Book edited by André Corrêa d’Almeida: “Innovation is often presented as being in the exclusive domain of the private sector. Yet despite widespread perceptions of public-sector inefficiency, government agencies have much to teach us about how technological and social advances occur. Improving governance at the municipal level is critical to the future of the twenty-first-century city, from environmental sustainability to education, economic development, public health, and beyond. In this age of acceleration and massive migration of people into cities around the world, this book explains how innovation from within city agencies and administrations makes urban systems smarter and shapes life in New York City.
Using a series of case studies, Smarter New York City describes the drivers and constraints behind urban innovation, including leadership and organization; networks and interagency collaboration; institutional context; technology and real-time data collection; responsiveness and decision making; and results and impact. Cases include residential organic-waste collection, an NYPD program that identifies the sound of gunshots in real time, and the Vision Zero attempt to end traffic casualties, among others. Challenging the usefulness of a tech-centric view of urban innovation, Smarter New York City brings together a multidisciplinary and integrated perspective to imagine new possibilities from within city agencies, with practical lessons for city officials, urban planners, policy makers, civil society, and potential private-sector partners….(More)”.
Small Data for Big Impact
Liz Luckett at the Stanford Social Innovation Review: “As an investor in data-driven companies, I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandfather—a baker, a small business owner, and, I now realize, a pioneering data scientist. Without much more than pencil, paper, and extraordinarily deep knowledge of his customers in Washington Heights, Manhattan, he bought, sold, and managed inventory while also managing risk. His community was poor, but his business prospered. This was not because of what we celebrate today as the power and predictive promise of big data, but rather because of what I call small data: nuanced market insights that come through regular and trusted interactions.
Big data takes into account volumes of information from largely electronic sources—such as credit cards, pay stubs, test scores—and segments people into groups. As a result, people participating in the formalized economy benefit from big data. But people who are paid in cash and have no recognized accolades, such as higher education, are left out. Small data captures those insights to address this market failure. My grandfather, for example, had critical customer information he carefully gathered over the years: who could pay now, who needed a few days more, and which tabs to close. If he had access to a big data algorithm, it likely would have told him all his clients were unlikely to repay him, based on the fact that they were low income (vs. high income) and low education level (vs. college degree). Today, I worry that in our enthusiasm for big data and aggregated predictions, we often lose the critical insights we can gain from small data, because we don’t collect it. In the process, we are missing vital opportunities to both make money and create economic empowerment.
We won’t solve this problem of big data by returning to my grandfather’s shop floor. What we need is more and better data—a small data movement to supply vital missing links in marketplaces and supply chains the world over. What are the proxies that allow large companies to discern whom among the low income are good customers in the absence of a shopkeeper? At The Social Entrepreneurs’ Fund (TSEF), we are profitably investing in a new breed of data company: enterprises that are intentionally and responsibly serving low-income communities, and generating new and unique insights about the behavior of individuals in the process. The value of the small data they collect is becoming increasingly useful to other partners, including corporations who are willing to pay for it. It is a kind of dual market opportunity that for the first time makes it economically advantageous for these companies to reach the poor. We are betting on small data to transform opportunities and quality of life for the underserved, tap into markets that were once seen as too risky or too costly to reach, and earn significant returns for investors….(More)”.
You weren’t supposed to have to think about politics
Bonnie Kristian at The Week: “You were not supposed to have to think about politics.
Not this much, anyway. Good citizenship was not supposed to entail paying obsessive attention to a 24-hour news cycle. It was not supposed to demand conversational knowledge, at any given moment, of at least 15 issues of national importance. It was not supposed to be the task of each American to have An Informed Opinion on What the Government Should Do about every matter of state.
America’s founders never wanted politics to be a major occupation of your mind. It was not supposed to feature prominently among your worries. Most of the time, it was not supposed to be your responsibility.
I know, I know, we learn in grade school that America is a democracy, and each of us must do our part to ensure good governance “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” This may be inspirational for children, but it is not entirely true.
