The Power of Nudges, for Good and Bad

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard H. Thaler in the New York Times: “Nudges, small design changes that can markedly affect individual behavior, have been catching on. These techniques rely on insights from behavioral science, and when used ethically, they can be very helpful. But we need to be sure that they aren’t being employed to sway people to make bad decisions that they will later regret.

Whenever I’m asked to autograph a copy of “Nudge,” the book I wrote with Cass Sunstein, the Harvard law professor, I sign it, “Nudge for good.” Unfortunately, that is meant as a plea, not an expectation.

Three principles should guide the use of nudges:

■ All nudging should be transparent and never misleading.

■ It should be as easy as possible to opt out of the nudge, preferably with as little as one mouse click.

■ There should be good reason to believe that the behavior being encouraged will improve the welfare of those being nudged.
As far as I know, the government teams in Britain and the United States that have focused on nudging have followed these guidelines scrupulously. But the private sector is another matter. In this domain, I see much more troubling behavior.

For example, last spring I received an email telling me that the first prominent review of a new book of mine had appeared: It was in The Times of London. Eager to read the review, I clicked on a hyperlink, only to run into a pay wall. Still, I was tempted by an offer to take out a one-month trial subscription for the price of just £1. As both a consumer and producer of newspaper articles, I have no beef with pay walls. But before signing up, I read the fine print. As expected, I would have to provide credit card information and would be automatically enrolled as a subscriber when the trial period expired. The subscription rate would then be £26 (about $40) a month. That wasn’t a concern because I did not intend to become a paying subscriber. I just wanted to read that one article.

But the details turned me off. To cancel, I had to give 15 days’ notice, so the one-month trial offer actually was good for just two weeks. What’s more, I would have to call London, during British business hours, and not on a toll-free number. That was both annoying and worrying. As an absent-minded American professor, I figured there was a good chance I would end up subscribing for several months, and that reading the article would end up costing me at least £100….

These examples are not unusual. Many companies are nudging purely for their own profit and not in customers’ best interests. In a recent column in The New York Times, Robert Shiller called such behavior “phishing.” Mr. Shiller and George Akerlof, both Nobel-winning economists, have written a book on the subject, “Phishing for Phools.”

Some argue that phishing — or evil nudging — is more dangerous in government than in the private sector. The argument is that government is a monopoly with coercive power, while we have more choice in the private sector over which newspapers we read and which airlines we fly.

I think this distinction is overstated. In a democracy, if a government creates bad policies, it can be voted out of office. Competition in the private sector, however, can easily work to encourage phishing rather than stifle it.

One example is the mortgage industry in the early 2000s. Borrowers were encouraged to take out loans that they could not repay when real estate prices fell. Competition did not eliminate this practice, because it was hard for anyone to make money selling the advice “Don’t take that loan.”

As customers, we can help one another by resisting these come-ons. The more we turn down questionable offers like trip insurance and scrutinize “one month” trials, the less incentive companies will have to use such schemes. Conversely, if customers reward firms that act in our best interests, more such outfits will survive and flourish, and the options available to us will improve….(More)

UK police force trials virtual crime visits over Skype

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nick Summers at Engadget: In an effort to cut costs and make its officers more efficient, police in Peterborough, England are asking citizens to report their crimes over Skype. So, whereas before a local “bobby” would come round to their house, notepad in hand, to ask questions and take down what happened, the entire process will now be conducted over webcam. Alternatively, victims can do the follow-up on the phone or at the station — handy if Skype is being its usual, unreliable self. The system is being trialled for crimes reported via 101, the police’s non-emergency contact number. The force says it’ll give people more flexibility with appointment times, and also ensure officers spend more hours each day on patrol. We suspect it also has something to do with the major budget cuts facing forces up and down the country….(More)”

Open Data as Open Educational Resources: Case studies of emerging practice

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Javiera Atenas and Leo Havemann: “…is the outcome of a collective effort that has its origins in the 5th Open Knowledge Open Education Working Group call, in which the idea of using Open Data in schools was mentioned. It occurred to us that Open Data and open educational resources seemed to us almost to exist in separate open worlds.

