Designing for More Effective Protests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Linda Poon at CityLab: “…It’s also safe to assume there will be more protests to come, and that they may be smaller and more dispersed around cities. That’s the argument made by a handful of design and architecture organizations in an open letter in January to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio suggesting ways the city could make its streets more protest friendly. The Van Alen Institute, one of the signatories, recently followed that up with a related question: How can New Yorkers themselves design for better protests, to make them more inclusive and accessible to the city’s diverse population?

That’s the central question behind the institute’s one-day design contest, “To the Streets,” which asked activists, designers, and people of all backgrounds and disciplines to come up with imaginative—but also realistic—strategies that community members can use to plan effective protests.

One of the key challenges, as outlined in the letter and in the competition rules, is that future protests may not be as big as the Women’s March, nor will they always be held in the most popular protest sites. In a city as diverse as New York, the protests might be more decentralized. Instead of one large protest, smaller ones may happen simultaneously in spaces nestled inside the immigrant communities most affected by the Trump administration’s policies.

The competition asked designers to find ways to link these protest sites together so that their messages resonate throughout the city and so that they stand out. If protests do become more frequent, it’s important that they don’t become normalized, says John Schettino, a fellow at the Design Trust for Public Space and one of the contest judges.

The city might be able to make these protest sites bigger and safer, and it could have the authority to pedestrianize streets like 5th Avenue, where Trump Tower is located. “The physical design of the space tends to be a top-down process that comes from the city government,” Schettino says. But then there’s the “soft infrastructure of activist design,” or how interventions and activism can temporarily reclaim public spaces.

The winning proposal, chosen out of five finalists, came from urban designers James Khamsi and Despo Thoma, who came up with the idea of using flatbed trucks as mobile platforms that act as a central point for protests. Hovering above each truck would be giant balloons whose colorful appearance would draw attention from people miles away, and whose monitors can display the protestors’ messages….(More)”.

Data Collaboratives: exchanging data to create public value across Latin America and the Caribbean

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst, Andrew Young and Prianka Srinivasan at IADB’s Abierto al Publico: “Data is playing an ever-increasing role in bolstering businesses across Latin America – and the rest of the word. In Brazil, Mexico and Colombia alone, the revenue from Big Data is calculated at more than US$603.7 million, a market that is only set to increase as more companies across Latin America and the Caribbean embrace data-driven strategies to enhance their bottom-line. Brazilian banking giant Itau plans to create six data centers across the country, and already uses data collected from consumers online to improve cross-selling techniques and streamline their investments. Data from web-clicks, social media profiles, and telecommunication services is fueling a new generation of entrepreneurs keen to make big dollars from big data.

What if this same data could be used not just to improve business, but to improve the collective well-being of our communities, public spaces, and cities? Analysis of social media data can offer powerful insights to city officials into public trends and movements to better plan infrastructure and policies. Public health officials and humanitarian workers can use mobile phone data to, for instance, map human mobility and better target their interventions. By repurposing the data collected by companies for their business interests, governments, international organizations and NGOs can leverage big data insights for the greater public good.

Key question is thus: How to unlock useful data collected by corporations in a responsible manner and ensure its vast potential does not go to waste?

“Data Collaboratives” are emerging as a possible answer. Data collaboratives are a new type of public-private partnerships aimed at creating public value by exchanging data across sectors.

Research conducted by the GovLab finds that Data Collaboratives offer several potential benefits across a number of sectors, including humanitarian and anti-poverty efforts, urban planning, natural resource stewardship, health, and disaster management. As a greater number of companies in Latin America look to data to spur business interests, our research suggests that some companies are also sharing and collaborating around data to confront some of society’s most pressing problems.

Consider the following Data Collaboratives that seek to enhance…(More)”

The cloud, the crowd, and the city: How new data practices reconfigure urban governance?

