Nudging for Success

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “A groundbreaking report published today by ideas42 reveals several innovations that college administrators and policymakers can leverage to significantly improve college graduation rates at a time where completion is more out of reach than ever for millions of students.

The student path through college to graduation day is strewn with subtle, often invisible barriers that, over time, hinder students’ progress and cause some of them to drop out entirely. In Nudging for Success: Using Behavioral Science to Improve the Postsecondary Student Journey, ideas42 focuses on simple, low-cost ways to combat these unintentional obstacles and support student persistence and success at every stage in the college experience, from pre-admission to post-graduation. Teams worked with students, faculty and administrators at colleges around the country.

Even for students whose tuition is covered by financial aid, whose academic preparation is exemplary, and who are able to commit themselves full-time to their education, the subtle logistical and psychological sticking points can have a huge impact on their ability to persist and fully reap the benefits of a higher education.

Less than 60% of full-time students graduate from four-year colleges within six years, and less than 30% graduate from community colleges within three years. There are a myriad of factors often cited as deterrents to finishing school, such as the cost of tuition or the need to juggle family and work obligations, but behavioral science and the results of this report demonstrate that lesser-known dynamics like self-perception are also at play.

From increasing financial aid filing to fostering positive friend groups and a sense of belonging on campus, the 16 behavioral solutions outlined in Nudging for Success represent the potential for significant impact on the student experience and persistence. At Arizona State University, sending behaviorally-designed email reminders to students and parents about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) priority deadline increased submissions by 72% and led to an increase in grant awards. Freshman retention among low-income, first generation, under-represented or other students most at risk of dropping out increased by 10% at San Francisco State University with the use of a testimonial video, self-affirming exercises, and monthly messaging aimed at first-time students.

“This evidence demonstrates how behavioral science can be the key to uplifting millions of Americans through education,” said Alissa Fishbane, Managing Director at ideas42. “By approaching the completion crisis from the whole experience of students themselves, administrators and policymakers have the opportunity to reduce the number of students who start, but do not finish, college—students who take on the financial burden of tuition but miss out on the substantial benefits of earning a degree.”

The results of this work drive home the importance of examining the college experience from the student perspective and through the lens of human behavior. College administrators and policymakers can replicate these gains at institutions across the country to make it simpler for students to complete the degree they started in ways that are often easier and less expensive to implement than existing alternatives—paving the way to stronger economic futures for millions of Americans….(More)”

In Your Neighborhood, Who Draws the Map?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lizzie MacWillie at NextCity: “…By crowdsourcing neighborhood boundaries, residents can put themselves on the map in critical ways.

Why does this matter? Neighborhoods are the smallest organizing element in any city. A strong city is made up of strong neighborhoods, where the residents can effectively advocate for their needs. A neighborhood boundary marks off a particular geography and calls out important elements within that geography: architecture, street fabric, public spaces and natural resources, to name a few. Putting that line on a page lets residents begin to identify needs and set priorities. Without boundaries, there’s no way to know where to start.

Knowing a neighborhood’s boundaries and unique features allows a group to list its assets. What buildings have historic significance? What shops and restaurants exist? It also helps highlight gaps: What’s missing? What does the neighborhood need more of? What is there already too much of? Armed with this detailed inventory, residents can approach a developer, city council member or advocacy group with hard numbers on what they know their neighborhood needs.

With a precisely defined geography, residents living in a food desert can point to developable vacant land that’s ideal for a grocery store. They can also cite how many potential grocery shoppers live within the neighborhood.

In addition to being able to organize within the neighborhood, staking a claim to a neighborhood, putting it on a map and naming it, can help a neighborhood control its own narrative and tell its story — so someone else doesn’t.

Our neighborhood map project was started in part as a response to consistent misidentification of Dallas neighborhoods by local media, which appears to be particularly common in stories about majority-minority neighborhoods. This kind of oversight can contribute to a false narrative about a place, especially when the news is about crime or violence, and takes away from residents’ ability to tell their story and shape their neighborhood’s future. Even worse is when neighborhoods are completely left off of the map, as if they have no story at all to tell.

