We must create a culture of “open data makers”

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Rufus Pollock (@rufuspollock), Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation: “Open data and open knowledge are fundamentally about empowerment, about giving people – citizens, journalists, NGOs, companies and policy-makers – access to the information they need to understand and shape the world around them.

Through openness, we can ensure that technology and data improve science, governance, and society. Without it, we may see the increasing centralisation of knowledge – and therefore power – in the hands of the few, and a huge loss in our potential, individually and collectively, to innovate, understand, and improve the world around us.

Open data is data that can be freely accessed, used, built upon and shared by anyone, for any purpose. With digital technology – from mobiles to the internet – increasingly everywhere, we’re seeing a data revolution. Its a revolution both in the amount of data available and in our ability to use, and share, that data. And it’s changing everything we do – from how we travel home from work to how scientists do research, to how government set policy….

its about people, the people who use data, and the people who use the insights from that data to drive change. We need to create a culture of “open data makers”, people able and ready to make apps and insights with open data. We need to connect open data with those who have the best questions and the biggest needs – a healthcare worker in Zambia, the London commuter travelling home – and go beyond the data geeks and the tech savvy.”

The Age of Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

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

Power to the people: how open data is improving health service delivery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “…What’s really interesting is how this data can be utilised by citizens to enable them to make more informed choices and demand improved services in sectors such as health. A growing community of technologists and social activists is emerging across Africa, supported by a burgeoning network of technology innovation hubs. They’re beginning to explore the ways in which data can be utilised to improve health outcomes.
In Northern Uganda, the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army conflict displaced two million people, leaving the social infrastructure in tatters. In 2008, the government launched a Peace, Recovery and Development Plan, but progress has been limited. There are insufficient health centres to serve the population, a severe shortage of staff, drugs and equipment, and corruption is widespread.
Cipesa – an organisation that uses communication technologies to support poverty reduction and development – and Numec, a local media organisation, have launched the iParticipate project. A multimedia platform is being populated with baseline data outlining the current status of the health service across three districts….
In the same region, Wougnet is training women to use information technologies to tackle social challenges. Local officials and community members have formed voluntary social accountability committees and been trained in the use of an online platform to capture and store information relating to poor governance and corruption in the health sector, often via mobile phones.
The platform strengthened campaign efforts which resulted in the construction of a health centre in Aloni Parish. In Amuru district, five health workers were arrested following reports highlighting negligence.
In the village of Bagega in Nigeria, 400 children died and thousands suffered significant health problems as the result of lead poisoning caused by poor mining practices. The government pledged $5.3m (£3.23m) for remediation, but the funds never reached the affected region.
A local organisation, Follow the Money, created an infographic highlighting the government’s commitments and combined this with real life testimonies and photographs showing the actual situation on the ground. Within 48 hours of a targeted Twitter campaign, the president committed to releasing funds to the village and, in February this year, children started receiving long overdue medical attention.
All these initiatives depend on access to critical government data and an active citizens who feel empowered to effect change in their own lives and communities. At present, it’s often hard to access data which is sufficiently granular, particularly at district or local level. For citizens to be engaged with information from government, it also needs to be accessible in ways that are simple to understand and linked to campaigns that impact their daily lives.
Tracking expenditure can also operate across borders. Donors are beginning to open up aid data by publishing to the IATI registry. This transparency by donor governments should improve the effectiveness of aid spending and contribute towards improved health outcomes.
It’s hard to draw general conclusions about how technology can contribute towards improving health outcomes, particularly when context is so critical and the field is so new. Nonetheless, some themes are emerging which can maximise the chances of an intervention’s success.
It can at times be challenging to encourage citizens to report for an array of reasons, including a lack of belief in their ability to effect change, cultural norms, a lack of time and both perceived and real risks. Still, participation seems to increase when citizens receive feedback from reports submitted and when mechanisms are in place that enable citizens to take collective action. On-the-ground testimonies and evidence can also help shift public opinion and amplify critical messages.
Interventions are dramatically strengthened when integrated into wider programmes, implemented by organisations that have established a strong relationship with the communities in which they work. They need to be backed by at least one strong civil society organisation that can follow up on any reports, queries or challenges which may arise. Where possible, engagement from government and local leaders can make a real difference. Identifying champions within government can also significantly improve responsiveness.”