We decided to seek out evidence in the use of open data as OER, initially by conducting a bibliographical search. As we could not find published evidence, we decided to ask educators if they were in fact, using open data in this way, and wrote a post for this blog (with Ernesto Priego) explaining our perspective, called The 21st Century’s Raw Material: Using Open Data as Open Educational Resources. We ended the post with a link to an exploratory survey, the results of which indicated a need for more awareness of the existence and potential value of Open Data amongst educators…..

the case studies themselves. They have been provided by scholars and practitioners from different disciplines and countries, and they reflect different approaches to the use of open data. The first case study presents an approach to educating both teachers and students in the use of open data for civil monitoring via Scuola di OpenCoesione in Italy, and has been written by Chiara Ciociola and Luigi Reggi. The second case, by Tim Coughlan from the Open University, UK, showcases practical applications in the use of local and contextualised open data for the development of apps. The third case, written by Katie Shamash, Juan Pablo Alperin & Alessandra Bordini from Simon Fraser University, Canada, demonstrates how publishing students can engage, through data analysis, in very current debates around scholarly communications and be encouraged to publish their own findings. The fourth case by Alan Dix from Talis and University of Birmingham, UK, and Geoffrey Ellis from University of Konstanz, Germany, is unique because the data discussed in this case is self-produced, indeed ‘quantified self’ data, which was used with students as material for class discussion and, separately, as source data for another student’s dissertation project. Finally, the fifth case, presented by Virginia Power from University of the West of England, UK, examines strategies to develop data and statistical literacies in future librarians and knowledge managers, aiming to support and extend their theoretical understanding of the concept of the ‘knowledge society’ through the use of Open Data….(More)

The book can be downloaded here Open Data as Open Educational Resources

Does Open Data Need Journalism?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jonathan Stoneman at Reuters Institute for Journalism: “The Open Data movement really came into being when President Obama issued his first policy paper, on his first day in office in January 2009. The US government opened up thousands of datasets to scrutiny by the public, by journalists, by policy-makers. Coders and developers were also invited to make the data useful to people and businesses in all manner of ways. Other governments across the globe followed suit, opening up data to their populations.

Opening data in this way has not resulted in genuine openness, save in a few isolated cases. In the USA and a few European countries, developers have created apps and websites which draw on Open Data, but these are not reaching a mass audience.

At the same time, journalists are not seen by government as the end users of these data. Data releases, even in the best cases, are uneven, and slow, and do not meet the needs of journalists. Although thousands of journalists have been learning and adopting the new skills of datajournalism they have tended to work with data obtained through Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation.

Stories which have resulted from datajournalists’ efforts have rarely been front page news; in many cases data-driven stories have ended up as lesser stories on inside pages, or as infographics, which relatively few people look at.

In this context, therefore, Open Data remains outside the mainstream of journalism, and out of the consciousness of the electorate, begging the question, “what are Open Data for?”, or as one developer put it – “if Open Data is the answer, what was the question?” Openness is seen as a badge of honour – scores of national governments have signed pledges to make data open, often repeating the same kind of idealistic official language as the previous announcement of a conversion to openness. But these acts are “top down”, and soon run out of momentum, becoming simply openness for its own sake. Looking at specific examples, the United States is the nearest to a success story: there is a rich ecosystem – made up of government departments, interest groups and NGOs, the media, civil society – which allows data driven projects the space to grow and the airtime to make an impact. (It probably helped that the media in the US were facing an existential challenge urgent enough to force them to embrace new, inexpensive, ways of carrying out investigative reporting).

Elsewhere data are making less impact on journalism. In the UK the new openness is being exploited by a small minority. Where data are made published on the data.gov.uk website they are frequently out of date, incomplete, or of limited new value, so where data do drive stories, these tend to be data released under FOI legislation, and the resulting stories take the form of statistics and/or infographics.

In developing countries where Open Data Portals have been launched with a fanfare – such as Kenya, and more recently Burkina Faso – there has been little uptake by coders, journalists, or citizens, and the number of fresh datasets being published drops to a trickle, and are soon well out of date. Small, apparently randomly selected datasets are soon outdated and inertia sets in.

The British Conservative Party, pledging greater openness in its 2010 manifesto, foresaw armies of “Armchair Auditors” who would comb through the data and present the government with ideas for greater efficiency in the use of public funds. Almost needless to say, these armies have never materialised, and thousands of datasets go unscrutinised by anybody. 2 In countries like Britain large amounts of data are being published but going (probably) unread and unscrutinised by anybody. At the same time, the journalists who want to make use of data are getting what they need through FOI, or even by gathering data themselves. Open Data is thus being bypassed, and could become an irrelevance. Yet, the media could be vital agents in the quest for the release of meaningful, relevant, timely data.