Neighborhood mapping can also counter narrative hijacking like I’ve seen in my hometown of Brooklyn, where realtor-driven neighborhood rebranding has led to areas being renamed. These places have their own unique identities and histories, yet longtime residents saw names changed so that real estate sellers could capitalize on increasing property values in adjacent trendy neighborhoods.

Cities across the country — including Dallas, Boston, New York, Chicago,Portland and Seattle — have crowdsourced mapping projects people can contribute to. For cities lacking such an effort, tools like Google Map Maker have been effective….(More)”.

Using Behavioral Science to Combat Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass R. Sunstein and Lucia A. Reisch in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (Forthcoming): “Careful attention to choice architecture promises to open up new possibilities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions – possibilities that go well beyond, and that may supplement or complement, the standard tools of economic incentives, mandates, and bans. How, for example, do consumers choose between climate-friendly products or services and alternatives that are potentially damaging to the climate but less expensive? The answer may well depend on the default rule. Indeed, climate-friendly default rules may well be a more effective tool for altering outcomes than large economic incentives. The underlying reasons include the power of suggestion; inertia and procrastination; and loss aversion. If well-chosen, climate-friendly defaults are likely to have large effects in reducing the economic and environmental harms associated with various products and activities. In deciding whether to establish climate-friendly defaults, choice architects (subject to legal constraints) should consider both consumer welfare and a wide range of other costs and benefits. Sometimes that assessment will argue strongly in favor of climate-friendly defaults, particularly when both economic and environmental considerations point in their direction. Notably, surveys in the United States and Europe show that majorities in many nations are in favor of climate-friendly defaults….(More)”

Transforming governance: how can technology help reshape democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Briefing by Matt Leighninger: “Around the world, people are asking how we can make democracy work in new and better ways. We are frustrated by political systems in which voting is the only legitimate political act, concerned that many republics don’t have the strength or appeal to withstand authoritarian figures, and disillusioned by the inability of many countries to address the fundamental challenges of health, education and economic development.

We can no longer assume that the countries of the global North have ‘advanced’ democracies, and that the nations of the global South simply need to catch up. Citizens of these older democracies have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions; Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other valuable democratic innovations have emerged. The stage is set for a more equitable, global conversation about what we mean by democracy.

How can we adjust our democratic formulas so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the parts of this equation may come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organisations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as ‘civic technology’ or ‘civic tech’, these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts, and help neighbours remain connected. If we want to create democracies in which citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, we should be asking a number of questions about civic tech, including:

  • How can online tools best support new forms of democracy?
  • What are the examples of how this has happened?
  • What are some variables to consider in comparing these examples?
  • How can we learn from each other as we move forward?

This background note has been developed to help democratic innovators explore these questions and examine how their work can provide answers….(More)”

What Can Civic Tech Learn From Social Movements?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stacy Donohue at Omidyar Network: “…In order to spur creative thinking about how the civic tech sector could be accelerated and expanded, we looked to Purpose, a public benefit corporation that works with NGOs, philanthropies, and brands on movement building strategies. We wanted to explore what we might learn from taking the work that Purpose has done mapping the progress of of 21st century social movements and applying its methodology to civic tech.

So why consider viewing civic tech using the lens of 21st century movements? Movements are engines of change in society that enable citizens to create new and better paths to engage with government and to seek recourse on issues that matter to millions of people.  At first glance, civic tech doesn’t appear to be a movement in the purest sense of the term, but on closer inspection, it does share some fundamental characteristics. Like a movement, civic tech is mission driven, is focused on making change that benefits the public, and in most cases enables better public input into decision making.

