return on investment in producing expert research and organising it into searchable web libraries when almost three quarters of the output goes largely unseen.
The World Bank works at a scale unheard of by most organisations, but expert groups everywhere face the same challenges. Too much knowledge gets trapped in multi-page pdf files that are slow to download (especially in low-bandwidth areas), costly to print, and unavailable for computer analysis until someone manually or automatically extracts the raw data.
Even those who brave the progress bar find too often that urgent, incisive findings about poverty, health, discrimination, conflict or social change are presented in prose written by and for high-level experts, rendering it impenetrable to almost everyone else. Information isn’t just trapped in pdfs; it’s trapped in PhDs.
Governments and NGOs are beginning to realise that digital strategy means more than posting a document online, but what will it take for these groups to change not just their tools, but their thinking? It won’t be enough to partner with WhatsApp or hire GrumpyCat.
I asked strategists from the development, communications and social media fields to offer simple, “Tweetable” suggestions for how the policy community can become better communicators.
For nonprofits and governments that still publish 100-page pdfs on their websites and do not optimise the content to share in other channels such as social: it is a huge waste of time and ineffective. Stop it now.
– Beth Kanter, author and speaker. Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media
Treat text as #opendata so infomediaries can mash it up and make it more accessible (see, for example federalregister.gov) and don’t just post and blast: distribute information in a targeted way to those most likely to be interested.
– Beth Noveck, director at the Governance Lab and former director at White House Open Government Initiative
Don’t be boring. Sounds easy, actually quite hard, super-important.
– Eli Pariser, CEO of Upworthy
Surprise me. Uncover the key finding that inspired you, rather than trying to tell it all at once and show me how the world could change because of it.
– Jay Golden, co-founder of Wakingstar Storyworks
For the Bank or anyone who is generating policy information they actually want people to use, they must actually write it for the user, not for themselves. As Steve Jobs said, ‘Simple can be harder than complex’.
– Kristen Grimm, founder and president at Spitfire Strategies
The way to reach the widest audience is to think beyond content format and focus on content strategy.
– Laura Silber, director of public affairs at Open Society Foundations
Open the door to policy work with short, accessible pieces – a blog post, a video take, infographics – that deliver the ‘so what’ succinctly.
– Robert McMahon, editor at Council on Foreign Relations
Policy information is more usable if it’s linked to corresponding actions one can take, or if it helps stir debate. Also, whichever way you slice it, there will always be a narrow market for raw policy reports … that’s why explainer sites, listicles and talking heads exist.
– Ory Okolloh, director of investments at Omidyar Network and former public policy and government relations manager at Google Africa
Ms Okolloh, who helped found the citizen reporting platform Ushahidi, also offered a simple reminder about policy reports: “‘Never gets downloaded’ doesn’t mean ‘never gets read’.” Just as we shouldn’t mistake posting for dissemination, we shouldn’t confuse popularity with influence….”
Innovation And Inequality
Edited book on “Emerging Technologies in an Unequal World”: “Susan Cozzens, Dhanaraj Thakur, and the other co-authors ask how the benefits and costs of emerging technologies are distributed amongst different countries – some rich and some poor. Examining the case studies of five technologies across eight countries in Africa, Europe and the Americas, the book finds that the distributional dynamics around a given technology are influenced by the way entrepreneurs and others package the technology, how governments promote it and the existing local skills and capacity to use it. These factors create social and economic boundaries where the technology stops diffusing between and within countries. The book presents a series of recommendations for policy-makers and private sector actors to move emerging technologies beyond these boundaries and improve their distributional outcomes.
Offering a broad range of mature and relatively new emerging technologies from a diverse set of countries, the study will strongly appeal to policy-makers in science, technology and innovation policy. It will also benefit students and academics interested in innovation, science, technology and innovation policy, the economics of innovation, as well as the history and sociology of technology.
Full table of contents“
Citizen participation and technology
ICTlogy: “The recent, rapid rise in the use of digital technology is changing relationships between citizens, organizations and public institutions, and expanding political participation. But while technology has the potential to amplify citizens’ voices, it must be accompanied by clear political goals and other factors to increase their clout.
Those are among the conclusions of a new NDI study, “Citizen Participation and Technology,” that examines the role digital technologies – such as social media, interactive websites and SMS systems – play in increasing citizen participation and fostering accountability in government. The study was driven by the recognition that better insights are needed into the relationship between new technologies, citizen participation programs and the outcomes they aim to achieve.
Using case studies from countries such as Burma, Mexico and Uganda, the study explores whether the use of technology in citizen participation programs amplifies citizen voices and increases government responsiveness and accountability, and whether the use of digital technology increases the political clout of citizens.