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Introduction to Special Issue of Big Data & Society by Philip Ashton, Rachel Weber and Matthew Zook: “The urban archetype of the flâneur, so central to the concept of modernity, can now experience the city in ways unimaginable one hundred years ago. Strolling around Paris, the contemporary flâneur might stop to post pictures of her discoveries on Instagram, simultaneously identifying points of interest to the rest of her social network and broadcasting her location (perhaps unknowingly). The café she visits might be in the middle of a fundraising campaign through a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter, and she might be invited to tweet to her followers in exchange for a discount on her pain au chocolate. As she ambles about Paris, the route of her stroll is captured by movement sensors positioned on top of street lights, and this data—aggregated with that of thousands of other pedestrians—could be used by the City of Paris to sync up transit schedules. And if those schedules were not convenient, she might tap Uber to whisk her home to her threadbare pension booked on AirBnB.

This vignette attests to the transformation of the urban experience through technology-enabled platforms that allow for the quick mobilization and exchange of information, public services, surplus capacity, entrepreneurial energy, and money. However, these changes have implicated more than just consumers, as multiple technologies have been taken up in urban governance processes through platforms variously labeled as Big Data, crowd sourcing, or the sharing economy. These systems combine inexpensive data collection and cloud-based storage, distributed social networks, geotagged locational sensing, mobile access (often through “app” platforms), and new collaborative entrepreneurship models to radically alter how the needs of urban residents are identified and how services are delivered and consumed in so-called “smart cities” (Townsend, 2013). Backed by Big Data, smart city initiatives have made inroads into urban service provision and policy in areas such as e-government and transparency, new forms of public-private partnerships through “urban lab” arrangements, or models such as impact investing, civic hacking, or tactical urbanism (cf. Karvonen and van Heur, 2014; Kitchin, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2005).

In the rhetoric used by their boosters, the vision and practice of these technologies “disrupts” existing markets by harnessing the power of “the crowd”—a process fully evident in sectors such as taxi (Uber/Lyft), hoteling (AirBnB), and finance (peer-to-peer lending). However, the notion of disruption has also targeted government bureaucracies and public services, with new initiatives seeking to insert crowd mechanisms or characteristics—at once self-organizing and collectively rational (Brabham, 2008)—into public policy. These mechanisms envision reconfiguring the traditional relationship of public powers with planning and governance by vesting data collection and problem-solving in crowd-like institutional arrangements that are partially or wholly outside the purview of government agencies. While scholars are used to talking about “governance beyond-the-state” (Swyngedouw, 2005) in terms of privatization and a growing scope for civil society organizations, technological intermediation potentially changes the scale and techniques of governance as well as its relationship to sovereign authority.

For instance, civic crowdfunding models have emerged as new means of organizing public service provision and funding community economic development by embracing both market-like bidding mechanisms and social-network technologies to distribute responsibility for planning and financing socially desirable investments to laypeople (Brickstarter, 2012; Correia de Freitas and Amado, 2013; Langley and Leyshon, 2016). Other practices are even more radical in their scope. Toronto’s Urban Repair Squad—an offshoot of the aptly named Critical Mass bike happenings—urges residents to take transportation planning into their own hands and paint their own bike lanes. Their motto: “They say city is broke. We fix. No charge.” (All that is missing is the snarky “you’re welcome” at the end.)

Combined, these emerging platforms and practices are challenging the tactics, capabilities, and authorizations employed to define and govern urban problems. This special theme of Big Data & Society picks up these issues, interrogating the emergence of digital platforms and smart city initiatives that rely on both the crowd and the cloud (new on-demand, internet-based technologies that store and process data) to generate and fold Big Data into urban governance. The papers contained herein were presented as part of a one-day symposium held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in April 2015 and sponsored by UIC’s Department of Urban Planning and Policy. Setting aside the tired narratives of individual genius and unstoppable technological progress, workshop participants sought to understand why these practices and platforms have recently gained popularity and what their implementation might mean for cities. Papers addressed numerous questions: How have institutional supports and political-economic contexts facilitated the ascendance of “crowd” and “cloud” models within different spheres of urban governance? How do their advocates position them relative to imaginaries of state or market failure/dysfunction? What kinds of assumptions and expectations are embedded in the design and operation of these platforms and practices? What kinds of institutional reconfigurations have been spurred by the push to adopt smart city initiatives? How is information collected through these initiatives being used to advance particular policy agendas? Who is likely to benefit from them?…(More)”.

