in Pacific Standard: “Indeed, 2014 could be called the Year of Government Accountability, as voters on just about every continent have demanded that public officials govern with relentless efficiency, fiscal responsibility, and transparency….
The bottom line, in my view, is that facts must be the fundamental basis for critical and strategic decision-making at every level of government around the world today.
This belief—the foundation of massive technology and social movements, such as open data, big data, and data-driven government—is currently shared by a number of global government leaders. Just recently, for example, President Obama declared that “We must respond based on facts, not fear” when confronting the global Ebola crisis.
To be sure, presenting facts to decision-makers where and when they are needed is one of the most urgent technology priorities of our time. The good news is that we’re seeing progress on this front each and every day as civic organizations around the world rush to open their vast troves of data on the Internet and usher in a new era in data-driven government that will produce facts at the speed of light, and deliver them in context to political leaders, everyday citizens, professional academicians, scientists, journalists, and software developers wherever they are connected to the Web.
Data-driven government, which capitalizes on data, one of the most valuable natural resources of the 21st century, is a breakthrough opportunity of truly significant proportions. And it will be absolutely critical if governments everywhere are to achieve their ultimate mission. Without it, I worry that we just won’t be able to provide citizens with a higher quality of life and with greater opportunities to achieve their full potential.
Labcraft: How labs cultivate change through innovation and collaboration
Labcraft: “The struggle to solve local and global issues often appears to pitch large corporations and governments against activists, artists, workers and ordinary citizens. But what happens when these entities consciously join forces and share resources to create social change?
It’s happening more than you might think—in a growing phenomenon known as social labs. And Labcraft offers an intimate picture of this new and evolving landscape—where seemingly disparate stakeholders network and align as learning communities who collaborate for positive change.
Social innovation labs do what we expect laboratories to do—invent and experiment. But their “test tubes” are real-world challenges. And as they explore new connections, new ideas, and new initiatives, they often generate new perspectives and promising solutions.”
It’s happening more than you might think—in a growing phenomenon known as social labs. And Labcraft offers an intimate picture of this new and evolving landscape—where seemingly disparate stakeholders network and align as learning communities who collaborate for positive change.
Social innovation labs do what we expect laboratories to do—invent and experiment. But their “test tubes” are real-world challenges. And as they explore new connections, new ideas, and new initiatives, they often generate new perspectives and promising solutions.”
Look to Government—Yes, Government—for New Social Innovations
Paper by Christian Bason and Philip Colligan: “If asked to identify the hotbed of social innovation right now, many people would likely point to the new philanthropy of Silicon Valley or the social entrepreneurship efforts supported by Ashoka, Echoing Green, and Skoll Foundation. Very few people, if any, would mention their state capital or Capitol Hill. While local and national governments may have promulgated some of the greatest advances in human history — from public education to putting a man on the moon — public bureaucracies are more commonly known to stifle innovation.
Yet, around the world, there are local, regional, and national government innovators who are challenging this paradigm. They are pioneering a new form of experimental government — bringing new knowledge and practices to the craft of governing and policy making; drawing on human-centered design, user engagement, open innovation, and cross-sector collaboration; and using data, evidence, and insights in new ways.
Earlier this year, Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (which Philip helps run), teamed up with Bloomberg Philanthropies to publish i-teams, the first global review of public innovation teams set up by national and city governments. The study profiled 20 of the most established i-teams from around the world, including:
- French Experimental Fund for Youth, which has supported more than 554 experimental projects (such as one that reduces school drop-out rates) that have benefited over 480,000 young people;
- Nesta’s Innovation Lab, which has run 70 open innovation challenges and programs supporting over 750 innovators working in fields as diverse as energy efficiency, healthcare, and digital education;
- New Orleans’ Innovation and Delivery team, which achieved a 19% reduction in the number of murders in the city in 2013 compared to the previous year.
How are i-teams achieving these results? The most effective ones are explicit about the goal they seek – be it creating a solution to a specific policy challenge, engaging citizenry in behaviors that help the commonweal, or transforming the way government behaves. Importantly, these teams are also able to deploy the right skills, capabilities, and methods for the job.
In addition, i-teams have a strong bias toward action. They apply academic research in behavioral economics and psychology to public policy and services, focusing on rapid experimentation and iteration. The approach stands in stark contrast to the normal routines of government.
Take for example, The UK’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), often called the Nudge Unit. It sets clear goals, engages the right expertise to prototype means to the end, and tests innovations rapidly in the field, to learn what’s not working and rapidly scales what is.
One of BIT’s most famous projects changed taxpayer behavior. BIT’s team of economists, behavioral psychologists, and seasoned government staffers came up with minor changes to tax letters, sent out by the UK Government, that subtlety introduced positive peer pressure. By simply altering the letters to say that most people in their local area had already paid their taxes, BIT was able to boost repayment rates by around 5%. This trial was part of a range of interventions, which have helped forward over £200 million in additional tax revenue to HM Revenue & Customs, the UK’s tax authority.
The Danish government’s internal i-team, MindLab (which Christian ran for 8 years) has likewise influenced citizen behavior….”
