Global

Transparency, accountability, and technology

Curated on February 2, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Shanthi Kalathil at Plan International: “The recently launched Sustainable Development Goals have kicked off a renewed development agenda that features, among other things, a dedicated emphasis on peace, justice, and strong institutions. This emphasis, encapsulated in Goal #16, contains several sub-priorities, including reducing corruption; developing effective, accountable, and transparent institutions; ensuring inclusive, participatory, and representative decision-making; and ensuring access to information.

Indeed, the governance-related Goals merely stamp an official imprimatur on what have now become key buzzwords in development. Naturally, where there are buzzwords, there are “tools.” In many cases, those “tools” turn out to be information and communications technologies, and the data flows they facilitate. It’s no wonder, then, that technology has been embraced by the development community as a crucial component of the global accountability and transparency “toolkit.”

Certainly, information and communication technology for development (ICT4D) has long been a part of the development conversation. More recently, ICTs have emerged prominently in the context of good governance, transparency, and accountability. Yet – despite a growing number of studies and evaluations – there hasn’t been a field-wide deeper reckoning with technology’s role in fostering accountability. Technology often seems to promise greater transparency and empowered citizen voice, fitting seamlessly into broader goals of good governance for development. Yet the actual track record of many initiatives has been spotty, and dedicated examination has been sparse (although efforts are underway to change this). That hasn’t stemmed the enthusiasm to press ahead with tech-related applications and open-data-everything; if anything, calls for more critical examination are often treated as mere bumps on the road to progress.

One problem with the “tool for accountability” frame is that it minimizes the political, economic, and social ramifications of technology itself, including the complex web of laws, regulation, culture, norms, and power relations that accompany any form of communication. This means that, while many of these projects tackle the accountability piece using the recommended political economy lens, there is no corresponding emphasis on the communications and/or technology side of the equation. Referring to technology primarily as a “tool” to facilitate aspects of good governance, accountability, or transparency reinforces the idea that it’s merely a widget, one that doesn’t carry its own complexities. It subsumes technology as a means to a broader end, and in doing so, minimizes its ramifications. This, in turn, can lead to unintended or unsustainable outcomes.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to view accountability projects that employ technology in a different way. It’s time to ditch the “tech toolkit,” and instead embrace the emergence of a truly hybrid field with its own unique political economy. This will require a deeper engagement with the power relations that accompany the introduction of technology, and is likely to illuminate a host of issues that currently lie hidden in the planning stage and beyond. This deeper engagement will also require a rethink of current design, monitoring, and evaluation practices; so, for example, in addition to understanding the accountability challenge in question, program design will have to incorporate an equally substantive analysis of the political economy of the proposed ICT intervention, including stakeholders, potential obstacles, and an examination of all possible outcomes (intended or otherwise). While this will require substantial effort, by moving beyond the toolkit approach, we may be able to engage holistically with transparency, accountability, AND technology in ways that could lead to more sustained development impact. (Read the Report)

Open Data Is Changing the World in Four Ways…

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan Verhulst at The GovLab Blog: “New repository of case studies documents the impact of open data globally: odimpact.org.

Despite global commitments to and increasing enthusiasm for open data, little is actually known about its use and impact. What kinds of social and economic transformation has open data brought about, and what is its future potential? How—and under what circumstances—has it been most effective? How have open data practitioners mitigated risks and maximized social good?

Even as proponents of open data extol its virtues, the field continues to suffer from a paucity of empiricalevidence. This limits our understanding of open data and its impact.

Over the last few months, The GovLab (@thegovlab), in collaboration with Omidyar Network(@OmidyarNetwork), has worked to address these shortcomings by developing 19 detailed open data case studies from around the world. The case studies have been selected for their sectoral and geographic representativeness. They are built in part from secondary sources (“desk research”), and also from more than60 first-hand interviews with important players and key stakeholders. In a related collaboration withOmidyar Network, Becky Hogge(@barefoot_techie), an independent researcher, has developed an additional six open data case studies, all focused on the United Kingdom. Together, these case studies, seek to provide a more nuanced understanding of the various processes and factors underlying the demand, supply, release, use and impact of open data.