Policymakers around the world are embracing behavioural science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist: “In 2013 thousands of school pupils in England received a letter from a student named Ben at the University of Bristol. The recipients had just gained good marks in their GCSEs, exams normally taken at age 16. But they attended schools where few pupils progressed to university at age 18, and those that did were likely to go to their nearest one. That suggested the schools were poor at nurturing aspiration. In his letter Ben explained that employers cared about the reputation of the university a job applicant has attended. He pointed out that top universities can be a cheaper option for poorer pupils, because they give more financial aid. He added that he had not known these facts at the recipient’s age.

The letters had the effect that was hoped for. A study published in March found that after leaving school, the students who received both Ben’s letter and another, similar one some months later were more likely to be at a prestigious university than those who received just one of the letters, and more likely again than those who received none. For each extra student in a better university, the initiative cost just £45 ($58), much less than universities’ own attempts to broaden their intake. And the approach was less heavy-handed than imposing quotas for poorer pupils, an option previous governments had considered. The education department is considering rolling out the scheme….

Some critics feared that nudges would do little good, and that their effects would fade over time. Others warned that governments were straying perilously close to mass manipulation. More recently, some of the findings on which the behavioural sciences rest have been questioned, as researchers in many fields have sought to replicate famous results, and failed.

By and large those doubts have been allayed. Even if specific results turn out to be mistaken, an experimental, iterative, data-driven approach to policymaking is gaining ground in many places, not just in dedicated units, but throughout government.

Nudging is hardly new. “In Genesis, Satan nudged, and Eve did too,” writes Cass Sunstein of Harvard University. From the middle of the 20th century psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo showed how sensitive humans are to social pressure. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described the mental shortcuts and biases that influence decision-making. Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini wrote popular books on persuasion. Firms, especially in technology, retail and advertising, used behavioural science to shape brand perception and customer behaviour—and, ultimately, to sell more stuff.

But governments’ use of psychological insights to achieve policy goals was occasional and unsystematic. According to David Halpern, the boss of BIT, as far as policymakers were concerned, psychology was “the sickly sibling to economics”. That began to change after Mr Sunstein and Richard Thaler, an economist, published “Nudge”, in 2008. The book attacked the assumption of rational decision-making inherent in most economic models and showed how “choice architecture”, or context, could be changed to “nudge” people to make better choices…..

Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Non-profit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030….

Among the most effective nudges are “social” ones: those that communicate norms or draw on people’s networks. A scheme tested in Guatemala with help from the World Bank and BIT tweaked the wording of letters sent to people and firms who had failed to submit tax returns the previous year. The letters that framed non-payment as an active choice, or noted that paying up is more common than evasion, cut the number of non-payers in the following year and increased the average sum paid. And a trial involving diabetes shows that it matters to nudge at the right moment. In 2014 Hamad Medical Corporation, a health-care provider in Qatar, raised take-up rates for diabetes screening by offering it during Ramadan. That meant most Qataris were fasting, so the need to do so before the test imposed no extra burden….(More)”.

Civic Tech Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rebecca Rumbul and Emily Shaw: “‘Civic technology’ is mostly used to refer to NGO led digital initiatives designed to bridge the gap between citizen and institution. However, since the rise of Code for America and similar organisations around the world, civic citizen-focused tech has increasingly been developed and implemented by and with public bodies themselves in an attempt to reach out to citizens and increase engagement and participation. Whilst early civic tech tended to focus on country-level issues, these initiatives are now proliferating at sub-national levels, particularly in cities. These emerging sub-national and municipal level civic technologies form the focus of this research, which explores five case studies of municipal civic tech operating in the US. It examines not only the impacts of this tech upon citizen users, but the effects it has upon the implementing institutions.

Whilst many governments in the world are still working with centralised forms of digital governance, the US has over the last 10 years experienced a plurality of growth in sub-state civic tech usage by city and municipal governments. This nascent government civic tech environment provided a most fertile opportunity for research into the operations and impacts of civic tech employed by official institutions.

This project was designed to examine how civic tech implemented by government is currently operating, who is using it, and what impacts it is having upon service delivery. The aim of this research is therefore to provide a comprehensive picture of civic technology implementation by municipal level public bodies and the challenges and benefits that arise in the process. It is hoped that this report will be of practical use to both public bodies and civic technologists working with them.

