Paper by Henrik Serup Christensen, Maija Karjalainen and Laura Nurminen: “Crowdsourcing legislation gives ordinary citizens, rather than political and bureaucratic elites, the chance to cooperate to come up with innovative new policies. By increasing popular involvement, representative democracies hope to restock dwindling reserves of political legitimacy. However, it is still not clear how involvement in legislative decision making affects the attitudes of the participants. It is therefore of central concern to establish whether crowdsourcing can actually help restore political legitimacy by creating more positive attitudes toward the political system. This article contributes to this research agenda by examining the developments in attitudes among the users on the Finnish website Avoin Ministeriö (“Open Ministry”) which orchestrates crowdsourcing of legislation by providing online tools for deliberating ideas for citizens’ initiatives. The developments in attitudes are investigated with a two-stage survey of 421 respondents who answered questions concerning political and social attitudes, as well as political activities performed. The results suggest that while crowdsourcing legislation has so far not affected political legitimacy in a positive manner, it has the potential to do so….(More)”
Can Big Data Measure Livability in Cities?
PlaceILive: “Big data helps us measure and predict consumer behavior, hurricanes and even pregnancies. It has revolutionized the way we access and use information. That being said, so far big data has not been able to tackle bigger issues like urbanization or improve the livability of cities.
A new startup, www.placeilive.com thinks big data should and can be used to measure livability. They aggregated open data from government institutions and social media to create a tool that can calculate just that. ….PlaceILive wants to help people and governments better understand their cities, so that they can make smarter decisions. Cities can be more sustainable, while its users save money and time when they are choosing a new home.
Not everyone is eager to read long lists of raw data. Therefore they created appealing user-friendly maps that visualize the statistics. Offering the user fast and accessible information on the neighborhoods that matter to them.
Another cornerstone of PlaceILive is their Life Quality Index: an algorithm that takes aspects like transportation, safety, and affordability into account. Making it possible for people to easily compare the livability of different houses. You can read more on the methodology and sources here.
In its beta form, the site features five cities—New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, London and Berlin. When you click on the New York portal, for instance, you can search for the place you want to know more about by borough, zip code, or address. Using New York as an example, it looks like this….(More)
Eight ways to make government more experimental
Jonathan Breckon et al at NESTA: “When the banners and bunting have been tidied away after the May election, and a new bunch of ministers sit at their Whitehall desks, could they embrace a more experimental approach to government?
Such an approach requires a degree of humility. Facing up to the fact that we don’t have all the answers for the next five years. We need to test things out, evaluate new ways of doing things with the best of social science, and grow what works. And drop policies that fail.
But how best to go about it? Here are our 8 ways to make it a reality:
- Make failure OK. A more benign attitude to risk is central to experimentation. As a 2003 Cabinet Office review entitled Trying it Out said, a pilot that reveals a policy to be flawed should be ‘viewed as a success rather than a failure, having potentially helped to avert a potentially larger political and/or financial embarrassment’. Pilots are particularly important in fast moving areas such as technology to try promising fresh ideas in real-time. Our ‘Visible Classroom’ pilot tried an innovative approach to teacher CPD developed from technology for television subtitling.
- Avoid making policies that are set in stone. Allowing policy to be more project–based, flexible and time-limited could encourage room for manoeuvre, according to a previous Nesta report State of Uncertainty; Innovation policy through experimentation. The Department for Work and Pensions’ Employment Retention and Advancement pilot scheme to help people back to work was designed to influence the shape of legislation. It allowed for amendments and learning as it was rolled out. We need more policy experiments like this.
- Work with the grain of current policy environment. Experimenters need to be opportunists. We need to be nimble and flexible. Ready to seize windows of opportunity to experiment. Some services have to be rolled out in stages due to budget constraints. This offers opportunities to try things out before going national. For instance, The Mexican Oportunidades anti-poverty experiments which eventually reached 5.8 million households in all Mexican states, had to be trialled first in a handful of areas. Greater devolution is creating a patchwork of different policy priorities, funding and delivery models – so-called ‘natural experiments’. Let’s seize the opportunity to deliberately test and compare across different jurisdictions. What about a trial of basic income in Northern Ireland, for example, along the lines of recent Finnish proposals, or universal free childcare in Scotland?