We believe that better understanding the essential components of movements, and observing the ways in which civic tech does or does not behave like one, can yield insights on how we as a civic tech community can collectively drive the sector forward….

report Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements….provides a lot of rich insight and detail which we invite everyone to explore.  Meanwhile, we have summarized five key findings:

  1. Grassroots activity is expanding across the US – Activity is no longer centralized around San Francisco and New York; it’s rapidly growing and spreading across the US – in fact, there was an 81% increase in the number of cities hosting civic tech MeetUps from 2013 to 2015, and 45 of 50 states had at least one MeetUp on civic tech in 2015.
  2. Talk is turning to action – We are walking the talk. One way we can see this is that growth in civic tech Twitter discussion is highly correlated with the growth in GitHub contributions to civic tech projects and related Meetup events. Between 2013-2015, over 8,500 people contributed code to GitHub civic tech projects and there were over 76,000 MeetUps for civic tech events. 
  3. There is an engaged core, but it is very small in number – As with most social movements, civic tech has a definite core of highly engaged evangelists, advocates and entrepreneurs that are driving conversations, activity, and events and this is growing. The number of Meetup groups holding multiple events a quarter grew by 136% between 2013 to 2015. And likewise there was a 60% growth in Engaged Tweeters in during this time period.  However, this level of activity is dwarfed by other movements such as climate action.
  4. Civic tech is growing but still lacking scale – There are many positive indications of growth in civic tech; for example, the combination of nonprofit and for-profit funding to the sector increased by almost 120% over the period.  But while growth compares favorably to other movements, again the scale just isn’t there.
  5. Common themes, but no shared vision or identity – Purpose examined the extent to which civic tech exhibits and articulates a shared vision or identity around which members of a movement can rally. What they found is that many fewer people are discussing the same shared set of themes. Two themes – Open Data and Government Transparency – are resonating and gaining traction across the sector and could therefore form the basis of common identity for civic tech.

While each of these insights is important in its own right and requires action to move the sector forward, the main thing that strikes us is the need for a coherent and clearly articulated vision and sense of shared identity for civic tech…

Read the full report: Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements

Explore the data tool here….(More)”

Using Innovation and Technology to Improve City Services

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

IBM Center for the Business of Government: “In this report, Professor Greenberg examines a dozen cities across the United States that have award-winning reputations for using innovation and technology to improve the services they provide to their residents. She explores a variety of success factors associated with effective service delivery at the local level, including:

  • The policies, platforms, and applications that cities use for different purposes, such as public engagement, streamlining the issuance of permits, and emergency response
  • How cities can successfully partner with third parties, such as nonprofits, foundations, universities, and private businesses to improve service delivery using technology
  • The types of business cases that can be presented to mayors and city councils to support various changes proposed by innovators in city government

Professor Greenberg identifies a series of trends that drive cities to undertake innovations, such as the increased use of mobile devices by residents. Based on cities’ responses to these trends, she offers a set of findings and specific actions that city officials can act upon to create innovation agendas for their communities. Her report also presents case studies for each of the dozen cities in her review. These cases provide a real-world context, which will allow interested leaders in other cities to see how their own communities might approach similar innovation initiatives.

This report builds on two other IBM Center reports: A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work, by Rachel Burstein and Alissa Black, and The Persistence of Innovation in Government: A Guide for Public Servants, by Sandford Borins, which examines the use of awards to stimulate innovation in government.

We hope that government leaders who are interested in innovations using technology to improve services will benefit from the governance models and tools described in this report, as they consider how best to leverage innovation and technology initiatives to serve residents more effectively and efficiently….(More)”

Is artificial intelligence key to dengue prevention?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BreakDengue: “Dengue fever outbreaks are increasing in both frequency and magnitude. Not only that, the number of countries that could potentially be affected by the disease is growing all the time.

This growth has led to renewed efforts to address the disease, and a pioneering Malaysian researcher was recently recognized for his efforts to harness the power of big data and artificial intelligence to accurately predict dengue outbreaks.

Dr. Dhesi Baha Raja received the Pistoia Alliance Life Science Award at King’s College London in April of this year, for developing a disease prediction platform that employs technology and data to give people prior warning of when disease outbreaks occur.The medical doctor and epidemiologist has spent years working to develop AIME (Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology)…

it relies on a complex algorithm, which analyses a wide range of data collected by local government and also satellite image recognition systems. Over 20 variables such as weather, wind speed, wind direction, thunderstorm, solar radiation and rainfall schedule are included and analyzed. Population models and geographical terrain are also included. The ultimate result of this intersection between epidemiology, public health and technology is a map, which clearly illustrates the probability and location of the next dengue outbreak.

