New Research Network to Study and Design Innovative Ways of Solving Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Network

MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance formed to gather evidence and develop new designs for governing 

NEW YORK, NY, March 4, 2014 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University today announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions to help improve people’s lives.
Convened and organized by the GovLab, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance is made possible by a three-year grant of $5 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as a gift from Google.org, which will allow the Network to tap the latest technological advances to further its work.
Combining empirical research with real-world experiments, the Research Network will study what happens when governments and institutions open themselves to diverse participation, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and seek input and expertise from a range of people. Network members include twelve experts (see below) in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This core group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. Together, they will assess existing innovations in governing and experiment with new practices and how institutions make decisions at the local, national, and international levels.
Support for the Network from Google.org will be used to build technology platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world, empirical experiments with institutional partners such as governments and NGOs to discover what can enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The Network’s research will be complemented by theoretical writing and compelling storytelling designed to articulate and demonstrate clearly and concretely how governing agencies might work better than they do today. “We want to arm policymakers and practitioners with evidence of what works and what does not,” says Professor Beth Simone Noveck, Network Chair and author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citi More Powerful, “which is vital to drive innovation, re-establish legitimacy and more effectively target scarce resources to solve today’s problems.”
“From prize-backed challenges to spur creative thinking to the use of expert networks to get the smartest people focused on a problem no matter where they work, this shift from top-down, closed, and professional government to decentralized, open, and smarter governance may be the major social innovation of the 21st century,” says Noveck. “The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance is the ideal crucible for helping  transition from closed and centralized to open and collaborative institutions of governance in a way that is scientifically sound and yields new insights to inform future efforts, always with an eye toward real-world impacts.”
MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci added, “Recognizing that we cannot solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s tools, this interdisciplinary group will bring fresh thinking to questions about how our governing institutions operate, and how they can develop better ways to help address seemingly intractable social problems for the common good.”
Members
The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance comprises:
Chair: Beth Simone Noveck
Network Coordinator: Andrew Young
Chief of Research: Stefaan Verhulst
Faculty Members:

  • Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)/University of Southampton, UK)
  • Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech/Weill Cornell Medical College)
  • Erik Johnston (Arizona State University)
  • Henry Farrell (George Washington University)
  • Sheena S. Iyengar (Columbia Business School/Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business)
  • Karim Lakhani (Harvard Business School)
  • Anita McGahan (University of Toronto)
  • Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute)

Institutional Members:

  • Christian Bason and Jesper Christiansen (MindLab, Denmark)
  • Geoff Mulgan (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts – NESTA, United Kingdom)
  • Lee Rainie (Pew Research Center)

The Network is eager to hear from and engage with the public as it undertakes its work. Please contact Stefaan Verhulst to share your ideas or identify opportunities to collaborate.”

Revolutionising Digital Public Service Delivery: A UK Government Perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Alan W. Brown, Jerry Fishenden,  and Mark Thompson: ” For public sector organizations across the world, the pressures for improved
efficiency during the past decades are now accompanied by an equally strong need to revolutionise service delivery to create solutions that better meet citizens’ needs; to develop channels that offer efficiency and increase inclusion to all citizens being served; and to re-invent supply chains to deliver services faster, cheaper, and more effectively. But how do government organisations ensure investment in digital transformation delivers the intended outcomes after earlier “online government” and “e-government” initiatives produced little in terms of significant, sustainable benefits? Here we focus on how digitisation, built on open standards, is transforming the public sector’s relationship with its citizens. This paper provides a perspective of digital change efforts across the UK government as an illustration of the improvements taking place more broadly in the public sector. It provides a vision for the future of our digital world, revealing the symbiotic relationship between organisational change and digitisation, and offering insights into public service delivery in the digital economy.”