A micro-democratic perspective on crowd-work
New paper by Karin Hansson: “Social media has provided governments with new means to improve efficiency and innovation, by engaging a crowd in the gathering and development of data. These collaborative processes are also described as a way to improve democracy by enabling a more transparent and deliberative democracy where citizens participate more directly in decision processes on different levels. However, the dominant research on the e-democratic field takes a government perspective rather then a citizen perspective. –democracy from the perspective of the individual actor, in a global context, is less developed.
In this paper I therefore develop a model for a democratic process outside the realm of the nation state, in a performative state where inequality is norm and the state is unclear and fluid. In this process e-participation means an ICT supported method to get a diversity of opinions and perspectives rather than one single. This micro perspective on democratic participation online might be useful for development of tools for more democratic online crowds…”
IMF: Statistics for Policymaking
Christine Lagarde, Managing Director, IMF: “So if you are wondering why the IMF cares so much about statistics and hosting such forums—I would say the reason is obvious.
The quest for understanding and making sense of the real world—by recording tasks and counting objects—has anchored economic development and social behavior over the past several millennia. Data has gained prominence as a vital building block for making sound policy. Without reliable and timely economic data, we would be wandering in the dark, making decisions on the basis of anecdotes, gut feelings, or worse.
However, the world of economic and financial statistics is not “static.” Markets evolve, and policy needs adapt. There needs to be continuous dialogue between the users and suppliers of data on relevant economic and financial issues.
This is precisely the objective of our forum today. It provides a unique setting for discussing cutting-edge statistics among a broad range of stakeholders: academics, private sector analysts, data compilers, and decision makers.
The theme for this year’s forum is identifying macroeconomic and financial vulnerabilities. To do this, we need to touch upon a broad range of topics, including cross-border linkages, key market indicators, and survey data, and even “Big Data.”
We need to bring all relevant information to the service of macroeconomic policymaking.
I would like to use this opportunity to offer a few thoughts on three key activities under way at the Fund:
(i) the IMF/FSB G-20 Data Gaps Initiative;
(ii) the IMF Data Standards Initiatives; and
(iii) our Data Publication Initiative.
…
And I have an important announcement to make—starting January 1, 2015 we will provide all our online data free-of-charge to everyone.
This will help all those who draw on our data make better use of this vital statistical resource—from budget numbers to balance of payments data, debt statistics to critical global indicators.”
Hungry Planet: Can Big Data Help Feed 9 Billion Humans?
at NBC News: “With a population set to hit 9 billion human beings by 2050, the world needs to grow more food —without cutting down forests and jungles, which are the climate’s huge lungs.
The solution, according to one soil management scientist, is Big Data.
Kenneth Cassman, an agronomist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, recently unveiled a new interactive mapping tool that shows in fine-grain detail where higher crop yields are possible on current arable land.
“By some estimates, 20 to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are associated with agriculture and of that a large portion is due to conversion of natural systems like rainforests or grassland savannahs to crop production, agriculture,” Cassman told NBC News at a conference in suburban Seattle.
The only practical way to stop the conversion of wild lands to farmland is grow more food on land already dedicated to agriculture, he said. Currently, the amount of farmland used to produce rice, wheat, maize and soybean, he noted, is expanding at a rate of about 20 million acres a year.
Cassman and colleagues unveiled the Global Yield Gap and Water Productivity Atlas in October at the Water for Food conference. The atlas was six years and $6 million in the making and contains site-specific data on soil, climate and cropping systems to determine potential yield versus actual yield farm by farm in nearly 20 countries around the world. Projects are ongoing to secure data for 30 more countries….
A key initiative going forward is to teach smallholder farmers how to use the atlas, Cassman said. Until now, the tool has largely rested with agricultural researchers who have validated its promise of delivering information that can help grow more food on existing farmland….
Design for Policy
New book edited by Christian Bason: “Design for Policy is the first publication to chart the emergence of collaborative design approaches to innovation in public policy. Drawing on contributions from a range of the world’s leading academics, design practitioners and public managers, it provides a rich, detailed analysis of design as a tool for addressing public problems and capturing opportunities for achieving better and more efficient societal outcomes.
In his introduction, Christian Bason suggests that design may offer a fundamental reinvention of the art and craft of policy making for the twenty-first century. From challenging current problem spaces to driving the creative quest for new solutions and shaping the physical and virtual artefacts of policy implementation, design holds a significant yet largely unexplored potential.
The book is structured in three main sections, covering the global context of the rise of design for policy, in-depth case studies of the application of design to policy making, and a guide to concrete design tools for policy intent, insight, ideation and implementation. The summary chapter lays out a future agenda for design in government, suggesting how to position design more firmly on the public policy stage.
Design for Policy is intended as a resource for leaders and scholars in government departments, public service organizations and institutions, schools of design and public management, think tanks and consultancies that wish to understand and use design as a tool for public sector reform and innovation….More: Full contents list; Introduction – The Design for Policy Nexus.”
