Forget The Wisdom of Crowds; Neurobiologists Reveal The Wisdom Of The Confident

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Way back in 1906, the English polymath Francis Galton visited a country fair in which 800 people took part in a contest to guess the weight of a slaughtered ox. After the fair, he collected the guesses and calculated their average which turned out to be 1208 pounds. To Galton’s surprise, this was within 1 per cent of the true weight of 1198 pounds.
This is one of the earliest examples of a phenomenon that has come to be known as the wisdom of the crowd. The idea is that the collective opinion of a group of individuals can be better than a single expert opinion.
This phenomenon is commonplace today on websites such as Reddit in which users vote on the importance of particular stories and the most popular are given greater prominence.
However, anyone familiar with Reddit will know that the collective opinion isn’t always wise. In recent years, researchers have spent a significant amount of time and effort teasing apart the factors that make crowds stupid. One important factor turns out to be the way members of a crowd influence each other.
It turns out that if a crowd offers a wide range of independent estimates, then it is more likely to be wise. But if members of the crowd are influenced in the same way, for example by each other or by some external factor, then they tend to converge on a biased estimate. In this case, the crowd is likely to be stupid.
Today, Gabriel Madirolas and Gonzalo De Polavieja at the Cajal Institute in Madrid, Spain, say they found a way to analyse the answers from a crowd which allows them to remove this kind of bias and so settle on a wiser answer.
The theory behind their work is straightforward. Their idea is that some people are more strongly influenced by additional information than others who are confident in their own opinion. So identifying these more strongly influenced people and separating them from the independent thinkers creates two different groups. The group of independent thinkers is then more likely to give a wise estimate. Or put another way, ignore the wisdom of the crowd in favour of the wisdom of the confident.
So how to identify confident thinkers. Madirolas and De Polavieja began by studying the data from an earlier set of experiments in which groups of people were given tasks such as to estimate the length of the border between Switzerland and Italy, the correct answer being 734 kilometres.
After one task, some groups were shown the combined estimates of other groups before beginning their second task. These experiments clearly showed how this information biased the answers from these groups in their second tasks.
Madirolas and De Polavieja then set about creating a mathematical model of how individuals incorporate this extra information. They assume that each person comes to a final estimate based on two pieces of information: first, their own independent estimate of the length of the border and second, the earlier combined estimate revealed to the group. Each individual decides on a final estimate depending on the weighting they give to each piece of information.
Those people who are heavily biased give a strong weighting to the additional information whereas people who are confident in their own estimate give a small or zero weighting to the additional information.
Madirolas and De Polavieja then take each person’s behaviour and fit it to this model to reveal how independent their thinking has been.
That allows them to divide the groups into independent thinkers and biased thinkers. Taking the collective opinion of the independent thinkers then gives a much more accurate estimate of the length of the border.
“Our results show that, while a simple operation like the mean, median or geometric mean of a group may not allow groups to make good estimations, a more complex operation taking into account individuality in the social dynamics can lead to a better collective intelligence,” they say.
…
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1406.7578 : Wisdom of the Confident: Using Social Interactions to Eliminate the Bias in Wisdom of the Crowds”

Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Expertise

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of crowdsourcing was originally published in 2014.

Crowdsourcing enables leaders and citizens to work together to solve public problems in new and innovative ways. New tools and platforms enable citizens with differing levels of knowledge, expertise, experience and abilities to collaborate and solve problems together. Identifying experts, or individuals with specialized skills, knowledge or abilities with regard to a specific topic, and incentivizing their participation in crowdsourcing information, knowledge or experience to achieve a shared goal can enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of problem solving.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Börner, Katy, Michael Conlon, Jon Corson-Rikert, and Ying Ding. “VIVO: A Semantic Approach to Scholarly Networking and Discovery.” Synthesis Lectures on the Semantic Web: Theory and Technology 2, no. 1 (October 17, 2012): 1–178. http://bit.ly/17huggT.