Governments seem in no hurry to expand the “comfort zone” from which they release the data which shows their policies at their most effective, and keeping to themselves data which paints a gloomier picture. Journalists seem likely to remain in their comfort zone, where they make use of FOI and traditional sources of information. For their part, journalists should push for better data and use it more, working in collaboration with open data activists. They need to change the habits of a lifetime and discuss their sources: revealing the source and quality of data used in a story would in itself be as much a part of the advocacy as of the actual reporting.

If Open Data are to be part of a new system of democratic accountability, they need to be more than a gesture of openness. Nor should Open Data remain largely the preserve of companies using them for commercial purposes. Governments should improve the quality and relevance of published data, making them genuinely useful for journalists and citizens alike….(More)”

Technology is a new kind of lifeline for refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Marketplace: “Imagine you’re a refugee leaving home for good. You’ll need help. But what you ask for today is much different than it would have been just 10 years ago.

“What people are demanding, more and more, is not classic food, shelter, water, healthcare, but they demand wifi,” said Melita Šunjić, a spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Šunjić began her work with Syrian refugees in camps in Amman, Jordan. Many were from rural areas with basic cell phones.

“The refugees we’re looking at now, who are coming to Europe – this is a completely different story,” Šunjić said. “They are middle class, urban people. Practically each family has at least one smart phone. We calculated that in each group of 20, they would have three smart phones.”

Refugees use their phones to call home and to map their routes. Even smugglers have their own Facebook pages.

“I don’t remember a crisis or refugee group where modern technology played such a role,” Šunjić said.

As refugees from Syria continue to flow into Europe, aid organizations are gearing up for what promises to be a difficult winter.

Emily Eros, ‎a GIS mapping officer with the American Red Cross, said her organization is working on the basics like providing food, water and shelter, but it’s also helping refugees stay connected. “It’s a little bit difficult because it’s not just a matter of getting a wifi station up, it’s also a matter of having someone there who’s able to fix it if something goes wrong,” she said. …(More)”

Government as a Platform: a historical and architectural analysis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Bendik Bygstad and Francis D’Silva: “A national administration is dependent on its archives and registers, for many purposes, such as tax collection, enforcement of law, economic governance, and welfare services. Today, these services are based on large digital infrastructures, which grow organically in volume and scope. Building on a critical realist approach we investigate a particularly successful infrastructure in Norway called Altinn, and ask: what are the evolutionary mechanisms for a successful “government as a platform”? We frame our study with two perspectives; a historical institutional perspective that traces the roots of Altinn back to the Middle Ages, and an architectural perspective that allows for a more detailed analysis of the consequences of digitalization and the role of platforms. We offer two insights from our study: we identify three evolutionary mechanisms of national registers, and we discuss a future scenario of government platforms as “digital commons”…(More)”

Robots Will Make Leeds the First Self-Repairing City

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emiko Jozuka at Motherboard: “Researchers in Britain want to make the first “self-repairing” city by 2035. How will they do this? By creating autonomous repair robots that patrol the streets and drainage systems, making sure your car doesn’t dip into a pothole, and that you don’t experience any gas leaks.

“The idea is to create a city that behaves almost like a living organism,” said Raul Fuentes, a researcher at the School of Civil Engineering at Leeds University, who is working on the project. “The robots will act like white cells that are able to identify bacteria or viruses and attack them. It’s kind of like an immune system.”

The £4.2 million ($6.4 million) national infrastructure project is in collaboration with Leeds City Council and the UK Collaboration for Research in Infrastructures and Cities (UKCRIC). The aim is to create a fleet of robot repair workers who will live in Leeds city, spot problems, and sort them out before they become even bigger ones by 2035, said Fuentes. The project is set to launch officially in January 2016, he added.

For their five-year project—which has a vision that extends until 2050—the researchers will develop robot designs and technologies that focus on three main areas. The first is to create drones that can perch on high structures and repair things like street lamps; the second is to develop drones that can autonomously spot when a pothole is about to form and zone in and patch that up before it worsens; and the third is to develop robots that will live in utility pipes so they can inspect, repair, and report back to humans when they spot an issue.

“The robots will be living permanently in the city, and they’ll be able to identify issues before they become real problems,” explained Fuentes. The researchers are working on making the robots autonomous, and want them to be living in swarms or packs where they can communicate with one another on how best they could get the repair job done….(More)

Open Data: Six Stories About Impact in the UK

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Bacon at Omidyar Network: “In 2010, the year the United Kingdom launched its open data portal, a Transparency & Accountability Initiative report highlighted both the promise and potential of open data to improve services and create economic growth.

