For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.

The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.

One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.

China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.

When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.

“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.

The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.

What else could lotteries do?

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.

Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.

More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.

The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.

The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”

Privacy Laws Around the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Bloomberg Law: “Development of international privacy laws and regulations with critical impact on the global economy been extremely active over the last several years.

Download Privacy Laws Around the World to access common and disparate elements of the privacy laws from 61 countries. Crafted by Cynthia Rich of Morrison & Foerster LLP, the report includes expert analysis on privacy laws in Europe and Eurasia (non-EEA); East, Central and South Asia and the Pacific; the Western Hemisphere (Latin America, Caribbean and Canada); as well as Africa and the Near East.

Privacy Laws Around the World…access:

Side-by-side charts comparing four key compliance areas including registration requirements, cross-border data transfer limitations, data breach notification requirements and data protection officer requirements

A country-by-country review of the special characteristics of framework privacy laws

An overview of privacy legislation in development around the world…(More) (Requires Registration)”

Living labs: Implementing open innovation in the public sector

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Mila Gascó in Government Information Quarterly: “Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies. Living labs are environments that can support public open innovation processes.

This article makes a practical contribution to understand the role of living labs as intermediaries of public open innovation. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of these innovation intermediaries, their outcomes, and their main challenges. In particular, it adopts a qualitative approach (fourteen semi-structured interviews and one focus group were conducted) in order to analyze two living labs: Citilab in the city of Cornellà and the network of fab athenaeums (public fab labs) in the city of Barcelona, both in Spain. After a thorough analysis of the attributes of these living labs, the article concludes that 1) living labs provide the opportunity for public agencies to meet with private sector organizations and thus function as innovation intermediaries, 2) implementing an open innovation perspective is considered more important than obtaining specific innovation results, and 3) scalability and sustainability are the main problems living labs encounter as open innovation intermediaries….(More)”

Citizen engagement in rulemaking — evidence on regulatory practices in 185 countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Johns,Melissa Marie and Saltane,Valentina for the World Bank: “… presents a new database of indicators measuring the extent to which rulemaking processes are transparent and participatory across 185 countries. The data look at how citizen engagement happens in practice, including when and how governments open the policy-making process to public input. The data also capture the use of ex ante assessments to determine the possible cost of compliance with a proposed new regulation, the likely administrative burden of enforcing the regulation, and its potential environmental and social impacts. The data show that citizens have more opportunities to participate directly in the rulemaking process in developed economies than in developing ones. Differences are also apparent among regions: rulemaking processes are significantly less transparent and inclusive in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia on average than in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development high-income countries, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. In addition, ex ante impact assessments are much more common among higher-income economies than among lower-income ones. And greater citizen engagement in rulemaking is associated with higher-quality regulation, stronger democratic regimes, and less corrupt institutions….(More)”

Europe Should Promote Data for Social Good

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at Center for Data Innovation: “Changing demographics in Europe are creating enormous challenges for the European Union (EU) and its member states. The population is getting older, putting strain on the healthcare and welfare systems. Many young people are struggling to find work as economies recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Europe is facing a swell in immigration, increasingly from war-torn Syria, and governments are finding it difficult to integrate refugees and other migrants into society.These pressures have already propelled permanent changes to the EU. This summer, a slim majority of British voters chose to leave the Union, and many of those in favor of Brexit cited immigration as a motive for their vote.

Europe needs to find solutions to these challenges. Fortunately, advances in data-driven innovation that have helped businesses boost performance can also create significant social benefits. They can support EU policy priorities for social protection and inclusion by better informing policy and program design, improving service delivery, and spurring social innovations. While some governments, nonprofit organizations, universities, and companies are using data-driven insights and technologies to support disadvantaged populations, including unemployed workers, young people, older adults, and migrants, progress has been uneven across the EU due to resource constraints, digital inequality, and restrictive data regulations. renewed European commitment to using data for social good is needed to address these challenges.

