20 Innovations that Mattered in 2013

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New Guide from GovLoop: “The end of the year means two things: setting unrealistic New Year’s resolutions and endless retrospectives.  While we can’t force you to put down the cake and pick up a carrot, we can help you to do your job better by highlighting some of the biggest and best innovations to come out of government in the last 365 days.
The past year brought us the Interior Department’s Instagram feed and Colorado’s redesigned website. It also brought us St. Louis’ optimized data analytics that make their city safer and North Carolina’s iCenter that adopted a “try before you buy” policy.
All of these new technologies and tactics saved time and resources, critical outcomes in the current government landscape where budget cuts are making each new purchase risky.
But these were not the only buzzworthy projects for government technology in 2013. In this end-of-year issue, GovLoop analyzed the 20 best innovations in government in four different categories:

  • Mobile Apps Movers and Shakers?
  • Big Data Dynamos
  • Social Media Mavericks
  •  Website Wonders

We also asked two of the most innovative Chief Information Officers in the country to don some Google Glass’ In a year where the government shutdown and sequestration brought progress to a screeching halt, many agencies were able to rise above the inauspicious environment and produce groundbreaking and innovative programs.
For instance, when the horrible bombings brought terror to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the local police department sprang into action. They immediately mobilized their forces on the ground. But then they did something else, too. The Boston Police Department took to Twitter. The social media team was informative, timely and, accurate. The BPD flipped the script on emergency media management. They innovated in a time of crisis and got people the information they needed in a timely and appropriate manner.
We know that oftentimes it is hard to see through the budget cuts and government shutdowns, but government innovation is all around us. Our goal with this guide is to showcase programs that are not only making a difference but demonstrate risk and reward….”

Map of Government Innovation Labs

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New publication by Parsons DESIS Lab: “There is a growing perception that the state’s ability to provide various forms of public service can be enhanced through public-private partnerships, the use of new technologies, as well as various strategies for increased public participation. Such new approaches to provide better services for individuals and communities require breaking the established routines and traditional structures of government, and rethinking the opposition between government bureaucracies and community actors. The good news is that new kinds of collaboration are emerging. Such partnerships are characterized by horizontal practices such as co-governance, co-design, or co-production where citizens, experts, and governments work closely, together, to provide better public services. In the United States and across the world we can observe efforts to promote radical innovations in the public sector followed by the creation of different types of “authorizing environments” that foster these experiments….
GovLabsConstellation

…A Government Innovation Lab is a specific type of Public Innovation Place characterized by a direct connection with the public sector and created to tackle complex challenges that more traditional governmental structures seek to resolve. Government Innovation Labs experiment with and propose innovative public services and policies, while at the same time, try to reform and change the way government operates.”