The research shows that while more people are using technology—such as social media for mobile organizing, and interactive websites and text messaging systems that enable direct communication between constituents and elected officials or crowdsourcing election day experiences— the type and quality of their political participation, and therefore its impact on democratization, varies. It also suggests that, in order to leverage technology’s potential, there is a need to focus on non-technological areas such as political organizing, leadership skills and political analysis.
For example, the “2% and More Women in Politics” coalition led by Mexico’s National Institute for Women (INMUJERES) used a social media campaign and an online petition to call successfully for reforms that would allocate two percent of political party funding for women’s leadership training. Technology helped the activists reach a wider audience, but women from the different political parties who made up the coalition might not have come together without NDI’s role as a neutral convener.
The study, which was conducted with support from the National Endowment for Democracy, provides an overview of NDI’s approach to citizen participation, and examines how the integration of technologies affects its programs in order to inform the work of NDI, other democracy assistance practitioners, donors, and civic groups.
Observations:
Key findings:
- Technology can be used to readily create spaces and opportunities for citizens to express their voices, but making these voices politically stronger and the spaces more meaningful is a harder challenge that is political and not technological in nature.
- Technology that was used to purposefully connect citizens’ groups and amplify their voices had more political impact.
- There is a scarcity of data on specific demographic groups’ use of, and barriers to technology for political participation. Programs seeking to close the digital divide as an instrument of narrowing the political divide should be informed by more research into barriers to access to both politics and technology.
- There is a blurring of the meaning between the technologies of open government data and the politics of open government that clouds program strategies and implementation.
- Attempts to simply crowdsource public inputs will not result in users self-organizing into politically influential groups, since citizens lack the opportunities to develop leadership, unity, and commitment around a shared vision necessary for meaningful collective action.
- Political will and the technical capacity to engage citizens in policy making, or providing accurate data on government performance are lacking in many emerging democracies. Technology may have changed institutions’ ability to respond to citizen demands but its mere presence has not fundamentally changed actual government responsiveness.”
Politics or technology – which will save the world?
David Runciman in the Guardian: (Politics by David Runciman is due from Profile ..It is the first in a series of “Ideas in Profile”) “The most significant revolution of the 21st century so far is not political. It is the information technology revolution. Its transformative effects are everywhere. In many places, rapid technological change stands in stark contrast to the lack of political change. Take the United States. Its political system has hardly changed at all in the past 25 years. Even the moments of apparent transformation – such as the election of Obama in 2008 – have only reinforced how entrenched the established order is: once the excitement died away, Obama was left facing the same constrained political choices. American politics is stuck in a rut. But the lives of American citizens have been revolutionised over the same period. The birth of the web and the development of cheap and efficient devices through which to access it have completely altered the way people connect with each other. Networks of people with shared interests, tastes, concerns, fetishes, prejudices and fears have sprung up in limitless varieties. The information technology revolution has changed the way human beings befriend each other, how they meet, date, communicate, medicate, investigate, negotiate and decide who they want to be and what they want to do. Many aspects of our online world would be unrecognisable to someone who was transplanted here from any point in the 20th century. But the infighting and gridlock in Washington would be all too familiar.
This isn’t just an American story. China hasn’t changed much politically since 4 June 1989, when the massacre in Tiananmen Square snuffed out a would-be revolution and secured the current regime’s hold on power. But China itself has been totally altered since then. Economic growth is a large part of the difference. But so is the revolution in technology. A country of more than a billion people, nearly half of whom still live in the countryside, has been transformed by the mobile phone. There are currently over a billion phones in use in China. Ten years ago, fewer than one in 10 Chinese had access to one; today there is nearly one per person. Individuals whose horizons were until very recently constrained by physical geography – to live and die within a radius of a few miles from your birthplace was not unusual for Chinese peasants even into this century – now have access to the wider world. For the present, though maybe not for much longer, the spread of new technology has helped to stifle the call for greater political change. Who needs a political revolution when you’ve got a technological one?
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Technology has the power to make politics seem obsolete. The speed of change leaves government looking slow, cumbersome, unwieldy and often irrelevant. It can also make political thinking look tame by comparison with the big ideas coming out of the tech industry. This doesn’t just apply to far‑out ideas about what will soon be technologically possible: intelligent robots, computer implants in the human brain, virtual reality that is indistinguishable from “real” reality (all things that Ray Kurzweil, co-founder of the Google-sponsored Singularity University, thinks are coming by 2030). In this post-ideological age some of the most exotic political visions are the ones that emerge from discussions about tech. You’ll find more radical libertarians and outright communists among computer scientists than among political scientists. Advances in computing have thrown up fresh ways to think about what it means to own something, what it means to share something and what it means to have a private life at all. These are among the basic questions of modern politics. However, the new answers rarely get expressed in political terms (with the exception of occasional debates about civil rights for robots). More often they are expressions of frustration with politics and sometimes of outright contempt for it. Technology isn’t seen as a way of doing politics better. It’s seen as a way of bypassing politics altogether.