The United States’ government has democratic elements, yes, and, in some ways, it has become more democratic with time. (In other ways, it hasbecome less democratic, and I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether the net change is a loss or gain.) To say our country is a republic rather than a democracy is also misleading, but it does remind us of an important point: Our federal system is representational. It is not direct democracy. Each of us does not weigh in on everything. Instead, we periodically vote on representatives who will weigh in on our behalf while we do other, better things.
This is with good reason. At the most practical level, direct democracy was always impossible for a country of the United States’ size. And even now, assuming technology could be secure enough to use without concern over hacking and other malicious manipulation, there is cause to reject direct democracy: A system designed to force every responsible citizen to pay constant attention to politics is not desirable.
We elect representatives to do the great bulk of our politicking for us because we have more important things to do. We have families to raise and jobs to work and homes to maintain. We have our own areas of interest and expertise, our own relationships to cultivate. And, crucially, we have limited time, energy, and mental space. Some of us may choose to make politics our hobby or occupation, but all of us should not have to make that choice.
Politics is one aspect of our society. It is one part of many. We all no more need to be politicos, amateur or professional, than we all need to be philosophers or writers or tailors or dog rescuers or plumbers. Philosophy, books, clothes, rescue dogs, and working toilets are all important, just as politics is, but they are not everyone’s concern all the time. They are some people’s profession and the hobbies of others, but for most of us, these and any other field of work or pastime are only occasionally encountered…(More)”
The End of the End of History?
Introduction to Special Issue of The Hedgehog Review: “Although Francis Fukuyama never said the triumph of liberal democracy was inevitable, his qualified declaration of the “the end of history” captured the optimistic, sometimes naive tenor of the early post-Cold War era. But how quickly that confidence faded! Unmistakable signs of history’s resumption began to appear less than two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In its 2008 annual report on political rights and civil liberties around the world, the democracy watchdog Freedom House took troubled note of the reversal of progress in a number of key countries in South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the former Soviet space.
This “profoundly disturbing deterioration,” as Freedom House put it, has continued, and not only in countries with fragile democratic institutions. The most recent survey found that “in 2016 it was established democracies—countries rated Free in the report’s ranking system—that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks.” The report’s authors went on glumly to note that the US election of 2016 “raised fears of a foreign policy divorced from America’s traditional strategic commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rules-based international order that it helped to construct beginning in 1945.” And if this were not enough, they pointed to a growing “nexus” of mutual support between authoritarian regimes and populist movements in both weak and strong liberal democracies.
It would be somewhat reassuring to think the United States is the “exceptional nation” resisting the tide. But President Donald J. Trump’s casual, sometimes caustic, disdain for democratic norms and his inexplicable coziness with Vladimir Putin and lesser authoritarians have raised concerns in America and abroad, particularly among traditional allies.
Disturbing as the behavior of the forty-fifth president is, honesty compels us to recognize that Trump’s presidency is less the cause of America’s democracy woes than the product of them. Surveys and studies, including The Vanishing Center of American Democracy, published by the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture last year, reveal a steady decline in Americans’ confidence in their political institutions as well as various other bulwarks of a liberal and civil society. A declining faith in democratic norms has only exacerbated the culture war divisions of the last four decades, divisions that have in turn been intensified by what some call a new class war between “credentialed” elites and (mostly) white lower-income earners who see their fortunes declining. And as many have noted, democratic norms are bound to suffer when there are no shared conceptions of truth or objectivity, and when all products of journalism are dismissed, from one partisan angle or another, as “fake news.”
Is it time to declare the end of the end of history, as we tentatively suggest in the title to this issue’s theme? More fundamentally, is there something deeply flawed in what many people have long believed was the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment: not merely the idea of governments of, for, and by the people but states undergirded by commitments to personal and civil liberties. Are we witnessing the exhaustion of the once-vital liberal tradition that supported our politics, both its progressive and conservative strands, and which made politics a (relatively) civil enterprise, and compromise a desirable outcome of that enterprise?