Government's Crowdsourcing Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

John M. Kamensky  in Governing: “In a recent report for the IBM Center for the Business of Government, Brabham says that an important distinction between crowdsourcing and other forms of online participation is that crowdsourcing “entails a mix of top-down, traditional, hierarchical process and a bottom-up, open process involving an online community.”
Crowdsourcing in the public sector can be done within government, among employees as a way to surface ideas — such as the New York City government’s “Simplicity” initiative — or it can be done by nonprofit groups in ways that influence government operations. For example, a transportation advocacy group in New York City has created a site where citizens can report “near miss” accidents, which are then mapped to determine patterns. The idea is that, while the city government already maps accidents that have happened, hazardous traffic zones can be detected and resolved faster by mapping near-misses without waiting for a large number of actual accidents.
Brabham offers a strategic view of crowdsourcing and when it is useful to address public problems. His report also identifies four specific approaches, describing which is most useful for a given category of problem:
• Knowledge discovery and management. This approach is best for information-gathering and cataloguing problems through an online community, such as the reporting of earth tremors or potholes to a central source. This approach could also be used to report conditions of parks or hiking trails or for cataloging public art projects as have been done in several cities across the country.
• Distributed human-intelligence tasking: This approach is most useful when human intelligence is more effective than computer analysis. It involves distributing “micro-tasks” that require human intelligence to solve, such as transcribing handwritten historical documents into electronic files. For example, when the handwritten 1940 census records were publicly released in 2012, the National Archives catalyzed the electronic tagging of more than 130 million records so they could be searchable online. More than 150,000 people volunteered.
• Broadcast search: This approach is most useful when an agency is attempting to find creative solutions to problems. It involves broadcasting a problem-solving challenge widely on the Internet and offering an award for the best solution. NASA, for example, offered a prize for an algorithm to predict solar flares. The federal government sponsors a contest and awards Web platform, Challenge.gov, that various federal agencies can use to post their challenges. To date, hundreds of diverse challenges have been posted, with thousands of people proposing solutions.
• Peer-vetted creative production: This approach is most useful when an agency is looking for innovative ideas that must meet a test of taste or market support. It involves an online community that both proposes possible solutions and is empowered to collectively choose among them. For example, the Utah Transit Authority sponsored the Next Stop Design project, allowing citizens to design and vote on an ideal bus-stop shelter. Nearly 3,200 people participated, submitting 260 high-quality architectural renderings, and there were more than 10,000 votes leading to a final selection….”

Why government health departments are spending millions on mobile gaming

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

James Trew in Engadget : “Today sees the release of The Walk, an iOS and Android game backed by the UK’s Department of Health. It’s the second release in a collection of apps funded as part of the UK’s Small Business Research Initiative (SBRI). The first — StepJockey, an app that lets you map, locate, rate and log the calorific expenditure of staircases around your city — came out on Monday. All five apps in the program encourage you to move more, or change negative habits. Can an app improve your life? At the very least, we’re guessing the Department of Health — having just spent £2 million on this round of investment — thinks so. This is part of a growing trend, that could see government agencies in the UK taking a leaf out of Silicon Valley’s book when it comes to solving (health) problems. Read past the break to find out why it’s putting so much money on third-party digital initiatives.
Your mission is simple, ensure safe transit of a package from Inverness, to Edinburgh — and in the process save the world. Only one problem: a terrorist attack has rendered all motorised transport unusable — you’ll have to go on foot. That’s the premise behind The Walk. The concept isn’t complicated — encourage players to preambulate in the real world as part of an apocalyptic game narrative. Your phone’s accelerometer tracks your movements, unlocking levels and hours of story-telling audio which drive the plot along. Simple, fun, effective. The game’s predecessor (Zombies, Run!) uses similar mechanics, and currently encourages over 750,000 would-be Shauns (or Eds) to escape pursuing Zombies whenever they go for a jog. By lowering the requirement to walking, it’s hoped almost everyone can benefit this time. The focus is on increasing general daily movement, rather than dedicated, prescribed and sometimes prohibitive training routines.
There’s no question the theory is simple: apps that encourage activity, or responsible drinking, could cut down on healthcare requirements through prevention, negating the need for cure. In turn, it could also take a bite out of the estimated £8 billion that obesity and alcohol related diseases cost the UK’s health service each year. More interesting, is that the Department of Health is funding external mobile start-ups and indie developers at all. We asked it why, and were told it’s just as much about nurturing innovative ideas (where they can compete with more conventional fitness apps such as Nike+, MapMyFitness and Adidas miCoach) as it is about encouraging lifestyle change.

The motivation might initially be the potential (and hard to quantify) savings through a healthier public. But using apps to achieve this is an idea the US government is curious about also. ..”