Can A Serious Game Improve Privacy Awareness on Facebook?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv:  “Do you know who can see the items you’ve posted on Facebook? This, of course, depends on the privacy settings you’ve used for each picture, text or link that you’ve shared throughout your Facebook history.
You might be extremely careful in deciding who can see these things. But as time goes on, the number of items people share increases. And the number contacts they share them with increases too. So it’s easy to lose track of who can see what.
What’s more, an item that you may have been happy to share three years ago when you were at university, you may not be quite so happy to share now that you are looking for employment.
So how best to increase people’s awareness of their privacy settings? Today, Alexandra Cetto and pals from the University of Regensburg in Germany, say they’ve developed a serious game called Friend Inspector that allows users to increase their privacy awareness on Facebook.
And they say that within five months of its launch, the game had been requested over 100,000 times.
In recent years, serious games have become an increasingly important learning medium through digital simulations and virtual environments. So Cetto and co set about developing a game that could increase people’s awareness of privacy on Facebook.
Designing serious games is something of a black art. At the very least, there needs to be motivation to play and some kind of feedback or score to beat. And at the same time, the game has to achieve some kind of learning objective, in this case an enhanced awareness of privacy.
Aimed at 16-25 year olds, the game these guys came up with is deceptively simple. When potential players land on the home page, they’re asked a simple question: “Do you know who can see your Facebook profile?” This is followed by the teaser: “Playfully discover who can see your shared items and get advice to improve your privacy.”
When players sign up, the game retrieves his or her contacts, shared items and their privacy settings from Facebook. It then presents the player with a pair of these shared items asking which is more personal….
Finally, the game assesses the player’s score and makes a set of personalised recommendations about how to improve privacy, such as how to create friend lists, how to share personal items in a targeted manner and how the term friendship on a social network site differs from friendship in the real world…. Try it at http://www.friend-inspector.org/.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1402.5878 : Friend Inspector: A Serious Game to Enhance Privacy Awareness in Social Networks”

Open Government -Opportunities and Challenges for Public Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New volume of Public Administration and Information Technology series: “Given this global context, and taking into account both the need of academicians and practitioners, it is the intention of this book to shed light on the open government concept and, in particular:
• To provide comprehensive knowledge of recent major developments of open government around the world.
• To analyze the importance of open government efforts for public governance.
• To provide insightful analysis about those factors that are critical when designing, implementing and evaluating open government initiatives.
• To discuss how contextual factors affect open government initiatives’success or failure.
• To explore the existence of theoretical models of open government.
• To propose strategies to move forward and to address future challenges in an international context.”

Get Smart: Commission brings “open planning” movement to Europe to speed spread of smart cities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “The European Commission is calling on those involved in creating smart cities to publish their efforts in order to help build an open planning movement from the ground up.
The challenge is being issued to city administrations, small and large companies and other organisations to go public with their ICT, energy and mobility plans, so that all parties can learn from each other and grow the smart city market. Through collaboration as well as traditional competition, the Europe will get smarter, more competitive and more sustainable.
The Commission is looking for both new commitments to “get smart” and for interested parties to share their current and past successes. Sharing these ideas will feed the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (see IP/13/1159 and MEMO/13/1049) and networks such as the Smart Cities Stakeholder Platform, the Green Digital Charter, the Covenant of Mayors, and CIVITAS.
What’s in it for me?
If you are working in the smart cities field, joining the open planning movement will help you find the right partners, get better access to finance and make it easier to learn from your peers. You will help grow the marketplace you work in, and create export opportunities outside of Europe.
If you live in a city, you will benefit sooner from better traffic flows, greener buildings, and cheaper or more convenient services.
European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes said, “For those of us living in cities, – we need to make sure they are smart cities. Nothing else makes sense. And nothing else is such a worldwide economic opportunity – so we need to get sharing!”.
Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said: “Cities and Communities can only get smart if mayors and governors are committed to apply innovative industrial solutions”.
In June 2014 the Commission will then seek to analyse, group and promote the best plans and initiatives.”

New study proves economic benefits of open data for Berlin

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
ePSI Platform: “The study “Digitales Gold: Nutzen und Wertschöpfung durch Open Data für Berlin” – or “Digital Gold: the open data benefits and its added value for Berlin” in english – released by TSB Technologiestiftung Berlin estimates that Open Data will bring around 32 million euros per year of economic benefit to the city of Berlin for the next few years. …

The estimations made for Berlin are inspired by previous reasoning included in two other studies: Pollock R. (2011), Welfare Gains from opening up public sector information in the UK; and Fuchs, S. et al. (2013), Open Government Data – Offene Daten für Österreich. Mit  Community-Strategien von heute zum Potential von morgen.
Upon presenting the study  data journalist Michael Hörz shows various examples of how to develop interesting new information and services with publicly available information. You can read more about it (in German) here.”