The ground-breaking platform can predict dengue fever outbreaks up to two or three months in advance, with an accuracy approaching 88.7 per cent and within a 400m radius. Dr. Dhesi has just returned from Rio de Janeiro, where the platform was employed in a bid to fight dengue in advance of this summer’s Olympics. In Brazil, its perceived accuracy was around 84 per cent, whereas in Malaysia in was over 88 per cent – giving it an average accuracy of 86.37 per cent.

The web-based application has been tested in two states within Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, and Selangor, and the first ever mobile app is due to be deployed across Malaysia soon. Once its capability is adequately tested there, it will be rolled out globally. Dr. Dhesi’s team are working closely with mobile digital service provider Webe on this.

By making the app free to download, this will ensure the service becomes accessible to all, Dr Dhesi explains.
“With the web-based application, this could only be used by public health officials and agencies. We recognized the need for us to democratize this health service to the community, and the only way to do this is to provide the community with the mobile app.”
This will also enable the gathering of even greater knowledge on the possibility of dengue outbreaks in high-risk areas, as well as monitoring the changing risks as people move to different areas, he adds….(More)”

Estonia Is Demonstrating How Government Should Work in a Digital World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Motherboard: “In May, Manu Sporny became the 10,000th “e-Resident” of Estonia. Sporny, the founder and CEO of a digital payments and identity company located in the United States, has never set foot in Estonia. However, he heard about the country’s e-Residency program and decided it would be an obvious choice for his company’s European headquarters.

People like Sporny are why Estonia launched a digital residency program in December 2014. The program allows anyone in the world to apply for a digital identity, which will let them: establish and run a location independent business online, get easier access to EU markets, open a bank account and conduct e-banking, use international payment service providers, declare taxes, and sign all relevant documents and contracts remotely…..

One of the most essential components of a functioning digital society is a secure digital identity. The state and the private sector need to know who is accessing these online services. Likewise, users need to feel secure that their identity is protected.

Estonia found the solution to this problem. In 2002, we started issuing residents a mandatory ID-card with a chip that empowers them to categorically identify themselves and verify legal transactions and documents through a digital signature. A digital signature has been legally equivalent to a handwritten one throughout the European Union—not just in Estonia—since 1999.

With this new digital identity system, the state could serve not only areas with a low population, but also the entire Estonian diaspora. Estonians anywhere in the world could maintain a connection to their homeland via e-services, contribute to the legislative process, and even participate in elections. Once the government realized that it could scale this service worldwide, it seemed logical to offer its e-services to those without physical residency in Estonia. This meant the Estonian country suddenly had value as a service in addition to a place to live.

What does “Country as a Service” mean?

With the rise of a global internet, we’ve seen more skilled workers and businesspeople offering their services across nations, regardless of their physical location. A survey by Intuit estimates that this number will reach 40 percent in the US alone by 2020.

These entrepreneurs and skilled artisans are ultimately looking for the simplest way to create and maintain a legal, global identity as an outlet for their global offerings.

They look to other countries, not because they are looking for a tax haven, but because they have been prevented from incorporating and maintaining a business, due to barriers from their own government.

The most important thing for these entrepreneurs is that the creation and upkeep of the company is easy and hassle-free. It is also important that, despite being incorporated in a different nation, they remain honest taxpayers within their country of physical residence.

This is exactly what Estonia offers—a location-independent, hassle-free and fully-digital economic and financial environment where entrepreneurs can run their own company globally….

When an e-Resident establishes a company, it means that the company will likely start using the services offered by other Estonian companies (like creating a bank account, partnering with a payment service provider, seeking assistance from accountants, auditors and lawyers). As more clients are created for Estonian companies, their growth potential increases, along with the growth potential of the Estonian economy.

Eventually, there will be more residents outside borders than inside them

If states fail to redesign and simplify the machinery of bureaucracy and make it location-independent, there will be an opportunity for countries that can offer such services across borders.