- Experiments need the most robust and appropriate evaluation methods such as, if appropriate, Randomised Controlled Trials. Other methods, such as qualitative research may be needed to pry open the ‘black box’ of policies – to learn about why and how things are working. Civil servants should use the government trial advice panel as a source of expertise when setting up experiments.
- Grow the public debate about the importance of experimentation. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to psychological experiments on their 689,000 users web-users. Approval by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities – is essential, but we can’t just rely on experts. We need a dedicated public understanding of experimentation programmes, perhaps run by Evidence Matters or Ask for Evidence campaigns at Sense about Science. Taking part in an experiment in itself can be a learning opportunity creating an appetite amongt the public, something we have found from running an RCT with schools.
- Create ‘Skunkworks’ institutions. New or improved institutional structures within government can also help with experimentation. The Behavioural Insights Team, located in Nesta, operates a classic ‘skunkworks’ model, semi-detached from day-to-day bureaucracy. The nine UK What Works Centres help try things out semi-detached from central power, such as the The Education Endowment Foundation who source innovations widely from across the public and private sectors- including Nesta- rather than generating ideas exclusively in house or in government.
- Find low-cost ways to experiment. People sometimes worry that trials are expensive and complicated. This does not have to be the case. Experiments to encourage organ donation by the Government Digital Service and Behavioural Insights Team involved an estimated cost of £20,000. This was because the digital experiments didn’t involve setting up expensive new interventions – just changing messages on web pages for existing services. Some programmes do, however, need significant funding to evaluate and budgets need to be found for it. A memo from the White House Office for Management and Budget has asked for new Government schemes seeking funding to allocate a proportion of their budgets to ‘randomized controlled trials or carefully designed quasi-experimental techniques’.
- Be bold. A criticism of some experiments is that they only deal with the margins of policy and delivery. Government officials and researchers should set up more ambitious experiments on nationally important big-ticket issues, from counter-terrorism to innovation in jobs and housing….(More)
Why Google’s Waze Is Trading User Data With Local Governments
Parmy Olson at Forbes: “In Rio de Janeiro most eyes are on the final, nail-biting matches of the World Cup. Over in the command center of the city’s department of transport though, they’re on a different set of screens altogether.
Planners there are watching the aggregated data feeds of thousands of smartphones being walked or driven around a city, thanks to two popular travel apps, Waze and Moovit.
The goal is traffic management, and it involves swapping data for data. More cities are lining up to get access, and while the data the apps are sharing is all anonymous for now, identifying details could get more specific if cities like what they see, and people become more comfortable with being monitored through their smartphones in return for incentives.
Rio is the first city in the world to collect real-time data both from drivers who use the Waze navigation app and pedestrians who use the public-transportation app Moovit, giving it an unprecedented view on thousands of moving points across the sprawling city. Rio is also talking to the popular cycling app Strava to start monitoring how cyclists are moving around the city too.
All three apps are popular, consumer services which, in the last few months, have found a new way to make their crowdsourced data useful to someone other than advertisers. While consumers use Waze and Moovit to get around, both companies are flipping the use case and turning those millions of users into a network of sensors that municipalities can tap into for a better view on traffic and hazards. Local governments can also use these apps as a channel to send alerts.
On an average day in June, Rio’s transport planners could get an aggregated view of 110,000 drivers (half a million over the course of the month), and see nearly 60,000 incidents being reported each day – everything from built-up traffic, to hazards on the road, Waze says. Till now they’ve been relying on road cameras and other basic transport-department information.
What may be especially tantalizing for planners is the super-accurate read Waze gets on exactly where drivers are going, by pinging their phones’ GPS once every second. The app can tell how fast a driver is moving and even get a complete record of their driving history, according to Waze spokesperson Julie Mossler. (UPDATE: Since this story was first published Waze has asked to clarify that it separates users’ names and their 30-day driving info. The driving history is categorized under an alias.)
This passively-tracked GPS data “is not something we share,” she adds. Waze, which Google bought last year for $1.3 billion, can turn the data spigots on and off through its application programing interface (API).
Waze has been sharing user data with Rio since summer 2013 and it just signed up the State of Florida. It says more departments of transport are in the pipeline.