  • This e-book “provides an introduction to VIVO…a tool for representing information about research and researchers — their scholarly works, research interests, and organizational relationships.”
  • VIVO is a response to the fact that, “Information for scholars — and about scholarly activity — has not kept pace with the increasing demands and expectations. Information remains siloed in legacy systems and behind various access controls that must be licensed or otherwise negotiated before access. Information representation is in its infancy. The raw material of scholarship — the data and information regarding previous work — is not available in common formats with common semantics.”
  • Providing access to structured information on the work and experience of a diversity of scholars enables improved expert finding — “identifying and engaging experts whose scholarly works is of value to one’s own. To find experts, one needs rich data regarding one’s own work and the work of potential related experts. The authors argue that expert finding is of increasing importance since, “[m]ulti-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary investigation is increasingly required to address complex problems. 

Bozzon, Alessandro, Marco Brambilla, Stefano Ceri, Matteo Silvestri, and Giuliano Vesci. “Choosing the Right Crowd: Expert Finding in Social Networks.” In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Extending Database Technology, 637–648. EDBT  ’13. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2013. http://bit.ly/18QbtY5.

  • This paper explores the challenge of selecting experts within the population of social networks by considering the following problem: “given an expertise need (expressed for instance as a natural language query) and a set of social network members, who are the most knowledgeable people for addressing that need?”
  • The authors come to the following conclusions:
    • “profile information is generally less effective than information about resources that they directly create, own or annotate;
    • resources which are produced by others (resources appearing on the person’s Facebook wall or produced by people that she follows on Twitter) help increasing the assessment precision;
    • Twitter appears the most effective social network for expertise matching, as it very frequently outperforms all other social networks (either combined or alone);
    • Twitter appears as well very effective for matching expertise in domains such as computer engineering, science, sport, and technology & games, but Facebook is also very effective in fields such as locations, music, sport, and movies & tv;
    • surprisingly, LinkedIn appears less effective than other social networks in all domains (including computer science) and overall.”

Brabham, Daren C. “The Myth of Amateur Crowds.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 3 (2012): 394–410. http://bit.ly/1hdnGJV.

  • Unlike most of the related literature, this paper focuses on bringing attention to the expertise already being tapped by crowdsourcing efforts rather than determining ways to identify more dormant expertise to improve the results of crowdsourcing.
  • Brabham comes to two central conclusions: “(1) crowdsourcing is discussed in the popular press as a process driven by amateurs and hobbyists, yet empirical research on crowdsourcing indicates that crowds are largely self-selected professionals and experts who opt-in to crowdsourcing arrangements; and (2) the myth of the amateur in crowdsourcing ventures works to label crowds as mere hobbyists who see crowdsourcing ventures as opportunities for creative expression, as entertainment, or as opportunities to pass the time when bored. This amateur/hobbyist label then undermines the fact that large amounts of real work and expert knowledge are exerted by crowds for relatively little reward and to serve the profit motives of companies. 

Dutton, William H. Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government. One of a Series of Occasional Papers in Science and Technology Policy, Science and Technology Policy Institute, Institute for Defense Analyses, February 23, 2011. http://bit.ly/1c1bpEB.

  • In this paper, a case is made for more structured and well-managed crowdsourcing efforts within government. Specifically, the paper “explains how collaborative networking can be used to harness the distributed expertise of citizens, as distinguished from citizen consultation, which seeks to engage citizens — each on an equal footing.” Instead of looking for answers from an undefined crowd, Dutton proposes “networking the public as advisors” by seeking to “involve experts on particular public issues and problems distributed anywhere in the world.”
  • Dutton argues that expert-based crowdsourcing can be successfully for government for a number of reasons:
    • Direct communication with a diversity of independent experts
    • The convening power of government
    • Compatibility with open government and open innovation
    • Synergy with citizen consultation
    • Building on experience with paid consultants
    • Speed and urgency
    • Centrality of documents to policy and practice.
  • He also proposes a nine-step process for government to foster bottom-up collaboration networks:
    • Do not reinvent the technology
    • Focus on activities, not the tools
    • Start small, but capable of scaling up
    • Modularize
    • Be open and flexible in finding and going to communities of experts
    • Do not concentrate on one approach to all problems
    • Cultivate the bottom-up development of multiple projects
    • Experience networking and collaborating — be a networked individual
    • Capture, reward, and publicize success.