This algorithm can predict a revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Russell Brandom at the Verge: “For students of international conflict, 2013 provided plenty to examine. There was civil war in Syria, ethnic violence in China, and riots to the point of revolution in Ukraine. For those working at Duke University’s Ward Lab, all specialists in predicting conflict, the year looks like a betting sheet, full of predictions that worked and others that didn’t pan out.

Guerrilla campaigns intensified, proving out the prediction

When the lab put out their semiannual predictions in July, they gave Paraguay a 97 percent chance of insurgency, largely based on reports of Marxist rebels. The next month, guerrilla campaigns intensified, proving out the prediction. In the case of China’s armed clashes between Uighurs and Hans, the models showed a 33 percent chance of violence, even as the cause of each individual flare-up was concealed by the country’s state-run media. On the other hand, the unrest in Ukraine didn’t start raising alarms until the action had already started, so the country was left off the report entirely.

According to Ward Lab’s staff, the purpose of the project isn’t to make predictions but to test theories. If a certain theory of geopolitics can predict an uprising in Ukraine, then maybe that theory is onto something. And even if these specialists could predict every conflict, it would only be half the battle. “It’s a success only if it doesn’t come at the cost of predicting a lot of incidents that don’t occur,” says Michael D. Ward, the lab’s founder and chief investigator, who also runs the blog Predictive Heuristics. “But it suggests that we might be on the right track.”

If a certain theory of geopolitics can predict an uprising in Ukraine, maybe that theory is onto something

Forecasting the future of a country wasn’t always done this way. Traditionally, predicting revolution or war has been a secretive project, for the simple reason that any reliable prediction would be too valuable to share. But as predictions lean more on data, they’ve actually become harder to keep secret, ushering in a new generation of open-source prediction models that butt against the siloed status quo.

Will this country’s government face an acute existential threat in the next six months?

The story of automated conflict prediction starts at the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, known as the Pentagon’s R&D wing. In the 1990s, DARPA wanted to try out software-based approaches to anticipating which governments might collapse in the near future. The CIA was already on the case, with section chiefs from every region filing regular forecasts, but DARPA wanted to see if a computerized approach could do better. They looked at a simple question: will this country’s government face an acute existential threat in the next six months? When CIA analysts were put to the test, they averaged roughly 60 percent accuracy, so DARPA’s new system set the bar at 80 percent, looking at 29 different countries in Asia with populations over half a million. It was dubbed ICEWS, the Integrated Conflict Early Warning System, and it succeeded almost immediately, clearing 80 percent with algorithms built on simple regression analysis….

On the data side, researchers at Georgetown University are cataloging every significant political event of the past century into a single database called GDELT, and leaving the whole thing open for public research. Already, projects have used it to map the Syrian civil war and diplomatic gestures between Japan and South Korea, looking at dynamics that had never been mapped before. And then, of course, there’s Ward Lab, releasing a new sheet of predictions every six months and tweaking its algorithms with every development. It’s a mirror of the same open-vs.-closed debate in software — only now, instead of fighting over source code and security audits, it’s a fight over who can see the future the best.”

Big Data, Big New Businesses

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nigel Shaboldt and Michael Chui: “Many people have long believed that if government and the private sector agreed to share their data more freely, and allow it to be processed using the right analytics, previously unimaginable solutions to countless social, economic, and commercial problems would emerge. They may have no idea how right they are.

Even the most vocal proponents of open data appear to have underestimated how many profitable ideas and businesses stand to be created. More than 40 governments worldwide have committed to opening up their electronic data – including weather records, crime statistics, transport information, and much more – to businesses, consumers, and the general public. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the annual value of open data in education, transportation, consumer products, electricity, oil and gas, health care, and consumer finance could reach $3 trillion.

These benefits come in the form of new and better goods and services, as well as efficiency savings for businesses, consumers, and citizens. The range is vast. For example, drawing on data from various government agencies, the Climate Corporation (recently bought for $1 billion) has taken 30 years of weather data, 60 years of data on crop yields, and 14 terabytes of information on soil types to create customized insurance products.

Similarly, real-time traffic and transit information can be accessed on smartphone apps to inform users when the next bus is coming or how to avoid traffic congestion. And, by analyzing online comments about their products, manufacturers can identify which features consumers are most willing to pay for, and develop their business and investment strategies accordingly.