The contributors to this issue propose widely differing answers to these questions. But all agree that the questions are urgent and the stakes are high, not only for America and other liberal democracies but also for the relatively stable global order that emerged after World War II, an order built on faith in the universal worth of liberal principles….(More)”.
Opening Government to Improve Outcomes
Laura Wesley at Canada Beyond 150: “Open Government is a concept. It’s a view into government. It’s an invitation to stakeholders, citizens and civil society to help shape government decisions and actions. It is not a program or policy, yet both can be part of achieving the vision of a government that encourages civic participation, invites accountability and demonstrates transparency. Examples of open government include proactively disclosing financial and human resources-related information online and publishing expenditures that can be displayed visually or as machine-readable charts. These measures are intended to strengthen public sector management.
From my place within the public service, I see opening government as a verb. To me, it’s what we are doing to create opportunities for people – wherever they work or reside – to contribute to the activities that go into governing so that the country reflects the values of those who live in it. Engaging citizens and stakeholders in the context of policy shaping builds trust, seeks others’ perspectives, enables accountability, and allows us to collectively design better policy, programs and services.
What is engagement in the context of public policy?
Engagement processes can be structured and formal like parliamentary committees to study an issue or those that allow for anyone to provide feedback on legislation as it moves through Parliament. They can be done by elected officials or by public servants working on their behalf, for example, through processes that invite stakeholders to comment on proposed regulatory or legislative changes. They can be informal, like hosting conversations online. They can be open and transparent, moderated or unmoderated, multilateral or bilateral. There are many options, yet deciding which methods to employ at the right time can be cloaked in complexity, with much at risk if we get it wrong. So how can we teach “engagement” as a mechanism to improve policy-shaping?
Canada Beyond 150 is a participatory learning program for public servants to experience new ways of developing and delivering public policy. I was excited to learn that engagement, along with design and foresight, was one of the three pillars of the program. My team had mapped some of the system-wide gaps that needed to be filled in order to build the organizational muscle required to engage broadly; this was our chance to understand how to support new public servants through change….(More)”.
Invisible Algorithms, Invisible Politics
Laura Forlano at Public Books: “Over the past several decades, politicians and business leaders, technology pundits and the mainstream media, engineers and computer scientists—as well as science fiction and Hollywood films—have repeated a troubling refrain, championing the shift away from the material and toward the virtual, the networked, the digital, the online. It is as if all of life could be reduced to 1s and 0s, rendering it computable….
Today, it is in design criteria and engineering specifications—such as “invisibility” and “seamlessness,” which aim to improve the human experience with technology—that ethical decisions are negotiated….
Take this example. In late July 2017, the City of Chicago agreed to settle a $38.75 million class-action lawsuit related to its red-light-camera program. Under the settlement, the city will repay drivers who were unfairly ticketed a portion of the cost of their ticket. Over the past five years, the program, ostensibly implemented to make Chicago’s intersections safer, has been mired in corruption, bribery, mismanagement, malfunction, and moral wrongdoing. This confluence of factors has resulted in a great deal of negative press about the project.
The red-light-camera program is just one of many examples of such technologies being adopted by cities in their quest to become “smart” and, at the same time, increase revenue. Others include ticketless parking, intelligent traffic management, ride-sharing platforms, wireless networks, sensor-embedded devices, surveillance cameras, predictive policing software, driverless car testbeds, and digital-fabrication facilities.
The company that produced the red-light cameras, Redflex, claims on their website that their technology can “reliably and consistently address negative driving behaviors and effectively enforce traffic laws on roadways and intersections with a history of crashes and incidents.”Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the cameras were unnecessarily installed at some intersections without a history of problems; they malfunctioned; they issued illegal tickets due to short yellow-lights that were not within federal limits; and they issued tickets after enforcement hours. And, due to existing structural inequalities, these difficulties were more likely to negatively impact poorer and less advantaged city residents.
The controversies surrounding red-light cameras in Chicago make visible the ways in which design criteria and engineering specifications—concepts including safety and efficiency, seamlessness and stickiness, convenience and security—are themselves ways of defining the ethics, values, and politics of our cities and citizens. To be sure, these qualities seem clean, comforting, and cuddly at first glance. They are difficult to argue against.