The primary deliverable of this project was five case studies of civic tech projects that have been deployed by US cities since 2013:

  • SpeakUpAustin (www.speakupaustin.org), in Austin, Texas
  • LargeLots (www.largelots.org), in Chicago, Illinois
  • RecordTrac (records.oaklandnet.com), in Oakland, California
  • DC311 (311.dc.gov), in Washington, DC
  • Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) Police Complaint Tracker (www.seattle.gov/opa/file-acomplaint-about-the-seattle-police), in Seattle, Washington

In the study, the users of the civic tech tools and the implementers of the tools within government were interviewed about the impact of the tool’s introduction on the delivery of the relevant public service, how these additional sources of public input affected the departments where they had been introduced, whether the department had noted increased efficiency, and whether internal or external stakeholders perceived increased effectiveness.

The civic technology tools examined in this study were generally well-appreciated both internally and externally, receiving good reviews both from the government and non-government sides of their use. People inside and outside of government appreciated the benefits of using them, and expressed interest in maintaining and improving them….(More)”

Using Open Data to Combat Corruption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Robert Palmer at Open Data Charter: “…today we’re launching the Open Up Guide: Using Open Data to Combat Corruption. We think that with the right conditions in place, greater transparency can lead to more accountability, less corruption and better outcomes for citizens. This guide builds on the work in this area already done by the G20’s anti-corruption working group, Transparency International and the Web Foundation.

Inside the guide you’ll find a number of tools including:

  • A short overview on how open data can be used to combat corruption.
  • Use cases and methodologies. A series of case studies highlighting existing and future approaches to the use of open data in the anti-corruption field.
  • 30 priority datasets and the key attributes needed so that they can talk to each other. To address corruption networks it is particularly important that connections can be established and followed across data sets, national borders and different sectors.
  • Data standards. Standards describe what should be published, and the technical details of how it should be made available. The report includes some of the relevant standards for anti-corruption work, and highlights the areas where there are currently no standards.

The guide has been developed by Transparency International-Mexico, Open Contracting Partnership and the Open Data Charter, building on input from government officials, open data experts, civil society and journalists. It’s been designed as a practical tool for governments who want to use open data to fight corruption. However, it’s still a work in progress and we want feedback on how to make it more useful. Please either comment directly on the Google Doc version of the guide, or email us at info@opendatacharter.net….View the full guide.”

Tech Companies Should Speak Up for Refugees, Not Only High-Skilled Immigrants

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mark Latonero at Harvard Business Review: “The Trump administration’s latest travel ban is back in U.S. federal court. The Fourth Circuit, based in Virginia, and Ninth Circuit, based in San Francisco, are hearing cases challenging the latest executive order banning immigrants and refugees from six Muslim majority countries from entering the United States. Joining the fray are 162 technology companies, whose lawyers collectively filed an amicus brief to both courts. Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and Uber are among the companies urging federal judges to rule against the executive order, detailing why it is unjust and how it would hurt their businesses.

While the 40-page brief is filled with arguments in support of immigration, it hardly speaks about refugees, except to note that those seeking protection should be welcomed. Any multinational company with a diverse workforce would be concerned about limits to international hiring and employee travel. But tech companies should also be concerned about the refugee populations that depend on their digital services for safety and survival.

In researching migration and the refugee crisis in Europe, my team and I interviewed over 140 refugees from Syria, and I’ve learned that technology has been crucial to those fleeing war and violence across the Middle East and North Africa. Services like Google Maps, Facebook, WhatsApp, Skype, and Western Union have helped refugees find missing loved ones or locate safe places to sleep. Mobile phones have been essential — refugees have even used them on sinking boats to call rescue officials patrolling the Mediterranean.

Refugees’ reliance on these platforms demonstrates what tech companies often profess: that innovation can empower people to improve their lives and society. Tech companies did not intend for their tools to facilitate one of the largest mass movements of refugees in history, but they have a responsibility to look out for the safety and security of the vulnerable consumers using their products.

Some tech companies have intervened directly in the refugee crisis. Google has created apps to help refugees in Greece find medical facilities and other services; Facebook promised to provide free Wi-Fi in U.N. refugee camps. A day after President Trump issued the first travel ban, which initially suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, Airbnb announced it would provide free housing to refugees left stranded….

