Design in policy making

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
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

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

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)”

The Platform for Political Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Platform for Political Innovation …”is a project aiming to strengthen the role and efficiency of Civil Society in Greece, focusing on the imperative need for innovation in policy-making. The project is based on the collaboration of three Greek Civil Society Organizations which combine and build on their experience and know-how in order to maximize the impact of activities for Political Innovation. From October 2014 to May 2015, experimental applications of innovative processes and tools are initiated  in different Greek cities, focusing on the re-design of decision-making processes at local and national level. The proposed action plan constitutes the phase B of the wider social project POLITEIA 2.0 which won the Audience Award in the 2012 European Investment Bank Social Innovation Tournament.

The activities of the Platform for Political Innovation focus on Research, Networking, Training, Digital Tools and Innovation Workshops Development in 4 Greek cities….including:

Syntagma 2.0: workshops for the participatory design of a new Constitution for Greece by its citizens.

Pedio_Agora: workshops for the participatory design of a public space. Focus area: Varvakeios Square, Athens….(More)”

Why Entrepreneurs Should Go Work for Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Blanding interviewing Mitchell B. Weiss for HBS Working Knowledge:  “…In the past five years, cities around the world have increasingly become laboratories in innovation, producing idea labs that partner with outside businesses and nonprofits to solve thorny public policy problems—and along the way deal with challenges of knowing when to follow the established ways of government and when to break the mold. States and federal government, too, have been reaching out to designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs to help redo their operations. The new US Digital Service, for example, follows other federal efforts like 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows to streamline government websites and electronic records—adapting from models in the UK and elsewhere.

“We have many talented people in government, but by and large they have tended to be analysts and strategists, rather than inventors and builders,” says Weiss, who hopes his course can help change that. “One reason we didn’t have them is we weren’t training them. At policy schools we had not been training people to be all that entrepreneurial, and at business schools, we were not prepping or prodding entrepreneurial people to enter the public sector or even just to invent for the public realm.”

“Government should be naturals at crowdsourcing”

Government entrepreneurship takes many forms. There are “public-public entrepreneurs” who work within government agencies, as well as “private-public entrepreneurs” who establish private businesses that sell to government agencies or sometimes to citizens directly.

In Philadelphia, for example, Textizen enables citizens to communicate with city health and human services agencies by text messages, leading to new enforcement on air pollution controls. In California, OpenCounter streamlined registration for small businesses and provided zoning clearances in a fraction of the usual time. In New York, Mark43 is developing software to analyze crime statistics and organize law enforcement records. And in Boston, Bridj developed an on-demand bus service for routes underserved by public transportation.

The innovations are happening at a scale large enough to even attract venture capital investment, despite past VC skepticism about funding public projects.

“There was this paradox—on the one hand, government is the biggest customer in the world; on the other hand, 90 out of 100 VCs would say they don’t back business models that sell to government,” says Weiss. “Though that’s starting to change as startups and government are starting to change.” OpenGov received a $15 million round of funding last spring led by Andreessen Horowitz, and $17 million was pumped into civic social-networking app MindMixer last fall….

Governments could attract even more capital by examining their procurement rules to speed buying, says Weiss, giving them that same sense of urgency and lean startup practices needed to be successful in entrepreneurial projects…(More)”

Turning smartphones into personal, real-time pollution-location monitors

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kurzweil Newsletter: “Scientists reporting in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology have used smartphone and sensing technology to better pinpoint times and locations of the worst air pollution, which is associated with respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

Most such studies create a picture of exposure based on air pollution levels outside people’s homes. This approach ignores big differences in air quality in school and work environments. It also ignores spikes in pollution that happen over the course of the day such as during rush hour.

To fill in these gaps, Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen and colleagues in Spain, The Netherlands, and the U.S. equipped 54 school children from from 29 different schools around Barcelona with smartphones that could track their location and physical activity. The children also received sensors that continuously measured the ambient levels of black carbon, a component of soot. Although most children spent less than 4 percent of their day traveling to and from school, this exposure contributed 13 percent of their total potential black carbon exposure.

The study was associated with BREATHE, an epidemiological study of the relation between air pollution and brain development.

The researchers conclude that mobile technologies could contribute valuable new insights into air pollution exposure….

More: Mark J. Nieuwenhuijsen, David Donaire-Gonzalez, Ioar Rivas, Montserrat de Castro, Marta Cirach, Gerard Hoek, Edmund Seto, Michael Jerrett, Jordi Sunyer. Variability in and Agreement between Modeled and Personal Continuously Measured Black Carbon Levels Using Novel Smartphone and Sensor Technologies. Environmental Science & Technology, 2015; 150209104136008 DOI: 10.1021/es505362x

Participatory Democracy’s Emerging Tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

, and (The GovLab) at Governing: “As we explore the role of new technologies in changing how government makes policies and delivers services, one form of technology is emerging that has the potential to foster decision-making that’s not only more effective but also more legitimate: platforms for organizing communication by groups across a distance….

Whether the goal is setting an agenda, brainstorming solutions, choosing a path forward and implementing it, or collaborating to assess what works, here are some examples of new tools for participatory democracy:

Agenda-setting and brainstorming: Loomio is an open-source tool designed to make it easy for small to medium-sized groups to make decisions together. Participants can start a discussion on a given topic and invite people into a conversation. As the conversation progresses, anyone can put a proposal to a vote. It is specifically designed to enable consensus-based decision-making.