Goel, Gagan, Afshin Nikzad and Adish Singla. “Matching Workers with Tasks: Incentives in Heterogeneous Crowdsourcing Markets.” Under review by the International World Wide Web Conference (WWW). 2014. http://bit.ly/1qHBkdf

  • Combining the notions of crowdsourcing expertise and crowdsourcing tasks, this paper focuses on the challenge within platforms like Mechanical Turk related to intelligently matching tasks to workers.
  • The authors’ call for more strategic assignment of tasks in crowdsourcing markets is based on the understanding that “each worker has certain expertise and interests which define the set of tasks she can and is willing to do.”
  • Focusing on developing meaningful incentives based on varying levels of expertise, the authors sought to create a mechanism that, “i) is incentive compatible in the sense that it is truthful for agents to report their true cost, ii) picks a set of workers and assigns them to the tasks they are eligible for in order to maximize the utility of the requester, iii) makes sure total payments made to the workers doesn’t exceed the budget of the requester.

Gubanov, D., N. Korgin, D. Novikov and A. Kalkov. E-Expertise: Modern Collective Intelligence. Springer, Studies in Computational Intelligence 558, 2014. http://bit.ly/U1sxX7

  • In this book, the authors focus on “organization and mechanisms of expert decision-making support using modern information and communication technologies, as well as information analysis and collective intelligence technologies (electronic expertise or simply e-expertise).”
  • The book, which “addresses a wide range of readers interested in management, decision-making and expert activity in political, economic, social and industrial spheres, is broken into five chapters:
    • Chapter 1 (E-Expertise) discusses the role of e-expertise in decision-making processes. The procedures of e-expertise are classified, their benefits and shortcomings are identified, and the efficiency conditions are considered.
    • Chapter 2 (Expert Technologies and Principles) provides a comprehensive overview of modern expert technologies. A special emphasis is placed on the specifics of e-expertise. Moreover, the authors study the feasibility and reasonability of employing well-known methods and approaches in e-expertise.
    • Chapter 3 (E-Expertise: Organization and Technologies) describes some examples of up-to-date technologies to perform e-expertise.
    • Chapter 4 (Trust Networks and Competence Networks) deals with the problems of expert finding and grouping by information and communication technologies.
    • Chapter 5 (Active Expertise) treats the problem of expertise stability against any strategic manipulation by experts or coordinators pursuing individual goals.

Holst, Cathrine. “Expertise and Democracy.” ARENA Report No 1/14, Center for European Studies, University of Oslo. http://bit.ly/1nm3rh4

  • This report contains a set of 16 papers focused on the concept of “epistocracy,” meaning the “rule of knowers.” The papers inquire into the role of knowledge and expertise in modern democracies and especially in the European Union (EU). Major themes are: expert-rule and democratic legitimacy; the role of knowledge and expertise in EU governance; and the European Commission’s use of expertise.
    • Expert-rule and democratic legitimacy
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on issues such as the “implications of modern democracies’ knowledge and expertise dependence for political and democratic theory.” Topics include the accountability of experts, the legitimacy of expert arrangements within democracies, the role of evidence in policy-making, how expertise can be problematic in democratic contexts, and “ethical expertise” and its place in epistemic democracies.
    • The role of knowledge and expertise in EU governance
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on “general trends and developments in the EU with regard to the role of expertise and experts in political decision-making, the implications for the EU’s democratic legitimacy, and analytical strategies for studying expertise and democratic legitimacy in an EU context.”
    • The European Commission’s use of expertise
      • Papers within this theme concentrate on how the European Commission uses expertise and in particular the European Commission’s “expertgroup system.” Topics include the European Citizen’s Initiative, analytic-deliberative processes in EU food safety, the operation of EU environmental agencies, and the autonomy of various EU agencies.