The sector should extend these efforts by making sure its technologies aren’t used to target broad groups of people based on nationality or religion. Already the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CPB) is asking for the social media accounts — even passwords — of visitors from other counties. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has filed complaints against the CPB, stating that Muslim American citizens have been subjected to enhanced screening that includes scrutiny of their social media accounts and cell phones.

Trump has talked about creating a database to identify and register Muslims in America, including refugees. A number of companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Salesforce, have stated they will not help build a Muslim registry if asked by the government. In addition, a group of nearly 3,000 American tech employees signed an online pledge promising they would not develop data processing systems to help the U.S. government target individuals based on race, religion, or national origin….(More)”.

Building a Better Relationship Between Citizens and Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Felipe Estefan at Positive Returns: “Right now you don’t have to look very hard to find evidence of the tense, often broken, relationship between between citizens and their governments around the world.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Brazil. In just the past couple of years the country has faced the impeachment of a President, numerous major corruption scandals, and most recently the news that investigations are being opened into the conduct of more than 100 high-ranking political officials.

Each of these incidents has deepened the distrust of government and those that hold privileged positions of power in Brazil. At the same time this is reinforcing the belief that those in power operate to a different set of rules that are focused on self-interest rather than public good….

When governments fail to listen to and provide the services citizens need, opportunities are removed. If we are to restore the relationship between citizens and governments many things need to change. Not the least is the ability of citizens to have their voices heard and their needs met by government, and in turn for governments to be more efficient and effective in their responses….Colab — a Brazilian civic technology startup which provides a social network for engagement between citizens and local governments.

Colab provides citizens an opportunity to report local issues and suggest urban improvements, such as potholes, illegal car parking, public lighting, broken sidewalks, among others. It also allows citizens to proactively participate in the decisions that will impact their future and the futures of those around them.

For local governments, Colab offers a workflow management and engagement tool, as well as a data analytics system to manage and respond to citizens’ requests and to better evaluate their own performance.

Colab has already reached over 130 municipalities in Brazil, including Santos, Campinas, Niteroi, and Teresina. Across the country, they have over 150,000 members. So far the platform has enabled citizens from across these municipalities to submit more than 85,000 reports, with local governments responding to over 75% of those.

For instance, in Niteroi a citizen reported an issue with the drainage in the streets. Government resolved the issue and informed the citizen through the Colab platform. In a similar case in Pelotas, a citizen reported an issue with a pothole which government didn’t address correctly. Using the Colab platform the citizen engaged with government again to ensure to appropriate resolution of the issue. Similar cases in which government has successfully addressed the issues reported by citizens can be found in municipalities from Teresina to Recife.

Colab has been so successful at creating a vital bridge between citizens and local governments that it is now being used for a wide-range of purposes, from conducting participatory budgeting consultations to managing the outbreak of Zika….(More)”.

Updated N.Y.P.D. Anti-Crime System to Ask: ‘How We Doing?’

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Al Baker in the New York Times: “It was a policing invention with a futuristic sounding name — CompStat — when the New York Police Department introduced it as a management system for fighting crime in an era of much higher violence in the 1990s. Police departments around the country, and the world, adapted its system of mapping muggings, robberies and other crimes; measuring police activity; and holding local commanders accountable.

Now, a quarter-century later, it is getting a broad reimagining and being brought into the mobile age. Moving away from simple stats and figures, CompStat is getting touchy-feely. It’s going to ask New Yorkers — via thousands of questions on their phones — “How are you feeling?” and “How are we, the police, doing?”

Whether this new approach will be mimicked elsewhere is still unknown, but as is the case with almost all new tactics in the N.Y.P.D. — the largest municipal police force in the United States by far — it will be closely watched. Nor is it clear if New Yorkers will embrace this approach, reject it as intrusive or simply be annoyed by it.

The system, using location technology, sends out short sets of questions to smartphones along three themes: Do you feel safe in your neighborhood? Do you trust the police? Are you confident in the New York Police Department?

The questions stream out every day, around the clock, on 50,000 different smartphone applications and present themselves on screens as eight-second surveys.

The department believes it will get a more diverse measure of community satisfaction, and allow it to further drive down crime. For now, Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill is calling the tool a “sentiment meter,” though he is open to suggestions for a better name….(More)”.