But, like wolves in sheep’s clothing, they gnash their political-economic teeth, and show their insatiable desire to further the goals of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than merely slick marketing, these mundane infrastructures (hardware, software, data, and services) negotiate ethical questions around what kinds of societies we aspire to, what kind of cities we want to live in, what kinds of citizens we can become, who will benefit from these tradeoffs, and who will be left out….(More)
Dawn of the techlash
Rachel Botsman at the Guardian: “…Once seen as saviours of democracy, those titans are now just as likely to be viewed as threats to truth or, at the very least, impassive billionaires falling down on the job of monitoring their own backyards.
It wasn’t always this way. Remember the early catchy slogans that emerged from those ping-pong-tabled tech temples in Silicon Valley? “A place for friends”, “Don’t be evil” or “You can make money without being evil” (rather poignant, given what was to come). Users were enchanted by the sudden, handheld power of a smartphone to voice anything, access anything; grassroots activist movements revelled in these new tools for spreading their cause. The idealism of social media – democracy, friction-free communication, one-button socialising proved infectious.
So how did that unbridled enthusiasm for all things digital morph into a critical erosion of trust in technology, particularly in politics? Was 2017 the year of reckoning, when technology suddenly crossed to the dark side or had it been heading that way for some time? It might be useful to recall how social media first discovered its political muscle….
Technology is only the means. We also need to ask why our political ideologies have become so polarised, and take a hard look at our own behaviour, as well as that of the politicians themselves and the partisan media outlets who use these platforms, with their vast reach, to sow the seeds of distrust. Why are we so easily duped? Are we unwilling or unable to discern what’s true and what isn’t or to look for the boundaries between opinion, fact and misinformation? But what part are our own prejudices playing?
Luciano Floridi, of the Digital Ethics Lab at Oxford University, points out that technology alone can’t save us from ourselves. “The potential of technology to be a powerful positive force for democracy is huge and is still there. The problems arise when we ignore how technology can accentuate or highlight less attractive sides of human nature,” he says. “Prejudice. Jealousy. Intolerance of different views. Our tendency to play zero sum games. We against them. Saying technology is a threat to democracy is like saying food is bad for you because it causes obesity.”
It’s not enough to blame the messenger. Social media merely amplifies human intent – both good and bad. We need to be honest about our own, age-old appetite for ugly gossip and spreading half-baked information, about our own blindspots.
Is there a solution to it all? Plenty of smart people are working on technical fixes, if for no other reason than the tech companies know it’s in their own best interests to stem the haemorrhaging of trust. Whether they’ll go far enough remains to be seen.
We sometimes forget how uncharted this new digital world remains – it’s a work in progress. We forget that social media, for all its flaws, still brings people together, gives a voice to the voiceless, opens vast wells of information, exposes wrongdoing, sparks activism, allows us to meet up with unexpected strangers. The list goes on. It’s inevitable that there will be falls along the way, deviousness we didn’t foresee. Perhaps the present danger is that in our rush to condemn the corruption of digital technologies, we will unfairly condemn the technologies themselves….(More).
The Entrepreneurial Impact of Open Data
In the context of our collaboration with the GovLab-chaired MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance, we sought to dig deeper into the broader impact of open data on entrepreneurship. To do so we combined the OD500 with databases on startup activity from Crunchbase and AngelList. This allowed us to look at the trajectories of open data companies from their founding to the present day. In particular, we compared companies that use open data to similar companies with the same founding year, location and industry to see how well open data companies fare at securing funding along with other indicators of success.
We first looked at the extent to which open data companies have access to investor capital, wondering if open data companies have difficulty gaining funding because their use of public data may be perceived as insufficiently innovative or proprietary. If this is the case, the economic impact of open data may be limited. Instead, we found that open data companies obtain more investors than similar companies that do not use open data. Open data companies have, on average, 1.74 more investors than similar companies founded at the same time. Interestingly, investors in open data companies are not a specific group who specialize in open data startups. Instead, a wide variety of investors put money into these companies. Of the investors who funded open data companies, 59 percent had only invested in one open data company, while 81 percent had invested in one or two. Open data companies appear to be appealing to a wide range of investors….(More)”.