Phone Apps Help Government, Others Counter Violence Against Women

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

NextGov: “Smart and mobile phones have helped authorities solve crimes from beatings that occurred during the London riots to the Boston Marathon bombing. A panel of experts gathered on Monday said the devices can also help reduce and combat rapes and other gender-based violence.
Smartphone apps and text messaging services proliferated in India following a sharp rise in reported gang rapes, including the brutal 2012 rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi, according to panelists at the Wilson Center event on gender-based violence and innovative technologies.
The apps fall into four main categories, said Alex Dehgan, chief data scientist at the United States Agency for International Development: apps that aid sexual assault and domestic violence victims, apps that empower women to fight back against gender-based violence, apps focused on advocacy and apps that crowdsource and map cases of sexual assault.
The final category of apps is largely built on the Ushahidi platform, which was developed to track reports of missing people following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
One of the apps, Safecity, offers real-time alerts about sexual assaults across India to help women identify unsafe areas.
Similar apps have been launched in Egypt and Syria, Dehgan said. In lower-tech countries the systems often operate using text messages rather than smartphone apps so they’re more widely accessible.
One of the greatest impediments to using mobile technology to reduce gender violence is third world nations in which women often don’t have access to their own mobile or smartphones and rural areas in the U.S. and abroad in which there is limited service or broadband, Christopher Burns, USAID’s team leader for mobile access, said.
Burns suggested international policymakers should align plans for expanding broadband and mobile service with crowdsourced reports of gender violence.
“One suggestion for policy makers to focus on is to take a look at the crowd maps we’ve talked about today and see where there are greater incidences of gender-based violence and violence against women,” he said. “In all likelihood, those pockets probably don’t have the connectivity, don’t have the infrastructure [and] don’t have the capacity in place for survivors to benefit from those tools.”
One tool that’s been used in the U.S. is Circle of 6, an app for women on college campuses to automatically draw on friends when they think they’re in danger. The app allows women to pick six friends they can automatically text if they think they’re in a dangerous situation, asking them to call with an excuse for them to leave.
The app is designed to look like a game so it isn’t clear women are using their phones to seek help, said Nancy Schwartzman, executive director of Tech 4 Good, which developed the app.
Schwartzman has heard reports of gay men on college campuses using the app as well, she said. The military has been in contact with Tech 4 Good about developing a version of the app to combat sexual assault on military bases, she said.”

The Decay of American Political Institutions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the American Interest: “Many political institutions in the United States are decaying. This is not the same thing as the broader phenomenon of societal or civilization decline, which has become a highly politicized topic in the discourse about America. Political decay in this instance simply means that a specific political process—sometimes an individual government agency—has become dysfunctional. This is the result of intellectual rigidity and the growing power of entrenched political actors that prevent reform and rebalancing. This doesn’t mean that America is set on a permanent course of decline, or that its power relative to other countries will necessarily diminish. Institutional reform is, however, an extremely difficult thing to bring about, and there is no guarantee that it can be accomplished without a major disruption of the political order. So while decay is not the same as decline, neither are the two discussions unrelated.
There are many diagnoses of America’s current woes. In my view, there is no single “silver bullet” cause of institutional decay, or of the more expansive notion of decline. In general, however, the historical context of American political development is all too often given short shrift in much analysis. If we look more closely at American history as compared to that of other liberal democracies, we notice three key structural characteristics of American political culture that, however they developed and however effective they have been in the past, have become problematic in the present.
The first is that, relative to other liberal democracies, the judiciary and the legislature (including the roles played by the two major political parties) continue to play outsized roles in American government at the expense of Executive Branch bureaucracies. Americans’ traditional distrust of government thus leads to judicial solutions for administrative problems. Over time this has become a very expensive and inefficient way to manage administrative requirements.
The second is that the accretion of interest group and lobbying influences has distorted democratic processes and eroded the ability of the government to operate effectively. What biologists label kin selection and reciprocal altruism (the favoring of family and friends with whom one has exchanged favors) are the two natural modes of human sociability. It is to these types of relationships that people revert when modern, impersonal government breaks down.
The third is that under conditions of ideological polarization in a federal governance structure, the American system of checks and balances, originally designed to prevent the emergence of too strong an executive authority, has become a vetocracy. The decision system has become too porous—too democratic—for its own good, giving too many actors the means to stifle adjustments in public policy. We need stronger mechanisms to force collective decisions but, because of the judicialization of government and the outsized role of interest groups, we are unlikely to acquire such mechanisms short of a systemic crisis. In that sense these three structural characteristics have become intertwined….
In short, the problems of American government flow from a structural imbalance between the strength and competence of the state, on the one hand, and the institutions that were originally designed to constrain the state, on the other. There is too much law and too much “democracy”, in the form of legislative intervention, relative to American state capacity. Some history can make this assertion clearer….
In well-functioning governance systems, moreover, a great deal of deliberation occurs not just in legislatures but within bureaucracies. This is not a matter of bureaucrats simply talking to one another, but rather a complex series of consultations between government officials and businesses, outside implementers and service providers, civil society groups, the media and other sources of information about societal interests and opinions. The Congress wisely mandated consultation in the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedures Act, which requires regulatory agencies to publicly post proposed rule changes and to solicit comment about them. But these consultative procedures have become highly routinized and pro forma, with actual decisions being the outcome not of genuine deliberation, but of political confrontations between well organized interest groups….”