This report examines how the EU, member-states, and the private sector are using data to support social inclusion and protection. Examples include programs for employment and labor-market inclusion, youth employment and education, care for older adults, and social services for migrants and refugees. It also identifies the barriers that prevent European countries from fully capitalizing on opportunities to use data for social good. Finally, it proposes a number of actions policymakers in the EU should take to enable the public and private sectors to more effectively tackle the social challenges of a changing Europe through data-driven innovation. Policymakers should:

  • Support the collection and use of relevant, timely data on the populations they seek to better serve;
  • Participate in and fund cross-sector collaboration with data experts to make better use of data collected by governments and non-profit organizations working on social issues;
  • Focus government research funding on data analysis of social inequalities and require grant applicants to submit plans for data use and sharing;
  • Establish appropriate consent and sharing exemptions in data protection regulations for social science research; and
  • Revise EU regulations to accommodate social-service organizations and their institutional partners in exploring innovative uses of data….(More)”

Collective intelligence and international development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Gina Lucarelli, Tom Saunders and Eddie Copeland at Nesta: “The mountain kingdom of Lesotho, a small landlocked country in Sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely place to look for healthcare innovation. Yet in 2016, it became the first country in Africa to deploy the test and treat strategy for treating people with HIV. Rather than waiting for white blood cell counts to drop, patients begin treatment as soon as they are diagnosed. This strategy is backed by the WHO as it has the potential to increase the number of people who are able to access treatment, consequently reducing transmisssion and keeping people with HIV healthy and alive for longer.

While lots of good work is underway in Lesotho, and billions have been spent on HIV programmes in the country, the percentage of the population infected with HIV has remained steady and is now almost 23%. Challenges of this scale need new ideas and better ways to adopt them.

On a recent trip to Lesotho as part of a project with the United Nations Development Group, we met various UN agencies, the World Bank, government leaders, civil society actors and local businesses, to learn about the key development issues in Lesotho and to discuss the role that ‘collective intelligence’ might play in creating better country development plans. The key question Nesta and the UN are working on is: how can we increase the impact of the UN’s work by tapping into the ideas, information and possible solutions which are distributed among many partners, the private sector, and the 2 million people of Lesotho?

…our framework of collective intelligence, a set of iterative stages which can help organisations like the UN tap into the ideas, information and possible solutions of groups and individuals which are not normally involved included in the problem solving process. For each stage, we also presented a number of examples of how this works in practice.

Collective intelligence framework – stages and examples

  1. Better understanding the facts, data and experiences: New tools, from smartphones to online communities enable researchers, practitioners and policymakers to collect much larger amounts of data much more quickly. Organisations can use this data to target their resources at the most critical issues as well as feed into the development of products and services that more accurately meet the needs of citizens. Examples include mPower, a clinical study which used an app to collect data about people with Parkinsons disease via surveys and smartphone sensors.

  2. Better development of options and ideas: Beyond data collection, organisations can use digital tools to tap into the collective brainpower of citizens to come up with better ideas and options for action. Examples include participatory budgeting platforms like “Madame Mayor, I have an idea” and challenge prizes, such as USAID’s Ebola grand challenge.

  3. Better, more inclusive decision making: Decision making and problem solving are usually left to experts, yet citizens are often best placed to make the decisions that will affect them. New digital tools make it easier than ever for governments to involve citizens in policymaking, planning and budgeting. Our D-CENT tools enable citizen involvement in decision making in a number of fields. Another example is the Open Medicine Project, which designs digital tools for healthcare in consultation with both practitioners and patients.

  4. Better oversight and improvement of what is done: From monitoring corruption to scrutinising budgets, a number of tools allow broad involvement in the oversight of public sector activity, potentially increasing accountability and transparency. The Family and Friends Test is a tool that allows NHS users in the UK to submit feedback on services they have experienced. So far, 25 million pieces of feedback have been submitted. This feedback can be used to stimulate local improvement and empower staff to carry out changes… (More)”

Crowdsourcing Tolstoy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at the NewYorker: “When Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the journalist Fyokla Tolstaya, announced that the Leo Tolstoy State Museum was looking for volunteers to proofread some forty-six thousand eight hundred pages of her relative’s writings, she hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in six months.

Within days, some three thousand Russians—engineers, I.T. workers, schoolteachers, retirees, a student pilot, a twenty-year-old waitress—signed on. “We were so happy and so surprised,” said Tolstaya. “They finished in fourteen days.”