Today, after receiving and integrating comments from dozens of peer reviewers through a unique open process, we are delighted to share an initial batch of 10 case studies, as well three of Hogge’s UK-based stories. These are being made available at a new custom-built repository, Open Data’s Impact (http://odimpact.org), that will eventually house all the case studies, key findings across the studies, and additional resources related to the impact of open data. All this information will be stored in machine-readable HTML and PDF format, and will be searchable by area of impact, sector and region….(More)

Design-Led Innovation in the Public Sector

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Manuel Sosa at INSEAD Knowledge: “When entering a government permit office, virtually everyone would prepare themselves for a certain amount of boredom and confusion. But resignation may well turn to surprise or even shock, if that office is Singapore’s Employment Pass Service Centre (EPSC), where foreign professionals go to receive their visa to work in the city-state. The ambience more closely resembles a luxury hotel lobby than a grim government agency, an impression reinforced by the roaming reception managers who greet arriving applicants, directing them to a waiting area with upholstered chairs and skyline views.

In a new case study, “Designing the Employment Pass Service Centre for the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore”, Prof. Michael Pich and I explore how even public organizations are beginning to use design to find and tap into innovation opportunities where few have thought to look. In the case of Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM), a design-led transformation of a single facility was the starting point of a drastic reconsideration of what a government agency could be.

Efficiency is not enough

Prior to opening the EPSC in July 2009, MOM’s Work Pass Division (WPD) had developed hyper-efficient methods to process work permits for foreign workers, who comprise approximately 40 percent of Singapore’s workforce. In fact, it was generally considered the most efficient department of its kind in the world. After 9/11, a mandatory-fingerprinting policy for white-collar workers was introduced, necessitating a standalone centre. The agency saw this as an opportunity to raise the efficiency bar even further.

Giving careful consideration to every aspect of the permit-granting process, the project team worked with a local vendor to overhaul the existing model. The proposal they ultimately presented to MOM assured almost unheard-of waiting times, as well as a more aesthetically pleasing look and feel….

Most public-sector organisations’ prickly interactions with the public can be explained with the simple fact that they lack competition. Government bodies are generally monopolies dispensing necessities, so on the whole they don’t feel compelled to agonise over their public face.

MOM and the Singapore government had a different idea. Aware that they were competing with other countries for top global talent, they recognised that the permit-granting process, in a very real sense, set the tone for foreign professionals’ entire experience of Singapore. Expats would be unlikely to remember precisely how long it took to get processed, but the quality of the service received would resonate in their minds and affect their impression of the country as a whole.

IDEO typically begins by concentrating on the user experience. In this case, in addition to observing and identifying what goes through the mind of a typical applicant during his or her journey in the existing system, the observation stage included talking to foreigners who were arriving in Singapore about their experience. IDEO discovered that professionals newly arrived in Singapore were embarking on an entirely new chapter of their lives, with all the expected stresses. The last thing they needed was more stress when receiving their permit. Hence, the EPSC entry hall is airy and free of clutter to create a sense of calm. The ESPC provides toys to keep kids entertained while their parents meet with agents and register for work passes. Visitors are always called by name, not number. Intimidating interview rooms were done away with in favour of open cabanas….In its initial customer satisfaction survey in 2010, the EPSC scored an average rating of 5.7 out of 6….(More)”

When Does ICT-Enabled Citizen Voice Lead to Government Responsiveness?

Curated on January 17, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Tiago Peixoto and Jonathan Fox (Worldbank): “This paper reviews evidence on the use of 23 information and communication technology (ICT) platforms to project citizen voice to improve public service delivery. This meta-analysis focuses on empirical studies of initiatives in the global South, highlighting both citizen uptake (‘yelp’) and the degree to which public service providers respond to expressions of citizen voice (‘teeth’). The conceptual framework further distinguishes between two trajectories for ICT-enabled citizen voice: Upwards accountability occurs when users provide feedback directly to decision-makers in real time, allowing policy-makers and program managers to identify and address service delivery problems – but at their discretion. Downwards accountability, in contrast, occurs either through real time user feedback or less immediate forms of collective civic action that publicly call on service providers to become more accountable and depends less exclusively on decision- makers’ discretion about whether or not to act on the information provided. This distinction between the ways in which ICT platforms mediate the relationship between citizens and service providers allows for a precise analytical focus on how different dimensions of such platforms contribute to public sector responsiveness. These cases suggest that while ICT platforms have been relevant in increasing policymakers’ and senior managers’ capacity to respond, most of them have yet to influence their willingness to do so….(More)”

Human-machine superintelligence pegged as key to solving global problems

Curated on January 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Mandalia at Dispatch Tribunal: “Global complex problems such as climate change and geopolitical conflicts need a new approach if we want to solve them and researchers have suggested that human-machine super intelligence could be the key.