Google Moderator is a service that uses crowdsourcing to rank user-submitted questions, suggestions and ideas. The tool manages feedback from a large number of people, any of whom who can submit a question or vote up or down on the top questions. The DeLib Dialogue App is a service from the United Kingdom that also allows participants to suggest ideas, refine them via comments and discussions, and rate them to bring the best ideas to the top. And Your Priorities is a service that enables citizens to voice, debate and prioritize ideas.

Voting: Democracy 2.1 and OpaVote are tools that allow people to submit ideas, debate them and then vote on them. Democracy 2.1 offers voters the additional option of casting up to four equally weighted “plus votes” and two “minus votes.” OpaVote is designed to enable elections where voters select a single candidate, employ ranked-choice or approval voting, or use any combination of voting methods.

Drafting: DemocracyOS was designed specifically to enable co-creation of legislation or policy proposals. With the tool, large numbers of users can build proposals, either from scratch or by branching off from existing drafts. Currently in use in several cities, it is designed to get citizen input into a process where final decision-making authority still rests with elected officials or civil servants. For drafting together, Hypothes.is is an annotation tool that can be used to collaboratively annotate documents.

Discussion and Q&A: Stack Exchange enables a community to set up its own free question-and-answer board. It is optimal when a group has frequent, highly granular, factual questions that might be answered by others using the service. ….(More)”

 

“Data on the Web” Best Practices

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

W3C First Public Working Draft: “…The best practices described below have been developed to encourage and enable the continued expansion of the Web as a medium for the exchange of data. The growth of open data by governments across the world [OKFN-INDEX], the increasing publication of research data encouraged by organizations like the Research Data Alliance [RDA], the harvesting and analysis of social media, crowd-sourcing of information, the provision of important cultural heritage collections such as at the Bibliothèque nationale de France [BNF] and the sustained growth in the Linked Open Data Cloud [LODC], provide some examples of this phenomenon.

In broad terms, data publishers aim to share data either openly or with controlled access. Data consumers (who may also be producers themselves) want to be able to find and use data, especially if it is accurate, regularly updated and guaranteed to be available at all times. This creates a fundamental need for a common understanding between data publishers and data consumers. Without this agreement, data publishers’ efforts may be incompatible with data consumers’ desires.

Publishing data on the Web creates new challenges, such as how to represent, describe and make data available in a way that it will be easy to find and to understand. In this context, it becomes crucial to provide guidance to publishers that will improve consistency in the way data is managed, thus promoting the re-use of data and also to foster trust in the data among developers, whatever technology they choose to use, increasing the potential for genuine innovation.

This document sets out a series of best practices that will help publishers and consumers face the new challenges and opportunities posed by data on the Web.

Best practices cover different aspects related to data publishing and consumption, like data formats, data access, data identification and metadata. In order to delimit the scope and elicit the required features for Data on the Web Best Practices, the DWBP working group compiled a set of use cases [UCR] that represent scenarios of how data is commonly published on the Web and how it is used. The set of requirements derived from these use cases were used to guide the development of the best practice.

The Best Practices proposed in this document are intended to serve a more general purpose than the practices suggested in Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data [LD-BP] since it is domain-independent and whilst it recommends the use of Linked Data, it also promotes best practices for data on the web in formats such as CSV and JSON. The Best Practices related to the use of vocabularies incorporate practices that stem from Best Practices for Publishing Linked Data where appropriate….(More)

Open data could turn Europe’s digital desert into a digital rainforest

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joanna Roberts interviews Dirk Helbing, Professor of Computational Social Science at ETH Zurich at Horizon: “…If we want to be competitive, Europe needs to find its own way. How can we differentiate ourselves and make things better? I believe Europe should not engage in the locked data strategy that we see in all these huge IT giants. Instead, Europe should engage in open data, open innovation, and value-sensitive design, particularly approaches that support informational self-determination. So everyone can use this data, generate new kinds of data, and build applications on top. This is going to create ever more possibilities for everyone else, so in a sense that will turn a digital desert into a digital rainforest full of opportunities for everyone, with a rich information ecosystem.’…
The Internet of Things is the next big emerging information communication technology. It’s based on sensors. In smartphones there are about 15 sensors; for light, for noise, for location, for all sorts of things. You could also buy additional external sensors for humidity, for chemical substances and almost anything that comes to your mind. So basically this allows us to measure the environment and all the features of our physical, biological, economic, social and technological environment.
‘Imagine if there was one company in the world controlling all the sensors and collecting all the information. I think that might potentially be a dystopian surveillance nightmare, because you couldn’t take a single step or speak a single word without it being recorded. Therefore, if we want the Internet of Things to be consistent with a stable democracy then I believe we need to run it as a citizen web, which means to create and manage the planetary nervous system together. The citizens themselves would buy the sensors and activate them or not, would decide themselves what sensor data they would share with whom and for what purpose, so informational self-determination would be at the heart, and everyone would be in control of their own data.’….
A lot of exciting things will become possible. We would have a real-time picture of the world and we could use this data to be more aware of what the implications of our decisions and actions are. We could avoid mistakes and discover opportunities we would otherwise have missed. We will also be able to measure what’s going on in our society and economy and why. In this way, we will eventually identify the hidden forces that determine the success or failure of a company, of our economy or even our society….(More)”