King, Andrew and Karim R. Lakhani. “Using Open Innovation to Identify the Best Ideas.” MIT Sloan Management Review, September 11, 2013. http://bit.ly/HjVOpi.

  • In this paper, King and Lakhani examine different methods for opening innovation, where, “[i]nstead of doing everything in-house, companies can tap into the ideas cloud of external expertise to develop new products and services.”
  • The three types of open innovation discussed are: opening the idea-creation process, competitions where prizes are offered and designers bid with possible solutions; opening the idea-selection process, ‘approval contests’ in which outsiders vote to determine which entries should be pursued; and opening both idea generation and selection, an option used especially by organizations focused on quickly changing needs.

Long, Chengjiang, Gang Hua and Ashish Kapoor. “Active Visual Recognition with Expertise Estimation in Crowdsourcing.” 2013 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision. December 2013. http://bit.ly/1lRWFur.

  • This paper is focused on improving the crowdsourced labeling of visual datasets from platforms like Mechanical Turk. The authors note that, “Although it is cheap to obtain large quantity of labels through crowdsourcing, it has been well known that the collected labels could be very noisy. So it is desirable to model the expertise level of the labelers to ensure the quality of the labels. The higher the expertise level a labeler is at, the lower the label noises he/she will produce.”
  • Based on the need for identifying expert labelers upfront, the authors developed an “active classifier learning system which determines which users to label which unlabeled examples” from collected visual datasets.
  • The researchers’ experiments in identifying expert visual dataset labelers led to findings demonstrating that the “active selection” of expert labelers is beneficial in cutting through the noise of crowdsourcing platforms.

Noveck, Beth Simone. “’Peer to Patent’: Collective Intelligence, Open Review, and Patent Reform.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 20, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 123–162. http://bit.ly/HegzTT.

  • This law review article introduces the idea of crowdsourcing expertise to mitigate the challenge of patent processing. Noveck argues that, “access to information is the crux of the patent quality problem. Patent examiners currently make decisions about the grant of a patent that will shape an industry for a twenty-year period on the basis of a limited subset of available information. Examiners may neither consult the public, talk to experts, nor, in many cases, even use the Internet.”
  • Peer-to-Patent, which launched three years after this article, is based on the idea that, “The new generation of social software might not only make it easier to find friends but also to find expertise that can be applied to legal and policy decision-making. This way, we can improve upon the Constitutional promise to promote the progress of science and the useful arts in our democracy by ensuring that only worth ideas receive that ‘odious monopoly’ of which Thomas Jefferson complained.”

Ober, Josiah. “Democracy’s Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment.” American Political Science Review 107, no. 01 (2013): 104–122. http://bit.ly/1cgf857.

  • In this paper, Ober argues that, “A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world.”
  • Ober describes an approach to decision-making that aggregates expertise across multiple domains. This “Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest.”

Sims, Max H., Jeffrey Bigham, Henry Kautz and Marc W. Halterman. “Crowdsourcing medical expertise in near real time.” Journal of Hospital Medicine 9, no. 7, July 2014. http://bit.ly/1kAKvq7.

  • In this article, the authors discuss the develoment of a mobile application called DocCHIRP, which was developed due to the fact that, “although the Internet creates unprecedented access to information, gaps in the medical literature and inefficient searches often leave healthcare providers’ questions unanswered.”
  • The DocCHIRP pilot project used a “system of point-to-multipoint push notifications designed to help providers problem solve by crowdsourcing from their peers.”
  • Healthcare providers (HCPs) sought to gain intelligence from the crowd, which included 85 registered users, on questions related to medication, complex medical decision making, standard of care, administrative, testing and referrals.
  • The authors believe that, “if future iterations of the mobile crowdsourcing applications can address…adoption barriers and support the organic growth of the crowd of HCPs,” then “the approach could have a positive and transformative effect on how providers acquire relevant knowledge and care for patients.”