But none of these partnerships are making Waze any money. The app’s currency of choice is data. “It’s a two-way street,” says Mossler. “Literally.”
In return for its user updates, Waze gets real-time information from Rio on highways, from road sensors and even from cameras, while Florida will give the app data on construction projects or city events.
Florida’s department of transport could not be reached for comment, but one of its spokesmen recently told a local news station: “We’re going to share our information, our camera images, all of our information that comes from the sensors on the roadway, and Waze is going to share its data with us.”…
To get Moovit’s data, municipalities download a web interface that gives them an aggregated view of where pedestrians using Moovit are going. In return, the city feeds Moovit’s database with a stream of real-time GPS data for buses and trains, and can issue transport alerts to Moovit’s users. Erez notes the cities aren’t allowed to make “any sort of commercial approach to the users.”
Erez may be saving that for advertisers, an avenue he says he’s still exploring. For now getting data from cities is the bigger priority. It gives Moovit “a competitive advantage,” he says.
Cycling app Strava also recently started sharing its real-time user data as part of a paid-for service called Strava Metro.
Municipalities pay 80 cents a year for every Strava member being tracked. Metro only launched in May, but it already counts the state of Oregon; London, UK; Glasgow, Scotland; Queensland, Austalia and Evanston, Illinois as customers.
….
Privacy advocates will naturally want to keep a wary eye on what data is being fed to cities, and that it doesn’t leak or get somehow misused by City Hall. The data-sharing might not be ubiquitous enough for that to be a problem yet, and it should be noted that any kind of deal making with the public sector can get wrapped up in bureaucracy and take years to get off the ground.
For now Waze says it’s acting for the public good….(More)
The perils of extreme democracy
The Economist: “California cannot pass timely budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50 states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and Hollywood—be so poorly governed? ….But as our special report this week argues, the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from education to the regulation of chicken coops.
This citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California’s finances, shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications. And they have impoverished the state’s representative government. Who would want to sit in a legislature where 70-90% of the budget has already been allocated?
This has been a tragedy for California, but it matters far beyond the state’s borders. Around half of America’s states and an increasing number of countries have direct democracy in some form (article). Next month Britain will have its first referendum for years (on whether to change its voting system), and there is talk of voter recalls for aberrant MPs. The European Union has just introduced the first supranational initiative process. With technology making it ever easier to hold referendums and Western voters ever more angry with their politicians, direct democracy could be on the march.
And why not? There is, after all, a successful model: in Switzerland direct democracy goes back to the Middle Ages at the local level and to the 19th century at the federal. This mixture of direct and representative democracy seems to work well. Surely it is just a case of California (which explicitly borrowed the Swiss model) executing a good idea poorly?
Not entirely. Very few people, least of all this newspaper, want to ban direct democracy. Indeed, in some cases referendums are good things: they are a way of holding a legislature to account. In California reforms to curb gerrymandering and non-partisan primaries, both improvements, have recently been introduced by initiatives; and they were pushed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, a governor elected through the recall process. But there is a strong case for proceeding with caution, especially when it comes to allowing people to circumvent a legislature with citizen-made legislation.
The debate about the merits of representative and direct democracy goes back to ancient times. To simplify a little, the Athenians favoured pure democracy (“people rule”, though in fact oligarchs often had the last word); the Romans chose a republic, as a “public thing”, where representatives could make trade-offs for the common good and were accountable for the sum of their achievements. America’s Founding Fathers, especially James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, backed the Romans. Indeed, in their guise of “Publius” in the “Federalist Papers”, Madison and Hamilton warn against the dangerous “passions” of the mob and the threat of “minority factions” (ie, special interests) seizing the democratic process.
Proper democracy is far more than a perpetual ballot process. It must include deliberation, mature institutions and checks and balances such as those in the American constitution. Ironically, California imported direct democracy almost a century ago as a “safety valve” in case government should become corrupt. The process began to malfunction only relatively recently. With Proposition 13, it stopped being a valve and instead became almost the entire engine.