Opportunities are everywhere. A raft of open-data start-ups are now being incubated at the London-based Open Data Institute (ODI), which focuses on improving our understanding of corporate ownership, health-care delivery, energy, finance, transport, and many other areas of public interest.

Consumers are the main beneficiaries, especially in the household-goods market. It is estimated that consumers making better-informed buying decisions across sectors could capture an estimated $1.1 trillion in value annually. Third-party data aggregators are already allowing customers to compare prices across online and brick-and-mortar shops. Many also permit customers to compare quality ratings, safety data (drawn, for example, from official injury reports), information about the provenance of food, and producers’ environmental and labor practices.

Consider the book industry. Bookstores once regarded their inventory as a trade secret. Customers, competitors, and even suppliers seldom knew what stock bookstores held. Nowadays, by contrast, bookstores not only report what stock they carry but also when customers’ orders will arrive. If they did not, they would be excluded from the product-aggregation sites that have come to determine so many buying decisions.

The health-care sector is a prime target for achieving new efficiencies. By sharing the treatment data of a large patient population, for example, care providers can better identify practices that could save $180 billion annually.

The Open Data Institute-backed start-up Mastodon C uses open data on doctors’ prescriptions to differentiate among expensive patent medicines and cheaper “off-patent” varieties; when applied to just one class of drug, that could save around $400 million in one year for the British National Health Service. Meanwhile, open data on acquired infections in British hospitals has led to the publication of hospital-performance tables, a major factor in the 85% drop in reported infections.

There are also opportunities to prevent lifestyle-related diseases and improve treatment by enabling patients to compare their own data with aggregated data on similar patients. This has been shown to motivate patients to improve their diet, exercise more often, and take their medicines regularly. Similarly, letting people compare their energy use with that of their peers could prompt them to save hundreds of billions of dollars in electricity costs each year, to say nothing of reducing carbon emissions.

Such benchmarking is even more valuable for businesses seeking to improve their operational efficiency. The oil and gas industry, for example, could save $450 billion annually by sharing anonymized and aggregated data on the management of upstream and downstream facilities.

Finally, the move toward open data serves a variety of socially desirable ends, ranging from the reuse of publicly funded research to support work on poverty, inclusion, or discrimination, to the disclosure by corporations such as Nike of their supply-chain data and environmental impact.

There are, of course, challenges arising from the proliferation and systematic use of open data. Companies fear for their intellectual property; ordinary citizens worry about how their private information might be used and abused. Last year, Telefónica, the world’s fifth-largest mobile-network provider, tried to allay such fears by launching a digital confidence program to reassure customers that innovations in transparency would be implemented responsibly and without compromising users’ personal information.

The sensitive handling of these issues will be essential if we are to reap the potential $3 trillion in value that usage of open data could deliver each year. Consumers, policymakers, and companies must work together, not just to agree on common standards of analysis, but also to set the ground rules for the protection of privacy and property.”

Disinformation Visualization: How to lie with datavis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Mushon Zer-Aviv at School of Data: “Seeing is believing. When working with raw data we’re often encouraged to present it differently, to give it a form, to map it or visualize it. But all maps lie. In fact, maps have to lie, otherwise they wouldn’t be useful. Some are transparent and obvious lies, such as a tree icon on a map often represents more than one tree. Others are white lies – rounding numbers and prioritising details to create a more legible representation. And then there’s the third type of lie, those lies that convey a bias, be it deliberately or subconsciously. A bias that misrepresents the data and skews it towards a certain reading.

It all sounds very sinister, and indeed sometimes it is. It’s hard to see through a lie unless you stare it right in the face, and what better way to do that than to get our minds dirty and look at some examples of creative and mischievous visual manipulation.
Over the past year I’ve had a few opportunities to run Disinformation Visualization workshops, encouraging activists, designers, statisticians, analysts, researchers, technologists and artists to visualize lies. During these sessions I have used the DIKW pyramid (Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom), a framework for thinking about how data gains context and meaning and becomes information. This information needs to be consumed and understood to become knowledge. And finally when knowledge influences our insights and our decision making about the future it becomes wisdom. Data visualization is one of the ways to push data up the pyramid towards wisdom in order to affect our actions and decisions. It would be wise then to look at visualizations suspiciously.
DIKW
Centuries before big data, computer graphics and social media collided and gave us the datavis explosion, visualization was mostly a scientific tool for inquiry and documentation. This history gave the artform its authority as an integral part of the scientific process. Being a product of human brains and hands, a certain degree of bias was always there, no matter how scientific the process was. The effect of these early off-white lies are still felt today, as even our most celebrated interactive maps still echo the biases of the Mercator map projection, grounding Europe and North America on the top of the world, over emphasizing their size and perceived importance over the Global South. Our contemporary practices of programmatically data driven visualization hide both the human eyes and hands that produce them behind data sets, algorithms and computer graphics, but the same biases are still there, only they’re harder to decipher…”