Spina, Alessandro. “Scientific Expertise and Open Government in the Digital Era: Some Reflections on EFSA and Other EU Agencies.” in Foundations of EU Food Law and Policy, eds. A. Alemmano and S. Gabbi. Ashgate, 2014. http://bit.ly/1k2EwdD.

  • In this paper, Spina “presents some reflections on how the collaborative and crowdsourcing practices of Open Government could be integrated in the activities of EFSA [European Food Safety Authority] and other EU agencies,” with a particular focus on “highlighting the benefits of the Open Government paradigm for expert regulatory bodies in the EU.”
  • Spina argues that the “crowdsourcing of expertise and the reconfiguration of the information flows between European agencies and teh public could represent a concrete possibility of modernising the role of agencies with a new model that has a low financial burden and an almost immediate effect on the legal governance of agencies.”
  • He concludes that, “It is becoming evident that in order to guarantee that the best scientific expertise is provided to EU institutions and citizens, EFSA should strive to use the best organisational models to source science and expertise.”

GitHub: A Swiss Army knife for open government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

FCW: “Today, more than 300 government agencies are using the platform for public and private development. Cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco), states (New York, Washington, Utah) and countries (United Kingdom, Australia) are sharing code and paving a new road to civic collaboration….

In addition to a rapidly growing code collection, the General Services Administration’s new IT development shop has created a “/Developer program” to “provide comprehensive support for any federal agency engaged in the production or use of APIs.”
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has built a full-blown website on GitHub to showcase the software and design work its employees are doing.
Most of the White House’s repos relate to Drupal-driven websites, but the Obama administration has also shared its iOS and Android apps, which together have been forked nearly 400 times.

Civic-focused organizations — such as the OpenGov Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation and the Open Knowledge Foundation — are also actively involved with original projects on GitHub. Those projects include the OpenGov Foundation’s Madison document-editing tool touted by the likes of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and the Open Knowledge Foundation’s CKAN, which powers hundreds of government data platforms around the world.
According to GovCode, an aggregator of public government open-source projects hosted on GitHub, there have been hundreds of individual contributors and nearly 90,000 code commits, which involve making a set of tentative changes permanent.
The nitty-gritty
Getting started on GitHub is similar to the process for other social networking platforms. Users create individual accounts and can set up “organizations” for agencies or cities. They can then create repositories (or repos) to collaborate on projects through an individual or organizational account. Other developers or organizations can download repo code for reuse or repurpose it in their own repositories (called forking), and make it available to others to do the same.
Collaborative aspects of GitHub include pull requests that allow developers to submit and accept updates to repos that build on and grow an open-source project. There are wikis, gists (code snippet sharing) and issue tracking for bugs, feature requests, or general questions and answers.
GitHub provides free code hosting for all public repos. Upgrade offerings include personal and organizational plans based on the number of private repos. For organizations that want a self-hosted GitHub development environment, GitHub Enterprise, used by the likes of CFPB, allows for self-hosted, private repos behind a firewall.
GitHub’s core user interface can be unwelcoming or even intimidating to the nondeveloper, but GitHub’s Pages package offers Web-hosting features that include domain mapping and lightweight content management tools such as static site generator Jekyll and text editor Atom.
Notable government projects that use Pages are the White House’s Project Open Data, 18F’s /Developer Program, CFPB’s Open Tech website and New York’s Open Data Handbook. Indeed, Wired recently commented that the White House’s open-data GitHub efforts “could help fix government.”…
See also: GitHub for Government (GovLab)

Meet the UK start-ups changing the world with open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sophie Curtis in The Telegraph: “Data is more accessible today than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. From corporate databases to social media and embedded sensors, data is exploding, with total worldwide volume expected to reach 6.6 zettabytes by 2020.
Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. For example, the Department for Education publishes open data about the performance of schools in England, so that companies can create league tables and citizens can find the best-performing schools in their catchment area.
Governments worldwide are working to open up more of their data. Since January 2010, more than 18,500 UK government data sets have been released via the data.gov.uk web portal, creating new opportunities for organisations to build innovative digital services.
Businesses are also starting to realise the value of making their non-personal data freely available, with open innovation leading to the creation products and services that they can benefit from….