The Age of Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

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

Britain’s Ministry of Nudges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the New York Times: “A 24-year-old psychologist working for the British government, Mr. Gyani was supposed to come up with new ways to help people find work. He was intrigued by an obscure 1994 study that tracked a group of unemployed engineers in Texas. One group of engineers, who wrote about how it felt to lose their jobs, were twice as likely to find work as the ones who didn’t. Mr. Gyani took the study to a job center in Essex, northeast of London, where he was assigned for several months. Sure, it seemed crazy, but would it hurt to give it a shot? Hayley Carney, one of the center’s managers, was willing to try.

Ms. Carney walked up to a man slumped in a plastic chair in the waiting area as Mr. Gyani watched from across the room. The man — 28, recently separated and unemployed for most of his adult life — was “our most difficult case,” Ms. Carney said later.

“How would you like to write about your feelings” about being out of a job? she asked the man. Write for 20 minutes. Once a week. Whatever pops into your head.

An awkward silence followed. Maybe this was a bad idea, Mr. Gyani remembers thinking.

But then the man shrugged. Why not? And so, every week, after seeing a job adviser, he would stay and write. He wrote about applying for dozens of jobs and rarely hearing back, about not having anything to get up for in the morning, about his wife who had left him. He would reread what he had written the week before, and then write again.

Over several weeks, his words became less jumbled. He started to gain confidence, and his job adviser noticed the change. Before the month was out, he got a full-time job in construction — his first.

An Idea Born in America

Did the writing exercise help the man find a job? Even now it’s hard for Mr. Gyani to say for sure. But it was the start of a successful research trial at the Essex job center — one that is part of a much larger social experiment underway in Britain. A small band of psychologists and economists is quietly working to transform the nation’s policy making. Inspired by behavioral science, the group fans out across the country to job centers, schools and local government offices and tweaks bureaucratic processes to better suit human nature. The goal is to see if small interventions that don’t cost much can change behavior in large ways that serve both individuals and society.

It is an American idea, refined in American universities and popularized in 2008 with the best seller “Nudge,” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Professor Thaler, a contributor to the Economic View column in Sunday Business, is an economist at the University of Chicago, and Mr. Sunstein was a senior regulatory official in the Obama administration, where he applied behavioral findings to a range of regulatory policies, but didn’t have the mandate or resources to run experiments.

But it is in Britain that such experiments have taken root.  Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced the idea of testing the power of behavioral change to devise effective policies, seeing it not just as a way to help people make better decisions, but also to help government do more for less.

In 2010, Mr. Cameron set up the Behavioral Insights Team or nudge unit, as it’s often called. Three years later, the team has doubled in size and is about to announce a joint venture with an external partner to expand the program.