These so called ‘wicked’ problems are some of the most dire ones that need our immediate attention and researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University have presented their new vision of human computation that could help solve these problems in an article published in the journal Science.

Scientists behind the article have cited how power of human computation has helped push the traditional limits to new heights – something that was not achievable until now. Humans are still ahead of machines at great many things – cognitive abilities is one the key areas – but if their powers are combined with those of machines, the result would be multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Researchers have already proved that micro-tasking has helped with some complex problems including build the world’s most complete map of human retinal neurons; however, this approach isn’t always viable to solve much more complex problems of today and entirely new and innovative approach is required to solve “wicked problems” – those that involve many interacting systems that are constantly changing, and whose solutions have unforeseen consequences (e.g., corruption resulting from financial aid given in response to a natural disaster).

Recently developed human computation technologies that provide real-time access to crowd-based inputs could enable creation of more flexible collaborative environments and such setups are more apt for addressing the most challenging issues.

This idea is already taking shape in several human computation projects, including YardMap.org, which was launched by the Cornell in 2012 to map global conservation efforts one parcel at a time.

“By sharing and observing practices in a map-based social network, people can begin to relate their individual efforts to the global conservation potential of living and working landscapes,” says Janis Dickinson, Professor and Director of Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

YardMap allows participants to interact and build on each other’s work – something that crowdsourcing alone cannot achieve. The project serves as an important model for how such bottom-up, socially networked systems can bring about scalable changes how we manage residential landscapes.

HCI has recently set out to use crowd-power to accelerate Cornell-based Alzheimer’s disease research. WeCureAlz.com combines two successful microtasking systems into an interactive analytic pipeline that builds blood flow models of mouse brains. The stardust@home system, which was used to search for comet dust in one million images of aerogel, is being adapted to identify stalled blood vessels, which will then be pinpointed in the brain by a modified version of the EyeWire system….(More)”

Can crowdsourcing decipher the roots of armed conflict?

Curated on January 15, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephanie Kanowitz at GCN: “Researchers at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas at Dallas are proving that there’s accuracy, not just safety, in numbers. The Correlates of War project, a long-standing effort that studies the history of warfare, is now experimenting with crowdsourcing as a way to more quickly and inexpensively create a global conflict database that could help explain when and why countries go to war.

The goal is to facilitate the collection, dissemination and use of reliable data in international relations, but a byproduct has emerged: the development of technology that uses machine learning and natural language processing to efficiently, cost-effectively and accurately create databases from news articles that detail militarized interstate disputes.

The project is in its fifth iteration, having released the fourth set of Militarized Dispute (MID) Data in 2014. To create those earlier versions, researchers paid subject-matter experts such as political scientists to read and hand code newswire articles about disputes, identifying features of possible militarized incidents. Now, however, they’re soliciting help from anyone and everyone — and finding the results are much the same as what the experts produced, except the results come in faster and with significantly less expense.

As news articles come across the wire, the researchers pull them and formulate questions about them that help evaluate the military events. Next, the articles and questions are loaded onto the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a marketplace for crowdsourcing. The project assigns articles to readers, who typically spend about 10 minutes reading an article and responding to the questions. The readers submit the answers to the project researchers, who review them. The project assigns the same article to multiple workers and uses computer algorithms to combine the data into one annotation.

A systematic comparison of the crowdsourced responses with those of trained subject-matter experts showed that the crowdsourced work was accurate for 68 percent of the news reports coded. More important, the aggregation of answers for each article showed that common answers from multiple readers strongly correlated with correct coding. This allowed researchers to easily flag the articles that required deeper expert involvement and process the majority of the news items in near-real time and at limited cost….(more)”

Disclosing or obscuring? The politics of transparency in global climate governance

Curated on January 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aarti Gupta and Michael Mason: “Transparency is increasingly evoked within public and private climate governance arrangements as a key means to enhance accountability and improve environmental outcomes. We review assumed links between transparency, accountability and environmental sustainability here, by identifying four rationales underpinning uptake of transparency in governance. We label these democratization, technocratization, marketization and privatization, and assess how they shape the scope and practices of climate disclosure, and to what effect. We find that all four are discernible in climate governance, yet the technocratic and privatization rationales tend to overtake the originally intended (more inclusive, and more public-good oriented) democratization and marketization rationales for transparency, particularly during institutionalization of disclosure systems. This reduces transparency’s potential to enhance accountability or trigger more environmentally sustainable outcomes….(More)”

Finding the Missing Millions Can Help Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Curated on January 6, 2016November 14, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mahmoud Mohieldin and Mariana Dahan in the Huffington Post: “The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, approved in September, takes a holistic approach to development and presents no less than 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In committing to the goals and associated targets, the international community has agreed to a more ambitious development compact — that of ending poverty, protecting the planet while “leaving no one behind”.