Now a range of UK start-ups are working with the ODI to build businesses using open data, and have already unlocked a total of £2.5 million worth of investments and contracts.
Mastodon C joined the ODI start-up programme at its inception in December 2012. Shortly after joining, the company teamed up with Ben Goldacre and Open Healthcare UK, and embarked on a project investigating the use of branded statins over the far cheaper generic versions.
The data analysis identified potential efficiency savings to the NHS of £200 million. The company is now also working with the Technology Strategy Board and Nesta to help them gain better insight into their data.
Another start-up, CarbonCulture is a community platform designed to help people use resources more efficiently. The company uses high-tech metering to monitor carbon use in the workplace and help clients save money.
Organisations such as 10 Downing Street, Tate, Cardiff Council, the GLA and the UK Parliament are using the company’s digital tools to monitor and improve their energy consumption. CarbonCulture has also helped the Department of Energy and Climate Change reduce its gas use by 10 per cent.
Spend Network’s business is built on collecting the spend statements and tender documents published by government in the UK and Europe and then publishing this data openly so that anyone can use it. The company currently hosts over £1.2 trillion of transactions from the UK and over 1.8 million tenders from across Europe.
One of the company’s major breakthroughs was creating the first national, open spend analysis for central and local government. This was used to uncover a 45 per cent delay in the UK’s tendering process, holding up £22 billion of government funds to the economy.
Meanwhile, TransportAPI uses open data feeds from Traveline, Network Rail and Transport for London to provide nationwide timetables, departure and infrastructure information across all modes of public transport.
TransportAPI currently has 700 developers and organisations signed up to its platform, including individual taxpayers and public sector organisations like universities and local authorities. Travel portals, hyperlocal sites and business analytics are also integrating features, such as the ‘nearest transport’ widget, into their websites.
These are just four examples of how start-ups are using open data to create new digital services. The ODI this week announced seven new open data start-ups joining the programme, covering 3D printed learning materials, helping disabled communities, renewable energy markets, and smart cities….”

Are the Authoritarians Winning?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Review of several books by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Review of Books: “In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous.
Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. In the 1930s, Westerners went to Russia to admire Stalin’s Moscow subway stations; today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, and just as in the 1930s, they return wondering why autocracies can build high-speed railroad lines seemingly overnight, while democracies can take forty years to decide they cannot even begin. The Francis Fukuyama moment—when in 1989 Westerners were told that liberal democracy was the final form toward which all political striving was directed—now looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar moment.
For the first time since the end of the cold war, the advance of democratic constitutionalism has stopped. The army has staged a coup in Thailand and it’s unclear whether the generals will allow democracy to take root in Burma. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Côte d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, but in Mexico and Colombia it is threatened by violence, while in Argentina it struggles to shake off the dead weight of Peronism. In Brazil, the millions who took to the streets last June to protest corruption seem to have had no impact on the cronyism in Brasília. In the Middle East, democracy has a foothold in Tunisia, but in Syria there is chaos; in Egypt, plebiscitary authoritarianism rules; and in the monarchies, absolutism is ascendant.
In Europe, the policy elites keep insisting that the remedy for their continent’s woes is “more Europe” while a third of their electorate is saying they want less of it. From Hungary to Holland, including in France and the UK, the anti-European right gains ground by opposing the European Union generally and immigration in particular. In Russia the democratic moment of the 1990s now seems as distant as the brief constitutional interlude between 1905 and 1914 under the tsar….
It is not at all apparent that “governance innovation,” a bauble Micklethwait and Wooldridge chase across three continents, watching innovators at work making government more efficient in Chicago, Sacramento, Singapore, and Stockholm, will do the trick. The problem of the liberal state is not that it lacks modern management technique, good software, or different schemes to improve the “interface” between the bureaucrats and the public. By focusing on government innovation, Micklethwait and Wooldridge assume that the problem is improving the efficiency of government. But what is required is both more radical and more traditional: a return to constitutional democracy itself, to courts and regulatory bodies that are freed from the power of money and the influence of the powerful; to legislatures that cease to be circuses and return to holding the executive branch to public account while cooperating on measures for which there is a broad consensus; to elected chief executives who understand that they are not entertainers but leaders….”
Books reviewed:

Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity

a white paper by Joseph Stiglitz
Roosevelt Institute, 28 pp., May 28, 2014; available at rooseveltinstitute.org“

Smart cities from scratch? a socio-technical perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Luís Carvalho in Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society: “This paper argues that contemporary smart city visions based on ITs (information and tele- communication technologies) configure complex socio-technical challenges that can benefit from strategic niche management to foster two key processes: technological learning and societal embedding. Moreover, it studies the extent to which those processes started to unfold in two paradigmatic cases of smart city pilots ‘from scratch’: Songdo (South Korea) and PlanIT Valley (Portugal). The rationale and potentials of the two pilots as arenas for socio-technical experimentation and global niche formation are analysed, as well as the tensions and bottlenecks involved in nurturing socially rich innovation ecosystems and in maintaining social and political support over time.”

Digital Government: Turning the Rhetoric into Reality

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Miguel Carrasco and Peter Goss at BCG Perspectives: “Getting better—but still plenty of room for improvement: that’s the current assessment by everyday users of their governments’ efforts to deliver online services. The public sector has made good progress, but most countries are not moving nearly as quickly as users would like. Many governments have made bold commitments, and a few countries have determined to go “digital by default.” Most are moving more modestly, often overwhelmed by complexity and slowed by bureaucratic skepticism over online delivery as well as by a lack of digital skills. Developing countries lead in the rate of online usage, but they mostly trail developed nations in user satisfaction.
Many citizens—accustomed to innovation in such sectors as retailing, media, and financial services—wish their governments would get on with it. Of the services that can be accessed online, many only provide information and forms, while users are looking to get help and transact business. People want to do more. Digital interaction is often faster, easier, and more efficient than going to a service center or talking on the phone, but users become frustrated when the services do not perform as expected. They know what good online service providers offer. They have seen a lot of improvement in recent years, and they want their governments to make even better use of digital’s capabilities.
Many governments are already well on the way to improving digital service delivery, but there is often a gap between rhetoric and reality. There is no shortage of government policies and strategies relating to “digital first,” “e-government,” and “gov2.0,” in addition to digital by default. But governments need more than a strategy. “Going digital” requires leadership at the highest levels, investments in skills and human capital, and cultural and behavioral change. Based on BCG’s work with numerous governments and new research into the usage of, and satisfaction with, government digital services in 12 countries, we see five steps that most governments will want to take:

1. Focus on value. Put the priority on services with the biggest gaps between their importance to constituents and constituents’ satisfaction with digital delivery. In most countries, this will mean services related to health, education, social welfare, and immigration.

2. Adopt service design thinking. Governments should walk in users’ shoes. What does someone encounter when he or she goes to a government service website—plain language or bureaucratic legalese? How easy is it for the individual to navigate to the desired information? How many steps does it take to do what he or she came to do? Governments can make services easy to access and use by, for example, requiring users to register once and establish a digital credential, which can be used in the future to access online services across government.

3. Lead users online, keep users online. Invest in seamless end-to-end capabilities. Most government-service sites need to advance from providing information to enabling users to transact their business in its entirety, without having to resort to printing out forms or visiting service centers.

4. Demonstrate visible senior-leadership commitment. Governments can signal—to both their own officials and the public—the importance and the urgency that they place on their digital initiatives by where they assign responsibility for the effort.

5. Build the capabilities and skills to execute. Governments need to develop or acquire the skills and capabilities that will enable them to develop and deliver digital services.