The unit has been nudging people to pay taxes on time, insulate their attics, sign up for organ donation, stop smoking during pregnancy and give to charity — and has saved taxpayers tens of millions of pounds in the process, said David Halpern, its director. Every civil servant in Britain is now being trained in behavioral science. The nudge unit has a waiting list of government departments eager to work with it, and other countries, from Denmark to Australia, have expressed interest.

In fact, five years after it arrived in Washington, nudging appears to be entering the next stage, with a new team in the White House planning to run policy trials inspired in part by Britain’s program. “First the idea traveled to Britain and now the lessons are traveling back,” said Professor Thaler, who is an official but unpaid adviser to the nudge unit. “Britain is the first country that has mainstreamed this on a national level.”

See also: A Few Findings of Britain’s Nudge

The United States Releases its Second Open Government National Action Plan

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Sinai and Gayle Smith at the White House: “Since his first full day in office, President Obama has prioritized making government more open and accountable and has taken substantial steps to increase citizen participation, collaboration, and transparency in government. Today, the Obama Administration released the second U.S. Open Government National Action Plan, announcing 23 new or expanded open-government commitments that will advance these efforts even further.
…, in September 2011, the United States released its first Open Government National Action Plan, setting a series of ambitious goals to create a more open government. The United States has continued to implement and improve upon the open-government commitments set forth in the first Plan, along with many more efforts underway across government, including implementing individual Federal agency Open Government Plans. The second Plan builds on these efforts, in part through a series of key commitments highlighted in a preview report issued by the White House in October 2013, in conjunction with the Open Government Partnership Annual Summit in London.
Among the highlights of the second National Action Plan:

  • “We the People”: The White House will introduce new improvements to the We the People online petitions platform aimed at making it easier to collect and submit signatures and increase public participation in using this platform. Improvements will enable the public to perform data analysis on the signatures and petitions submitted to We the People, as well as include a more streamlined process for signing petitions and a new Application Programming Interface (API) that will allow third-parties to collect and submit signatures from their own websites.
  • Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Modernization: The FOIA encourages accountability through transparency and represents an unwavering national commitment to open government principles. Improving FOIA administration is one of the most effective ways to make the U.S. Government more open and accountable. Today, we announced five commitments to further modernize FOIA processes, including launching a consolidated online FOIA service to improve customers’ experience, creating and making training resources available to FOIA professionals and other Federal employees, and developing common FOIA standards for agencies across government.
  • The Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency (GIFT): The United States will join GIFT, an international network of governments and non-government organizations aimed at enhancing financial transparency, accountability, and stakeholder engagement. The U.S. Government will actively participate in the GIFT Working Group and seek opportunities to collaborate with stakeholders and champion greater fiscal openness and transparency in domestic and global spending.
  • Open Data to the Public: Over the past few years, government data has been used by journalists to uncover variations in hospital billings, by citizens to learn more about the social services provided by charities in their communities, and by entrepreneurs building new software tools to help farmers plan and manage their crops.  Building on the U.S. Government’s ongoing open data efforts, new commitments will make government data even more accessible and useful for the public, including by reforming how Federal agencies manage government data as a strategic asset, launching a new version of Data.gov to make it even easier to discover, understand, and use open government data, and expanding access to agriculture and nutrition data to help farmers and communities.
  • Participatory Budgeting: The United States will promote community-led participatory budgeting as a tool for enabling citizens to play a role in identifying, discussing, and prioritizing certain local public spending projects, and for giving citizens a voice in how taxpayer dollars are spent in their communities. This commitment will include steps by the U.S. Government to help raise awareness of the fact that participatory budgeting may be used for certain eligible Federal community development grant programs.

Other initiatives launched or expanded today include: increasing open innovation by encouraging expanded use of challenges, incentive prizes, citizen science, and crowdsourcing to harness American ingenuity, as well as modernizing the management of government records by leveraging technology to make records less burdensome to manage and easier to use and share. There are many other exciting open-government initiatives described in the second Plan — and you can view them all here.”