Going Digital: Restoring Trust In Government In Latin American Cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Carlos Santiso at The Rockefeller Foundation Blog: “Driven by fast-paced technological innovations, an exponential growth of smartphones, and a daily stream of big data, the “digital revolution” is changing the way we live our lives. Nowhere are the changes more sweeping than in cities. In Latin America, almost 80 percent of the population lives in cities, where massive adoption of social media is enabling new forms of digital engagement. Technology is ubiquitous in cities. The expectations of Latin American “digital citizens” have grown exponentially as a result of a rising middle class and an increasingly connected youth.

This digital transformation is recasting the relation between states and citizens. Digital citizens are asking for better services, more transparency, and meaningful participation. Their rising expectations concern the quality of the services city governments ought to provide, but also the standards of integrity, responsiveness, and fairness of the bureaucracy in their daily dealings. A recent study shows that citizens’ satisfaction with public services is not only determined by the objective quality of the service, but also their subjective expectations and how fairly they consider being treated….

New technologies and data analytics are transforming the governance of cities. Digital-intensive and data-driven innovations are changing how city governments function and deliver services, and also enabling new forms of social participation and co-creation. New technologies help improve efficiency and further transparency through new modes of open innovation. Tech-enabled and citizen-driven innovations also facilitate participation through feedback loops from citizens to local authorities to identify and resolve failures in the delivery of public services.

Three structural trends are driving the digital revolution in governments.

  1. The digital transformation of the machinery of government. National and city governments in the region are developing digital strategies to increase connectivity, improve services, and enhance accountability. According to a recent report, 75 percent of the 23 countries surveyed have developed comprehensive digital strategies, such as Uruguay Digital, Colombia’s Vive Digital or Mexico’s Agenda Digital, that include legally recognized digital identification mechanisms. “Smart cities” are intensifying the use of modern technologies and improve the interoperability of government systems, the backbone of government, to ensure that public services are inter-connected and thus avoid having citizens provide the same information to different entities. An important driver of this transformation is citizens’ demands for greater transparency and accountability in the delivery of public services. Sixteen countries in the region have developed open government strategies, and cities such as Buenos Aires in Argentina, La Libertad in Peru, and Sao Paolo in Brazil have also committed to opening up government to public scrutiny and new forms of social participation. This second wave of active transparency reforms follows a first, more passive wave that focused on facilitating access to information.
  1. The digital transformation of the interface with citizens. Sixty percent of the countries surveyed by the aforementioned report have established integrated service portals through which citizens can access online public services. Online portals allow for a single point of access to public services. Cities, such as Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro, are developing their own online service platforms to access municipal services. These innovations improve access to public services and contribute to simplifying bureaucratic processes and cutting red-tape, as a recent study shows. Governments are resorting to crowdsourcing solutions, open intelligence initiatives, and digital apps to encourage active citizen participation in the improvement of public services and the prevention of corruption. Colombia’s Transparency Secretariat has developed an app that allows citizens to report “white elephants” — incomplete or overbilled public works. By the end of 2015, it identified 83 such white elephants, mainly in the capital Bogotá, for a total value of almost $500 million, which led to the initiation of criminal proceedings by law enforcement authorities. While many of these initiatives emerge from civic initiatives, local governments are increasingly encouraging them and adopting their own open innovation models to rethink public services.
  1. The gradual mainstreaming of social innovation in local government. Governments are increasingly resorting to public innovation labs to tackle difficult problems for citizens and businesses. Governments innovation labs are helping address “wicked problems” by combining design thinking, crowdsourcing techniques, and data analytics tools. Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Uruguay, have developed such social innovation labs within government structures. As a recent report notes, these mechanisms come in different forms and shapes. Large cities, such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, are at the forefront of testing such laboratory mechanisms and institutionalizing tech-driven and citizen-centered approaches through innovation labs. For example, in 2013, Mexico City created its Laboratorio para la Ciudad, as a hub for civic innovation and urban creativity, relying on small-case experiments and interventions to improve specific government services and make local government more transparent, responsive, and receptive. It spearheaded an open government law for the city that encourages residents to participate in the design of public policies and requires city agencies to consider those suggestions…..(More)”.