Despite this ambition, we may not know who precisely is being left out of our development programs or how to more effectively target our intended beneficiaries.

A staggering 2.4 billion people today lack any form of recognized identity (ID), including some 625 million children, aged 0-14 years, whose births have never been registered with a civil authority. Only 19 out of 198 economies provide a unique ID at birth and use this consistently in civil identification and public services.

The Center for Global Development recently organized an event titled “Identity and the SDGs: How Finding the Missing Millions Can Help Achieve Development Goals”. While intending to speak about SDG target 16.9 on legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030, it became obvious that the importance of robust identification goes beyond its intrinsic value: it also enables the achievement of many other SDGs, such as financial inclusion, reduced corruption, gender equality, access to health services and appropriate social protection schemes.

Global initiatives, such as the World Bank Group’s Identification for Development (ID4D) agenda, a cross-institutional and multi-sectoral effort, aim to “make everyone count.” They will build new alliances and reshape existing development strategies in the areas of identification and civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS). On the latter, the World Bank, with a number of partners – including UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, and several bilateral donors — is launching the Global Financing Facility for Every Woman Every Child, which includes financing aimed at strengthening and expanding ID platforms of CRVS systems….

Finally, the international community should establish the right monitoring mechanisms and indicators to measure whether we are on track to achieving the SDGs. This target for universal identity will be especially critical as a means of monitoring and achieving the SDGs as a whole. As the saying goes, what is not counted doesn’t count and what is not measured cannot be managed and thus measuring progress towards global targets is a fundamental component of meeting the ambitious goals we have set….(More)”

Developing Global Norms for Sharing Data and Results during Public Health Emergencies

Curated on January 5, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kayvon Modjarrad et al in PLOS Med: “…When a new or re-emergent pathogen causes a major outbreak, rapid access to both raw and analysed data or other pertinent research findings becomes critical to developing a rapid and effective public health response. Without the timely exchange of information on clinical, epidemiologic, and molecular features of an infectious disease, informed decisions about appropriate responses cannot be made, particularly those that relate to fielding new interventions or adapting existing ones. Failure to share information in a timely manner can have disastrous public health consequences, leading to unnecessary suffering and death. The 2014–2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa revealed both successful practices and important deficiencies within existing mechanisms for information sharing. For example, trials of two Ebola vaccine candidates (ChAd3-ZEBOV and rVSV-ZEBOV) benefited greatly from an open collaboration between investigators and institutions in Africa, Europe, and North America . These teams, coordinated by the WHO, were able to generate and exchange critical data for the development of urgently needed, novel vaccines along faster timelines than have ever before been achieved. Similarly, some members of the genome sequencing community made viral sequence data publicly available within days of accessing samples , thus adhering to their profession’s long-established principles of rapid, public release of sequence data in any setting. In contrast, the dissemination of surveillance data early in the epidemic was comparatively slow, and in some cases, the criteria for sharing were unclear.

In recognition of the need to streamline mechanisms of data dissemination—globally and in as close to real-time as possible—the WHO held a consultation in Geneva, Switzerland, on 1–2 September 2015 to advance the development of data sharing norms, specifically in the context of public health emergencies….

preservation of global health requires prioritization of and support for international collaboration. These and other principles were affirmed at the consultation (Table 1) and codified into a consensus statement that was published on the WHO website immediately following the meeting (http://www.who.int/medicines/ebola-treatment/data-sharing_phe/en/). A more comprehensive set of principles and action items was made available in November 2015, including the consensus statement made by the editorial staff of journals that attended the meeting (http://www.who.int/medicines/ebola-treatment/blueprint_phe_data-share-results/en/). The success of prior initiatives to accelerate timelines for reporting clinical trial results has helped build momentum for a broader data sharing agenda. As the quick and transparent dissemination of information is the bedrock of good science and public health practice, it is important that the current trends in data sharing carry over to all matters of acute public health need. Such a global norm would advance the spirit of open collaboration, simplify current mechanisms of information sharing, and potentially save many lives in subsequent outbreaks….(More)”