In the five years since, the UK’s progress in opening its data has been pioneering and swift, but not without challenges and questions about impact. It’s this qualified success that prompted us to commission this report in an effort to understand if the promise and potential of open data are being realized, and, specifically, to…

… explore and document open data’s social, cultural, political, and economic impact;

… shine a light on the range of sectors and ways in which open data can make a difference; and

… profile the open data value chain, including its supply, demand, use, and re-use.

The report’s author, Becky Hogge, finds that open data has had catalytic and significant impact and that time will likely reveal even further value. She also flags critical challenges and obstacles, including closed datasets, valuable data not currently being collected, and important privacy considerations….Download full report here.”

Behavioural Science, Randomized Evaluations and the Transformation Of Public Policy: The Case of the UK Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Peter John: “Behaviour change policy conveys powerful image: groups of psychologists and scientists, maybe wearing white coats, messing with the minds of citizens, doing experiments on them without their consent, and seeking to manipulate their behaviours. Huddled in an office in the heart of Whitehall, or maybe working out of a windowless room in the White House, behavioural scientists are redesigning the messages and regulations that governments make, operating very far from the public’s view. The unsuspecting citizen becomes something akin to the subjects of science fiction novels, such as Huxley’s Brave New World or Zamyatin’s We. The emotional response to these developments is to cry out for a more humanistic form of public policy, a more participatory form of governance, and to base public policy on the common sense and good judgements of citizens and their elected representatives.

Of course, such an account is a massive stereotype, but something of this viewpoint has emerged as a backdrop to critical academic work on the use of behavioural science in government in what is described as the rise of the psychological state (Jones et al 2013a b), which might be seen to represent a step-change in use of psychological and other form of behavioural research to design public policies. Such a claim speaks more generally to the use of scientific ideas by government since the eighteenth century, which has been subject to a considerable amount of theoretical work in recent years, drawing on the work of Foucault, and which has developed into explorations of the theory and practice of governmentality (see Jones et al 2013:182-188).

With behaviour change, the ‘central concern has been to critically evaluate the broader ethical concerns of behavioural governance, which includes tracing geo-historical contingencies of knowledge mobilized in the legitimation of the behavior change agenda itself’ (190). This line of work presents a subtle set of arguments and claims that an empirical account, such as that presented in this chapter, cannot⎯nor should⎯challenge. Nonetheless, it is instructive to find out more about the phenomenon under study and to understand how the uses of behavioural ideas and randomized evaluations are limited and structured by the institutions and actors in the political process, which are following political and organizational ends. Of particular interest is the incremental and patchy nature of the diffusion of ideas, and how the use of behavioural sciences meshes with existing standard operating procedures and routines of bureaucracies. That said, behavioural sciences can make progress within the fragmented and decentralized policy process, and has the power to create innovations in public policies, often helped by articulate advocates of such measures.

The path of ideas in public policy is usually slow, one of gradual diffusion and small changes in operating assumptions, and this route is likely for the use of behavioural sciences. The implication of this line of argument is that agency as well as structure plays an important role in the adoption and diffusion of the ideas from the behavioural sciences. It implies a more limited and less uniform use of ideas and evidence than implied by the critical writers in this field, but one where public argument and debate play a central role….(More)”

Crowdsourced pollution data via smartphones

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “Citizens in eleven cities in Europe were recently recruited to help crowdsource pollution measurements, as part of the large-scale research project iSPEX-EU. Participants used their smartphones, an app and a lens called a spectropolarimeter, to collect data about air quality across the continent, which will be used by iSPEX to make comprehensive maps.

The project ran for six weeks and saw thousands of measurements taken in Athens, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Copenhagen, London, Manchester, Milan, Rome, and Toulouse. To contribute, citizens registered their interest, downloaded the free app and were sent an iSPEX lens. Then, on a clear day they placed the lens over their smartphone camera and photographed the sky in multiple directions. The app registered the location and direction of each picture and measured the light spectrum and the polarization of the light.
From the data, iSPEX are able to calculate how much fine dust — known as aerosols — there is in the atmosphere in that place and create a map showing levels of air pollution across Europe. The crowdsourced data can be used to aid government research by filling in any blank spaces and ensuring that the official data is honest.

We’ve seen attempts at similar projects before, such asSmart Citizen, but iSPEX EU benefits from the flexibility and simplicity of its tools. Smartphones have been successfully harnessed as scientific apparatus, enabling researchers to crowdsource data about issues including cancer and tree disease….(More)”