Can We Balance Data Protection With Value Creation?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A “privacy perspective” by Sara Degli Esposti: “In the last few years there has been a dramatic change in the opportunities organizations have to generate value from the data they collect about customers or service users. Customers and users are rapidly becoming collections of “data points” and organizations can learn an awful lot from the analysis of this huge accumulation of data points, also known as “Big Data.”

Organizations are perhaps thrilled, dreaming about new potential applications of digital data but also a bit concerned about hidden risks and unintended consequences. Take, for example, the human rights protections placed on personal data by the EU.  Regulators are watching closely, intending to preserve the eight basic privacy principles without compromising the free flow of information.
Some may ask whether it’s even possible to balance the two.
Enter the Big Data Protection Project (BDPP): an Open University study on organizations’ ability to leverage Big Data while complying with EU data protection principles. The study represents a chance for you to contribute to, and learn about, the debate on the reform of the EU Data Protection Directive. It is open to staff with interests in data management or use, from all types of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, with interests in Europe.
Join us by visiting the study’s page on the Open University website. Participants will receive a report with all the results. The BDP is a scientific project—no commercial organization is involved—with implications relevant to both policy-makers and industry representatives..
What kind of legislation do we need to create that positive system of incentive for organizations to innovate in the privacy field?
There is no easy answer.
That’s why we need to undertake empirical research into actual information management practices to understand the effects of regulation on people and organizations. Legal instruments conceived with the best intentions can be ineffective or detrimental in practice. However, other factors can also intervene and motivate business players to develop procedures and solutions which go far beyond compliance. Good legislation should complement market forces in bringing values and welfare to both consumers and organizations.
Is European data protection law keeping its promise of protecting users’ information privacy while contributing to the flourishing of the digital economy or not? Will the proposed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) be able to achieve this goal? What would you suggest to do to motivate organizations to invest in information security and take information privacy seriously?
Let’s consider for a second some basic ideas such as the eight fundamental data protection principles: notice, consent, purpose specification and limitation, data quality, respect of data subjects’ rights, information security and accountability. Many of these ideas are present in the EU 1995 Data Protection Directive, the U.S. Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) andthe 1980 OECD Guidelines. The fundamental question now is, should all these ideas be brought into the future, as suggested in the proposed new GDPR, orshould we reconsider our approach and revise some of them, as recommended in the 21st century version of the 1980 OECD Guidelines?
As you may know, notice and consent are often taken as examples of how very good intentions can be transformed into actions of limited importance. Rather than increase people’s awareness of the growing data economy, notice and consent have produced a tick-box tendency accompanied by long and unintelligible privacy policies. Besides, consent is rarely freely granted. Individuals give their consent in exchange for some product or service or as part of a job relationship. The imbalance between the two goods traded—think about how youngsters perceive not having access to some social media as a form of social exclusion—and the lack of feasible alternatives often make an instrument, such as the current use made of consent, meaningless.
On the other hand, a principle such as data quality, which has received very limited attention, could offer opportunities to policy-makers and businesses to reopen the debate on users’ control of their personal data. Having updated, accurate data is something very valuable for organizations. Data quality is also key to the success of many business models. New partnerships between users and organizations could be envisioned under this principle.
Finally, data collection limitation and purpose specification could be other examples of the divide between theory and practice: The tendency we see is that people and businesses want to share, merge and reuse data over time and to do new and unexpected things. Of course, we all want to avoid function creep and prevent any detrimental use of our personal data. We probably need new, stronger mechanisms to ensure data are used for good purposes.
Digital data have become economic assets these days. We need good legislation to stop the black market for personal data and open the debate on how each of us wants to contribute to, and benefit from, the data economy.”