In some circumstances, technology can and should bypass politics. The advent of widespread mobile phone ownership has allowed some of the world’s poorest citizens to wriggle free from the trap of failed government. In countries that lack basic infrastructure – an accessible transport network, a reliable legal system, a usable banking sector – phones enable people to create their own networks of ownership and exchange. In Africa, a grassroots, phone-based banking system has sprung up that for the first time permits money transfers without the physical exchange of cash. This makes it possible for the inhabitants of desperately poor and isolated rural areas to do business outside of their local communities. Technology caused this to happen; government didn’t. For many Africans, phones are an escape route from the constrained existence that bad politics has for so long mired them in.
But it would be a mistake to overstate what phones can do. They won’t rescue anyone from civil war. Africans can use their phones to tell the wider world of the horrors that are still taking place in some parts of the continent – in South Sudan, in Eritrea, in the Niger Delta, in the Central African Republic, in Somalia. Unfortunately the world does not often listen, and nor do the soldiers who are doing the killing. Phones have not changed the basic equation of political security: the people with the guns need a compelling reason not to use them. Technology by itself doesn’t give them that reason. Equally, technology by itself won’t provide the basic infrastructure whose lack it has provided a way around. If there are no functioning roads to get you to market, a phone is a godsend when you have something to sell. But in the long run, you still need the roads. In the end, only politics can rescue you from bad politics…”
Democracy and open data: are the two linked?
Molly Shwartz at R-Street: “Are democracies better at practicing open government than less free societies? To find out, I analyzed the 70 countries profiled in the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Index and compared the rankings against the 2013 Global Democracy Rankings. As a tenet of open government in the digital age, open data practices serve as one indicator of an open government. Overall, there is a strong relationship between democracy and transparency.
Using data collected in October 2013, the top ten countries for openness include the usual bastion-of-democracy suspects: the United Kingdom, the United States, mainland Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
There are, however, some noteworthy exceptions. Germany ranks lower than Russia and China. All three rank well above Lithuania. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Nepal all beat out Belgium. The chart (below) shows the democracy ranking of these same countries from 2008-2013 and highlights the obvious inconsistencies in the correlation between democracy and open data for many countries.
There are many reasons for such inconsistencies. The implementation of open-government efforts – for instance, opening government data sets – often can be imperfect or even misguided. Drilling down to some of the data behind the Open Data Index scores reveals that even countries that score very well, such as the United States, have room for improvement. For example, the judicial branch generally does not publish data and houses most information behind a pay-wall. The status of legislation and amendments introduced by Congress also often are not available in machine-readable form.
As internationally recognized markers of political freedom and technological innovation, open government initiatives are appealing political tools for politicians looking to gain prominence in the global arena, regardless of whether or not they possess a real commitment to democratic principles. In 2012, Russia made a public push to cultivate open government and open data projects that was enthusiastically endorsed by American institutions. In a June 2012 blog post summarizing a Russian “Open Government Ecosystem” workshop at the World Bank, one World Bank consultant professed the opinion that open government innovations “are happening all over Russia, and are starting to have genuine support from the country’s top leaders.”
Given the Russian government’s penchant for corruption, cronyism, violations of press freedom and increasing restrictions on public access to information, the idea that it was ever committed to government accountability and transparency is dubious at best. This was confirmed by Russia’s May 2013 withdrawal of its letter of intent to join the Open Government Partnership. As explained by John Wonderlich, policy director at the Sunlight Foundation:
While Russia’s initial commitment to OGP was likely a surprising boon for internal champions of reform, its withdrawal will also serve as a demonstration of the difficulty of making a political commitment to openness there.
Which just goes to show that, while a democratic government does not guarantee open government practices, a government that regularly violates democratic principles may be an impossible environment for implementing open government.
A cursory analysis of the ever-evolving international open data landscape reveals three major takeaways:
- Good intentions for government transparency in democratic countries are not always effectively realized.
- Politicians will gladly pay lip-service to the idea of open government without backing up words with actions.
- The transparency we’ve established can go away quickly without vigilant oversight and enforcement.”