Estonia has learned that it’s incredibly important in a small state to serve primarily small and micro businesses. In order to sustain a nation on this, we must automate and digitize processes to scale. Estonia’s model, for instance, is location-independent, making it simple to scale successfully. We hope to acquire at least 10 million digital residents (e-Residents) in a way that is mutually beneficial by the nation-states where these people are tax residents….(More)”

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at ArsTechnica: “In 1836, Anthony Panizzi, who later became principal librarian of the British Museum, gave evidence before a parliamentary select committee. At that time, he was only first assistant librarian, but even then he had an ambitious vision for what would one day became the British Library. He told the committee:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

He went some way to achieving that goal of providing general access to human knowledge. In 1856, after 20 years of labour as Keeper of Printed Books, he had helped boost the British Museum’s collection to over half a million books, making it the largest library in the world at the time. But there was a serious problem: to enjoy the benefits of those volumes, visitors needed to go to the British Museum in London.

Imagine, for a moment, if it were possible to provide access not just to those books, but to all knowledge for everyone, everywhere—the ultimate realisation of Panizzi’s dream. In fact, we don’t have to imagine: it is possible today, thanks to the combined technologies of digital texts and the Internet. The former means that we can make as many copies of a work as we want, for vanishingly small cost; the latter provides a way to provide those copies to anyone with an Internet connection. The global rise of low-cost smartphones means that group will soon include even the poorest members of society in every country.

That is to say, we have the technical means to share all knowledge, and yet we are nowhere near providing everyone with the ability to indulge their learned curiosity as Panizzi wanted it.

What’s stopping us? That’s the central question that the “open access” movement has been asking, and trying to answer, for the last two decades. Although tremendous progress has been made, with more knowledge freely available now than ever before, there are signs that open access is at a critical point in its development, which could determine whether it will ever succeed in realising Panizzi’s plan.

Table of Contents

Connect the corporate dots to see true transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “…In all this, a crucial point is often forgotten: simply amassing data will not solve the problem of transparency. What is also needed is a way for analysts to track the connections that exist between companies scattered across different national jurisdictions.

There are more than 45,000 companies listed on global stock exchanges and, according to Chris Taggart of OpenCorporates, an independent data company, there are between 250m and 400m unlisted groups. Many of these are listed on national registries but, since registries are extremely fragmented, it is very difficult for shareholders or regulators to form a complete picture of company activity.

It also creates financial stability risks. One reason why it is currently hard to track the scale of Chinese corporate debt, say, is that it is being issued by an opaque web of legal entities. Similarly, regulators struggled to cope with the fallout from the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008 because the bank was operating almost 3,000 different legal entities around the world.

Is there a solution to this? A good place to start would be for governments to put their corporate registries online. Another crucial step would be for governments and companies to agree on a common standard for labelling legal entities, so that these can be tracked across borders.

Happily, work on that has begun: in 2014, the Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation was created. It supports the implementation and use of “legal entity identifiers”, a data standard that identifies participants in financial transactions. Groups such as the Data Coalition in Washington DC are lobbying for laws that would force companies to use LEIs….However, this inter-governmental project is moving so slowly that the private sector may be a better bet. In recent years, companies such as Dun & Bradstreet have begun to amass proprietary information about complex corporate webs, and computer nerds are also starting to use the power of big data to join up the corporate dots in a public format.

OpenCorporates is a good example. Over the past five years, a dozen staff there have been painstakingly scraping national corporate registries to create a database designed to show how companies are connected around the world. This is far from complete but data from 100m entities have already been logged. And in the wake of the Panama Papers, more governments are coming on board — data from the Cayman Islands are currently being added and France is likely to collaborate soon.

Sadly, these moves will not deliver real transparency straight away. If you type “MIO” into the search box on the OpenCorporates website, you will not see a map of all of McKinsey’s activities — at least not yet.

The good news, however, is that with every data scrape, or use of an LEI, the picture of global corporate activity is becoming slightly less opaque thanks to the work of a hidden army of geeks. They deserve acclaim and support — even (or especially) from management consultants….(More)”