Experts rank the top 10 global trends

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Research: “A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the 10 most important global trends, based on a poll of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government, and non-profits. Here are some data points that compare and contrast the public’s views around the world with the trends identified by the experts….
7.  A lack of values in leadership – Between 2007 and 2012, confidence in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) national governments declined from 45% to 40% on average, making it difficult for national authorities to mobilize support for necessary reforms, according to a recent report by the OECD. In the U.S., public trust in government has fallen substantially since 1958 and is near an all-time low.…
9.  The growing importance of megacities – Life is increasingly lived in the world’s urban centers. According to the United Nations Population Division, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. However, not all of the world’s regions are equally urban. Africa, for example, is predicted to reach 50 percent urbanization by 2035.
10. The rapid spread of misinformation online – One-third (30%) of the world’s youth have been active online for at least five years, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Social networking has also spread around the world. In 19 of 21 countries, about three-in-ten or more of those polled use sites such as Facebook, according to our survey last year.”

6 Projects That Make Data More Accessible Win $100,000 Each From Gates

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Six nonprofit projects that aim to combine multiple sets of data to help solve social problems have each won $100,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…The winners:
• Pushpa Aman Singh, who founded GuideStar India as an effort of the Civil Society Information Services India. GuideStar India is the most comprehensive database of India’s registered charities. It has profiles of more than 4,000 organizations, and Ms. Singh plans to expand that number and the types of information included.
• Development Initiatives, an international aid organization, to support its partnership with the Ugandan nonprofit Development Research and Training. Together, they are trying to help residents of two districts in Uganda identify a key problem the communities face and use existing data sets to build both online and offline tools to help tackle that challenge…
• H.V. Jagadish, at the University of Michigan, to develop a prototype that will merge sets of incompatible geographic data to make them comparable. Mr. Jagadish, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, points to crime precincts and school districts as an example. “We want to understand the impact of education on crime, but the districts don’t quite overlap with the precincts,” he says. “This tool will address the lack of overlap.”
• Vijay Modi, at Columbia University, to work with government agencies and charities in Nigeria on a tool similar to Foursquare, the social network that allows people to share their location with friends. Mr. Modi, a mechanical-engineering professor and faculty member of the university’s Earth Institute, envisions a tool that will help people find important resources more easily…
• Gisli Olafsson and his team at NetHope, a network of aid organizations. The group is building a tool to help humanitarian charities share their data more widely and in real time—potentially saving more lives during disasters…
• Development Gateway, a nonprofit that assists international development charities with technology, and GroundTruth Initiative, a nonprofit that helps residents of communities learn mapping and media skills. The two groups want to give people living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, more detailed information about local schools…”

Citizen participation in municipal budgeting: Origins, practices, impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Leighton Walter Kille: “Citizen participation in governance is generally limited to the ballot box in the United States: If you don’t like what the last year’s crop of politicians is up to, throw them out of office next year. Residents almost never have a say on budget decisions beyond holding protests at press conferences or picketing city hall. Appointed community boards are found in New York and other municipalities, but their roles are strictly advisory. Still, more participation can lead to greater perceptions of procedural fairness and support for government, some research has shown.

For residents of other countries, more options exist. A practice known as “participatory budgeting” (PB) allows citizens to determine how some government funds are used. As detailed in a 2010 study by political scientist Yves Sintomer of the University of Paris and others, “Learning from the South: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide,” it was first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the late 1980s. Residents took part in local and citywide assemblies to help establish spending priorities for a select portion of the city’s spending budget. Larger issues such as taxation, debt service and pensions were specifically excluded. (A 2003 study from the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University goes deep into the specifics of the Brazilian experience.)
Since this beginning, participatory budgeting has spread to hundreds of other cities around the world, Sintomer and his team state: “There are between 511 and 920 participatory budgets in Latin America: more than the half of the participatory budgets in the world, where we can count between 795 and 1,469 experiences.” The range of numbers is an indication of how widely definition of participatory budgeting varies. Interest in the United States has been growing, with a number of New York council districts using the technique, as well as Chicago and Vallejo, California.
A 2013 paper in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, “The Struggle for a Voice: Tensions between Associations and Citizens in Participatory Budgeting,” notes that “the heterogeneous nature of the existing experiments calls into question even the possibility of defining [participatory budgeting].” Similarly, in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation dedicated to the issue, the authors note that “there is no standardized set of ‘best practices’ that governments are adopting, but there are a broader set of principles that are adapted by local governments to meet local circumstances.” Writing in the issue, Brian Wampler of Boise State University, states that there are four main principles: active citizen participation; increased citizen authority; improved governmental transparency; and reallocation of resources to improve social justice.
A 2013 study in the American Review of Public Administration, “Citizen Input in the Budget Process: When Does It Matter Most?” examines the impact of public participation on organizational effectiveness. The researchers, Hai (David) Guo and Milena I. Neshkova of Florida International University, used survey data from state departments of transportation to examine the effectiveness of citizen input at four different stages of the budgeting process: information sharing, budget discussion, budget decision and program assessment.
The findings of the study include:

  • Citizen participation is positively correlated with higher organizational performance. “In general if a state DOT adopts more citizen input strategies in the budget process, it achieves better outcomes. In other words, other things held equal, more citizen participation in the budget process is associated with fewer poor-quality roads and less fatalities on state highways.”
  • In terms of road condition, citizen participation makes a difference at all but the budget discussion stage.
  • Overall, citizen input matters most at the information-sharing and program-assessment stages. Consequently, “public managers should seek public input at these stages not only because it is normatively desirable but also for the very practical reasons of achieving better performance. When conveyed at the information-sharing stage, citizens’ preferences can be taken into account by decision makers and incorporated into the budget priorities.”

From Crowdsourcing to Crowdseeding: The Cutting Edge of Empowerment?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New chapter by Peter van der Windt in the book Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood: “In 2009 Columbia University launched a pilot project in the Kivus region of the Democratic Republic of Congo called Voix des Kivus. The point of the project was to examine the potential for using SMS technology to gather conflict event data in real-time. Given previous experiences in Eastern Congo, the research team expected that collecting high-quality event data in Eastern Congo in the traditional way (sending out enumerator teams) would be challenging, while using traditional approaches to collect event information in real-time would be impossible. As a result the team launched an SMS-based pilot project called Voix des Kivus. Parts of the Kivus have cellphone coverage, and cellphones are relatively inexpensive. Moreover, while enumerator teams have problems crossing bad roads or washed-away bridges, phone-signals do not. Finally, an SMS-message sent is received
instantaneously.
The Voix des Kivus project used a “crowdseeding” approach which combines the innovations of crowdsourcing with standard principles of survey research and
statistical analysis. It used a sampling frame, selected sites through systematic random sampling, and identified specific reporters in each site. Researchers then
“seeded” mobile phones to select “phoneholders” and trained them on how to use the system and what to report. Only these pre-selected reporters could contribute
into the system, rather than anyone with a mobile phone or connection of some sort, as it the case with standard crowdsourcing platforms.
This chapter draws on this experience to discuss how such ICT projects might empower populations by enabling the collection and distribution of information as an alternative mechanism of governance…”

Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Evgeny Morozov in Frankfurter Allgemeine: “In short, it’s okay to hate Silicon Valley – we just need to do it for the right reasons.  Below are three of them – but this is hardly an exhaustive list….
Reason number one:  Silicon Valley firms are building what I call “invisible barbed wire” around our lives. We are promised more freedom, more openness, more mobility; we are told we can roam wherever and whenever we want. But the kind of emancipation that we actually get is fake emancipation; it’s the emancipation of a just-released criminal wearing an ankle bracelet.
Yes, a self-driving car could make our commute less dreadful. But a self-driving car operated by Google would not just be a self-driving car: it would be a shrine to surveillance – on wheels! It would track everywhere we go. It might even prevent us from going to certain places if we our mood – measured through facial expression analysis – suggests that we are too angry or tired or emotional.  Yes, there are exceptions – at times, GPS does feel liberating – but the trend is clear: every new Google sensor in that car would introduce a new lever of control. That lever doesn’t even have to be exercised to produce changes in our behavior – our knowledge of its presence will suffice….
Reason number two: Silicon Valley has destroyed our ability to imagine other models for running and organizing our communication infrastructure. Forget about models that aren’t based on advertising and that do not contribute to the centralization of data on private servers located in America. To suggest that we need to look into other – perhaps, even publicly-provided alternatives –is to risk being accused of wanting to “break the Internet.” We have succumbed to what the Brazilian social theorist Roberto Unger calls “the dictatorship of no alternatives”: we are asked to accept that Gmail is the best and only possible way to do email, and that Facebook is the best and only possible way to do social networking.
But consider just how weird our current arrangement is. Imagine I told you that the post office could run on a different, innovation-friendly business model. Forget stamps. They cost money – and why pay money when there’s a way to send letters for free? Just think about the world-changing potential: the poor kids in Africa can finally reach you with their pleas for more laptops! So, instead of stamps, we would switch to an advertising-backed system: we’d open every letter that you send, scan its contents, insert a relevant ad, seal it, and then forward it to the recipient.
Sounds crazy? It does….
Reason number three:  the simplistic epistemology of Silicon Valley has become a model that other institutions are beginning to emulate. The trouble with Silicon Valley is not just that it enables the NSA –it also encourages, even emboldens them. It inspires the NSA to keep searching for connections in a world of meaningless links, to record every click, to ensure that no interaction goes unnoticed, undocumented and unanalyzed.  Like Silicon Valley, NSA assumes that everything is interconnected: if we can’t yet link two pieces of data, it’s because we haven’t looked deep enough – or we need a third piece of data, to be collected in the future, to make sense of it all.
There’s something delusional about this practice – and I don’t use “delusional” metaphorically. For the Italian philosopher Remo Bodei, delusion does not stem from too little psychic activity, as some psychoanalytic theories would have it, but, rather, from too much of it. Delirium, he notes, is “the incapacity to filter an enormous quantity of data.” While a sane, rational person “has learned that ignorance is vaster than knowledge and that one must resist the temptation to find more coherence than can currently be achieved,” the man suffering from delusion cannot stop finding coherence among inherently incoherent phenomena. He generalizes too much, which results in what Bodei calls “hyper-inclusion.”
“Hyper-inclusion” is exactly what plagues America’s military-industrial complex today….”

Findings from the emerging field of Transparency Research

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tiago Peixoto: “HEC Paris has just hosted the 3rd Global Conference on Transparency Research, and they have made the list of accepted papers available. …
As one goes through the papers,  it is clear that unlike most of the open government space, when it comes to research, transparency is treated less as a matter of technology and formats and more as a matter of social and political institutions.  And that is a good thing.”
This year’s papers are listed below:

Open Government and Its Constraints

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog entry by Panthea Lee: “Open government” is everywhere. Search the term and you’ll find OpenGovernment.org, OpenTheGovernment.org, Open Government Initiative, Open Gov Hub and the Open Gov Foundation; you’ll find open government initiatives for New York City, Boston, Kansas, Virginia, Tennessee and the list goes on; you’ll find dedicated open government plans for the White House, State Department, USAID, Treasury, Justice Department, Commerce, Energy and just about every other major federal agency. Even the departments of Defense and Homeland Security are in on open government.
And that’s just in the United States.
There is Open Government Africa, Open Government in the EU and Open Government Data. The World Bank has an Open Government Data Toolkit and recently announced a three-year initiative to help developing countries leverage open data. And this week, over 1,000 delegates from over 60 countries are in London for the annual meeting of the Open Government Partnership, which has grown from 8 to 60 member states in just two years….
Many of us have no consensus or clarity on just what exactly “open government” is, what we hope to achieve from it or how to measure our progress. Too often, our initiatives are designed through the narrow lenses of our own biases and without a concrete understanding of those they are intended for — both those in and out of government.
If we hope to realize the promise of more open governments, let’s be clear about the barriers we face so that we may start to overcome them.
Barrier 1: “Open Gov” is…?
Open government is… not new, for starters….
Barrier 2: Open Gov is Not Inclusive
The central irony of open government is that it’s often not “open” at all….
Barrier 3: Open Gov Lacks Empathy
Open government practitioners love to speak of “the citizen” and “the government.” But who exactly are these people? Too often, we don’t really know. We are builders, makers and creators with insufficient understanding of whom we are building, making and creating for…On the flip side, who do we mean by “the government?” And why, gosh darn it, is it so slow to innovate? Simply put, “the government” is comprised of individual people working in environments that are not conducive to innovation….
For open government to realize its potential, we must overcome these barriers.”