….More important, direct democracy must revert to being a safety valve, not the engine. Initiatives should be far harder to introduce. They should be shorter and simpler, so that voters can actually understand them. They should state what they cost, and where that money is to come from. And, if successful, initiatives must be subject to amendment by the legislature. Those would be good principles to apply to referendums, too….(More)”
Why governments need guinea pigs for policies
Jonathan Breckon in the Guardian:”People are unlikely to react positively to the idea of using citizens as guinea pigs; many will be downright disgusted. But there are times when government must experiment on us in the search for knowledge and better policy….
Though history calls into question the ethics of experimentation, unless we try things out, we will never learn. The National Audit Office says that £66bn worth of government projects have no plans to evaluate their impact. It is unethical to roll out policies in this arbitrary way. We have to experiment on a small scale to have a better understanding of how things work before rolling out policies across the UK. This is just as relevant to social policy, as it is to science and medicine, as set out in a new report by the Alliance for Useful Evidence.
Whether it’s the best ways to teach our kids to read, designing programmes to get unemployed people back to work, or encouraging organ donation – if the old ways don’t work, we have to test new ones. And that testing can’t always be done by a committee in Whitehall or in a university lab.
Experimentation can’t happen in isolation. What works in Lewisham or Londonnery, might not work in Lincoln – or indeed across the UK. For instance, there is a huge amount debate around the current practice of teaching children to read and spell using phonics, which was based on a small-scale study in Clackmannanshire, as well as evidence from the US. A government-commissioned review on the evidence for phonics led professor Carole Torgerson, then at York University, to warn against making national policy off the back of just one small Scottish trial.
One way round this problem is to do larger experiments. The increasing use of the internet in public services allows for more and faster experimentation, on a larger scale for lower cost – the randomised controlled trial on voter mobilisation that went to 61 million users in the 2010 US midterm elections, for example. However, the use of the internet doesn’t get us off the ethical hook. Facebook had to apologise after a global backlash to secret psychological tests on their 689,000 users.
Contentious experiments should be approved by ethics committees – normal practice for trials in hospitals and universities.
We are also not interested in freewheeling trial-and-error; robust and appropriate research techniques to learn from experiments are vital. It’s best to see experimentation as a continuum, ranging from the messiness of attempts to try something new to experiments using the best available social science, such as randomised controlled trials.
Experimental government means avoiding an approach where everything is fixed from the outset. What we need is “a spirit of experimentation, unburdened by promises of success”, as recommended by the late professor Roger Jowell, author of the 2003 Cabinet Office report, Trying it out [pdf]….(More)”
Design in policy making
Dr Andrea Siodmok at the Open Policy Making Blog: “….In recent years, notable policy and business experts have been discussing the value of design and ‘design thinking’ as an approach to improving the way Government delivers services in one form or another for (and with) citizens. Examples include Roger Martin from Rotman Business School, Christian Bason formerly of Mindlab, Marco Steinberg of Sitra, Hilary Cottam of Participle, and many more who have been promoting the use of design as a tool for service transformation.
So what is design and how is it being applied in government? This is the question that has been posed this week at the Service Design in Government conference in London. This week is also the launch of some of the Policy Lab tools in the Policy Toolkit.
The Policy Lab have produced a short introduction to design, service design and design thinking. It serves to explain how we are defining and using the term design in various ways in a policy context as well as provide practical tools and examples of design being used in policy making.
We tend to spot design when it goes wrong: badly laid out forms, websites we can’t navigate, confusing signage, transport links that don’t join together, queues for services that are in demand. Bad design is a time thief. We can also spot good design when we see it, but how is it achieved?…(More)”
Using open legislative data to map bill co-sponsorship networks in 15 countries
François Briatte at OpeningParliament.org: “A few years back, Kamil Gregor published a post under the title “Visualizing politics: Network analysis of bill sponsors”. His post, which focused on the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament, showed how basic social network analysis can support the exploration of parliamentary work, by revealing the ties that members of parliament create between each other through the co-sponsorship of private bills….In what follows, I would like to quickly report on a small research project that I have developed over the years, under the name “parlnet”.
Legislative data on bill co-sponsorship
This project looks at bill co-sponsorship networks in European countries. Many parliaments allow their members to co-sponsor each other’s private bills, which makes it possible to represent these parliaments as collaborative networks, where a tie exists between two MPs if they have co-sponsored legislation together.