Now, thanks largely to the efforts of these volunteers, nearly all of the great Russian writer’s massive body of work, including novels, diaries, letters, religious tracts, philosophical treatises, travelogues, and childhood memories, will soon be available online, in a form that can be easily downloaded, free of charge. “Of course we realized there are some novels on the Internet,” Tolstaya said. “But most [writings] are not. We in the museum decided this is not good.”…

The definitive, ninety-volume jubilee edition of Tolstoy’s works, compiled and published in Russia from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-fifties, had already been scanned by the Russian State Library. However, converting the PDFs into an easy-to-use digital format posed a challenge. For one thing, even after ABBYY, a company that specializes in translating printed documents into digital records, offered their services for free, proofreading costs were likely to be prohibitive. Charging readers to download the works was not an option. “At the end of his life, Tolstoy said, ‘I don’t need any money for my work. I want to give my work to the people,’ “ said Tolstaya. “It was important for us to make it free for everyone. It is his will.”

That was when they hit on the idea of crowdsourcing, Tolstaya said. “It’s according to Leo Tolstoy’s ideas, to do it with the help of all people around the world—vsem mirom—even the world’s hardest task can be done with the help of everyone.”…(More)”

Data governance: a Royal Society and British Academy project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Call for Evidence from The British Academy and the Royal Society: “…The project seeks to make recommendations for cross-sectoral governance arrangements that can ensure the UK remains a world leader in this area. The project will draw on scholars and scientists from across disciplines and will look at current and historical case studies of data governance, and of broader technology governance, from a range of countries and sectors. It will seek to enable connected debate by creating common frameworks to move debates on data governance forward.

Background

It is essential to get the best possible environment for the safe and rapid use of data in order to enhance UK’s wellbeing, security and economic growth. The UK has world class academic expertise in data science, in ethics and aspects other of governance; and it has a rapidly growing tech sector and there is a real opportunity for the UK to lead internationally in creating insights and mechanisms for enabling the new data sciences to benefit society.

While there are substantial arrangements in place for the safe use of data in the UK, these inevitably were designed early in the days of information technology and tend to rest on outdated notions of privacy and consent. In addition, newer considerations such as statistical stereotyping and bias in datasets, and implications for the freedom of choice, autonomy and equality of opportunity of individuals, come to the fore in this new technological context, as do transparency, accountability and openness of decision making.

Terms of Reference

The project seeks to:

  • Identify the communities with interests in the governance of data and its uses, but which may be considering these issues in different contexts and with varied aims and assumptions, in order to facilitate dialogue between these communities. These include academia, industry and the public sector.
  • Clarify where there are connections between different debates, identifying shared issues and common questions, and help to develop a common framework and shared language for debate.
  • Identify which social, ethical and governance challenges arise in the context of developments in data use.
  • Set out the public interests at stake in governance of data and its uses, and the relationships between them, and how the principles of responsible research and innovation (RRI) apply in the context of data use.
  • Make proposals for the UK to establish a sustained and flexible platform for debating issues of data governance, developing consensus about future legal and technical frameworks, and ensuring that learning and good practice spreads as fast as possible….(More)”

App gamifies safe street design, gets kids involved

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “It’s unlikely that cars will ever completely disappear, so cities are finding ways to help two wheels and four wheels safely co-exist. In-ground LED lights warn cars when a cyclist is approaching, and this app provides a driver’s safety performance report after each journey. In Norway, as part of a project to get more citizens walking and cycling, Oslo’s Traffic Agent app gives young school children a way to report street safety.

Initially focusing on home-to-school routes, the app assigns each child an agent number. The agents then log safe or unsafe conditions they come across in their travel to school. The app was developed by the Agency of Urban Environment, the Norwegian Centre for Transport Research and the Oslo City Teaching Agency, in consultation with children. And the Traffic Agent team is working closely with parent-teacher associations to get as many schools and children as possible involved in the project.

In the near future, Oslo’s city planners plan to ban cars from the city center but an urban environment that is safe for pedestrians and cyclists is an important first step…(More)”