Reclaiming Civic Spaces
Special edition of Sur International Journal on Human Rights on crackdowns on civil society around the world: “As shown by both the geographic reach of the contributions (authors from 16 countries) and the infographics to this edition, the issue is clearly of global concern. The first section of the journal seeks to address why this crackdown is happening, who is driving it and whether there is cross-fertilisation of ideas between actors.
The edition then focuses on the strategies that activists are implementing to combat the crackdown. A summary of these strategies can be seen in a video which captures a number of the author activists’ perspectives, shared when they gathered in São Paulo in October 2017 for a writers’ retreat….
The role of new media and online spaces in combatting the crackdown is prevalent in the contributions. The ease and speed with which information can be passed on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Telegram was cited as being important in mobilising support rapidly as well as helping reach previously untapped constituents (Sara Alsherif, Zoya Rehman, Raull Santiago, Victoria Ohaeri, Valerie Msoka and Denise Dora, Ravindran Daniel and Barbara Klugman). Despite the opportunities, Bondita Acharya, Helen Kezie-Nwoha, Sondos Shabayek, Shalini Eddens and Susan Jessop, Sara Alsherif and Zoya Rehman all note the challenges that digital tools present. Harassment of activists online is becoming increasingly common, particularly towards women. In addition, authorities are constantly developing new ways of monitoring these platforms. To combat this, Sara Alsherif describes how developing relationships with tech companies can help activists stay one step ahead of the curve.
The use of video is explored by Hagai El-Ad and Raull Santiago, both of whom describe how the medium is an important tool in capturing the restrictions being inflicted on civil society in their respective contexts. Moreover, Raull Santiago describes how his collective is trying to use these video images, captured by members of his community, in legal processes against the police force….(More)”.
A Roadmap to a Nationwide Data Infrastructure for Evidence-Based Policymaking
Introduction by Julia Lane and Andrew Reamer of a Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: “Throughout the United States, there is broad interest in expanding the nation’s capacity to design and implement public policy based on solid evidence. That interest has been stimulated by the new types of data that are available that can transform the way in which policy is designed and implemented. Yet progress in making use of sensitive data has been hindered by the legal, technical, and operational obstacles to access for research and evaluation. Progress has also been hindered by an almost exclusive focus on the interest and needs of the data users, rather than the interest and needs of the data providers. In addition, data stewardship is largely artisanal in nature.
There are very real consequences that result from lack of action. State and local governments are often hampered in their capacity to effectively mount and learn from innovative efforts. Although jurisdictions often have treasure troves of data from existing programs, the data are stove-piped, underused, and poorly maintained. The experience reported by one large city public health commissioner is too common: “We commissioners meet periodically to discuss specific childhood deaths in the city. In most cases, we each have a thick file on the child or family. But the only time we compare notes is after the child is dead.”1 In reality, most localities lack the technical, analytical, staffing, and legal capacity to make effective use of existing and emerging resources.
It is our sense that fundamental changes are necessary and a new approach must be taken to building data infrastructures. In particular,
- Privacy and confidentiality issues must be addressed at the beginning—not added as an afterthought.
- Data providers must be involved as key stakeholders throughout the design process.
- Workforce capacity must be developed at all levels.
- The scholarly community must be engaged to identify the value to research and policy….
To develop a roadmap for the creation of such an infrastructure, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, together with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, hosted a day-long workshop of more than sixty experts to discuss the findings of twelve commissioned papers and their implications for action. This volume of The ANNALS showcases those twelve articles. The workshop papers were grouped into three thematic areas: privacy and confidentiality, the views of data producers, and comprehensive strategies that have been used to build data infrastructures in other contexts. The authors and the attendees included computer scientists, social scientists, practitioners, and data producers.
This introductory article places the research in both an historical and a current context. It also provides a framework for understanding the contribution of the twelve articles….(More)”.