This report examines the state of government digital services through the lens of Internet users surveyed in Australia, Denmark, France, Indonesia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK, and the U.S. We investigated 37 different government services. (See Exhibit 1.)…”

Open Governments, Open Data: A New Lever for Transparency, Citizen Engagement, and Economic Growth

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joel Gurin at the SAIS Review of International Affairs: “The international open data movement is beginning to have an impact on government policy, business strategy, and economic development. Roughly sixty countries in the Open Government Partnership have committed to principles that include releasing government data as open data—that is, free public data in forms that can be readily used. Hundreds of businesses are using open data to create jobs and build economic value. Up to now, however, most of this activity has taken place in developed countries, with the United States and United Kingdom in the lead. The use of open data faces more obstacles in developing countries, but has growing promise there, as well.”

The Impact of Open: Keeping you healthy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

of Sunlight: “In healthcare, the goal-set shared widely throughout the field is known as “the Triple Aim”: improving individual experience of care, improving population health, and reducing the cost of care. Across the wide array of initiatives undertaken by health care data users, the great majority seem to fall within the scope of at least one aspect of the Triple Aim. Below is a set of examples that reveal how data — both open and not — is being used to achieve its elements.

The use of open data to reduce costs:

The use of open data to improve quality of care:

  • Using open data on a substantial series of individual hospital quality measures, CMS created a hospital comparison tool that allows consumers to compare average quality of care outcomes across their local hospitals.

  • Non-profit organizations survey hospitals and have used this data to provide another national measure of hospital quality that consumers can use to select a high-quality hospital.

  • In New York state, widely-shared data on cardiac surgery outcomes associated with individual providers has led to improved outcomes and better understanding of successful techniques.

  • In the UK, the National Health Service is actively working towards defining concrete metrics to evaluate how the system as a whole is moving towards improved quality. …

  • The broad cultural shift towards data-sharing in healthcare appears to have facilitated additional secured sharing in order to achieve the joint goal of improving healthcare quality and effectiveness. The current effort to securely network of millions of patient data records through the federal PCORI system has the potential to advance understanding of disease treatment at an unprecedented pace.

  • Through third-party tools, people are able to use the products of aggregated patient data in order to begin diagnosing their own symptoms more accurately, giving them a head start in understanding how to optimize their visit to a provider.

The use of open data to improve population health:

  • Out of the three elements of the triple aim, population health may have the longest and deepest relationship with open data. Public datasets like those collected by the Centers for Disease Control and the US Census have for decades been used to monitor disease prevalence, verify access to health insurance, and track mortality and morbidity statistics.

  • Population health improvement has been a major focus for newer developments as well. Health data has been a regular feature in tech efforts to improve the ways that governments — including local health departments — reach their constituencies. The use of data in new communication tools improves population health by increasing population awareness of local health trends and disease prevention opportunities. Two examples of this work in action include the Chicago Health Atlas, which combines health data and healthcare consumer problem-solving, and Philadelphia’s map interface to city data about available flu vaccines.

One final observation for open data advocates to take from health data concerns the way that the sector encourages the two-way information flow: it embraces the notion that data users can also be data producers. Open data ecosystems are properly characterized by multi-directional relationships among governmental and non-governmental actors, with opportunities for feedback, correction and augmentation of open datasets. That this happens at the scale of health data is important and meaningful for open data advocates who can face push-back when they ask their governments to ingest externally-generated data….”

Opening Public Transportation Data in Germany

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Thesis by Kaufmann, Stefan: “Open data has been recognized as a valuable resource, and public institutions have taken to publishing their data under open licenses, also in Germany. However, German public transit agencies are still reluctant to publish their schedules as open data. Also, two widely used data exchange formats used in German transit planning are proprietary, with no documentation publicly available. Through this work, one of the proprietary formats was reverse-engineered, and a transformation process into the open GTFS schedule format was developed. This process allowed a partnering transit operator to publish their schedule as open data. Also, through a survey taken with German transit authorities and operators, the prevalence of transit data exchange formats, and reservations concerning open transit data were evaluated. The survey brought a series of issues to light which serve as obstacles for opening up transit data. Addressing the issues found through this work, and partnering with open-minded transit authorities to further develop transit data publishing processes can serve as a foundation for wider adoption of publishing open transit data in Germany”