This idea is not new: it was pioneered by James Fowler in the United States, and has been the subject of extensive research in American politics, both on the U.S. Congress and on state legislatures. Similar research also exists on the bill co-sponsorship networks of parliaments in Argentina, Chile andRomania.
Inspired by this research and by Baptiste Coulmont’s visualisation of the French lower chamber, I surveyed the parliamentary websites of the following countries:
- all 28 current members of the European Union ;
- 4 members of the EFTA: Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland
This search returned 19 parliamentary chambers from 15 countries for which it was (relatively) easy to extract legislative data, either through open data portals like data.riksdagen.se in Sweden ordata.stortinget.no in Norway, or from official parliamentary websites directly….After splitting the data into legislative periods separated by nationwide elections, I was able to draw a large collection of networks showing bill co-sponsorship in these 19 chambers….In this graph, each point (or node) is a Belgian MP, and each tie between two MPs indicates that they have co-sponsored at least one bill together. The colors and abbreviations used in the graph are party-related codes, which combine information on the parliamentary group and linguistic community of each MP.Because this kind of graph can be interesting to explore in more detail, I have also built interactive visualizations out of them, in order to show more detailed information on the MPs who participate in bill cosposorship…
The parlnet project was coded in R, and its code is public so that it might benefit from external contributions. The list of countries and chambers that it covers is not exhaustive: in some cases like Portugal, I simply failed to retrieve the data. More talented coders might therefore be able to add to the current database.
Bill cosponsorship networks illustrate how open legislative data provided by parliaments can be turned into interactive tools that easily convey some information about parliamentary work, including, but not limited to:
- the role of parliamentary party leaders in managing the legislation produced by their groups
- the impact of partisan discipline and ideology on legislative collaboration between MPs
- the extent of cross-party cooperation in various parliamentary environments and chambers… (More)
Institutional isomorphism, policy networks, and the analytical depreciation of measurement indicators: The case of the EU e-government benchmarking
Paper by Cristiano Codagnone et al: “This article discusses the socio-political dimension of measurement in the context of benchmarking e-government within the European Union׳s Open Method of Coordination. It provides empirical evidence of how this has resulted in institutional isomorphism within the self-referential policy network community involved in the benchmarking process. It argues that the policy prominence retained by supply-side benchmarking of e-government has probably indirectly limited efforts made to measure and evaluate more tangible impacts. High scores in EU benchmarking have contributed to increasing the institutionally-perceived quality but not necessarily the real quality and utility of e-government services. The article concludes by outlining implications for policy and practical recommendations for filling the gaps identified in measurement and evaluation of e-government. It proposes a more comprehensive policy benchmarking framework, which aims to ensure a gradual improvement in measurement activities with indicators that reflect and follow the pace of change, align measurement activities to evaluation needs and, eventually, reduce measurement error….(More)”
31 cities agree to use EU-funded open innovation platform for better smart cities’ services
European Commission Press Release: “At CEBIT, 25 cities from 6 EU countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) and 6 cities from Brazil will present Open & Agile Smart Cities Task Force (OASC), an initiative making it easier for city councils and startups to improve smart city services (such as transport, energy efficiency, environmental or e-health services). This will be achieved thanks to FIWARE, an EU-funded, open source platform and cloud-based building blocks developed in the EU that can be used to develop a huge range of applications, from Smart Cities to eHealth, and from transport to disaster management. Many applications have already been built using FIWARE – from warnings of earthquakes to preventing food waste to Smartaxi apps. Find a full list of cities in the Background.
The OASC deal will allow cities to share their open data (collected from sensors measuring, for example, traffic flows) so that startups can develop apps and tools that benefit all citizens (for example, an app with traffic information for people on the move). Moreover, these systems will be shared between cities (so, an app with transport information developed in city A can be also adopted by city B, without the latter having to develop it from scratch); FIWARE will also give startups and app developers in these cities access to a global market for smart city services.
Cities from across the globe are trying to make the most of open innovation. This will allow them to include a variety of stakeholders in their activities (services are increasingly connected to other systems and innovative startups are a big part of this trend) and encourage a competitive yet attractive market for developers, thus reducing costs, increasing quality and avoiding vendor lock-in….(More)”