How to use the Internet to end corrupt deals between companies and governments
at the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “Every year governments worldwide spend more than $9.5 trillion on public goods and services, but finding out who won those contracts, why and whether they deliver as promised is largely invisible.
Enter the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS).
Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica and Paraguay became the first countries to announce on Tuesday that they have adopted the new global standards for publishing contracts online as part of a project to shine a light on how public money is spent and to combat massive corruption in public procurement.
“The mission is to end secret deals between companies and governments,” said Gavin Hayman, the incoming executive director for Open Contracting Partnership.
The concept is simple. Under Open Contracting, the government publishes online the projects it is putting out for bid and the terms; companies submit bids online; the winning contract is published including the reasons why; and then citizens can monitor performance according to the terms of the contract.
The Open Contracting initiative, developed by the World Wide Web Foundation with the support of the World Bank and Omidyar Network, has been several years in the making and is part of a broader global movement to increase the accountability of governments by using Internet technologies to make them more transparent.
A pioneer in data transparency was the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global coalition of governments, companies and civil society that works on improving accountability by publishing the revenues received in 35 member countries for their natural resources.
Publish What You Fund is a similar initiative for the aid industry. It delivered a common open standards in 2011 for donor countries to publish how much money they gave in development aid and details of what projects that money funded and where.
There’s also the Open Government Partnership, an international forum of 65 countries, each of which adopts an action plan laying out how it will improve the quality of government through collaboration with civil society, frequently using new technologies.
All of these initiatives have helped crack open the door of government.
What’s important about Open Contracting is the sheer scale of impact it could have. Public procurement accounts for about 15 percent of global GDP and according to Anne Jellema, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation which seeks to expand free access to the web worldwide and backed the OCDS project, corruption adds an estimated $2.3 trillion to the cost of those contracts every year.
A study by the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based think tank, looked at four countries already publishing their contracts online — the United Kingdom, Georgia, Colombia and Slovakia. It found open contracting increased visibility and encouraged more companies to submit bids, the quality and price competitiveness improved and citizen monitoring meant better service delivery….”
The Plan to Map Illegal Fishing From Space
W. Wayt Gibbs at Wired: “llicit fishing goes on every day at an industrial scale. But large commercial fishers are about to get a new set of overseers: conservationists—and soon the general public—armed with space-based reconnaissance of the global fleet.
Crews on big fishing boats deploy an impressive arsenal of technology—from advanced sonars to GPS navigation and mapping systems—as they chase down prey and trawl the seabed. These tools are so effective that roughly a third of the world’s fisheries are now overharvested, and more than three-quarters of the stocks that remain have hit their sustainable limits, according to the FAO. For some species, most of the catch is unreported, unregulated, or flat-out illegal.
But now environmentalists are using sophisticated technology of their own to peel away that cloak of invisibility. With satellite data from SpaceQuest and financial and engineering support from Google, two environmental activist groups have built the first global surveillance system that can track large fishing vessels anywhere in the world.
A prototype of the system, called Global Fishing Watch, was unveiled today at the IUCN World Parks Congress in Sydney. The tool makes use of Google’s mapping software and servers to display the tracks followed in 2012 and 2013 by some 25,000 ships that were either registered as large commercial fishers or were moving in ways that strongly suggest fishing activity.
The project was led by Oceana, a marine conservation advocacy group, and the software was developed by SkyTruth, a small non-profit that specializes in using remote sensing technologies to map environmentally sensitive activities such as fracking and flaring from oil and gas fields. Although the system currently displays voyages from nearly a year ago, “the plan is that we will build out a public release version that will have near-real-time data,” said Jackie Savitz, Oceana’s VP for U.S. oceans. “Then you’ll actually be able to see someone out there fishing within hours to days,” fast enough to act on the information if the fishing is happening illegally, such as in a marine protected area.
The effort got its start at a conference in February, when Savitz sat down with Paul Woods of SkyTruth and Brian Sullivan of Google’s Ocean and Earth Outreach program, and the three discovered they had all been thinking along the same lines: that the pieces were in hand to put eyes on the global fishing fleet, or at least the bigger boats out there. SpaceQuest now has four satellites in orbit that continually pick up radio transmissions that large ships send out as part of their automatic identification system (AIS), broadcasts that include a unique ID number and the vessel’s current position, speed, and heading. Each packet of data is relatively small, but the total AIS data stream is massive because it captures all kinds of boats: naval warships, supertankers, barges, even some yachts. To AIS a boat is a boat; there’s no easy way to tell which ones are fishing.
So the group turned to Analyze Corp., where data scientists teamed up with a former NOAA agent who worked for many years as an official fishery observer to develop a heuristic algorithm that synthesizes input such as rapid changes in trajectory, distances covered over the past 24 hours, long-term movements and port visits over months, and the self-declared identity and class of the boat. “It combines all that and spits out a weighted classification—essentially a probability that this vessel is fishing at this particular spot and time,” Woods said….”
Hashtag Standards For Emergencies
Key Findings of New Report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:”
- The public is using Twitter for real-time information exchange and for expressing emotional support during a variety of crises, such as wildfires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, political protests, mass shootings, and communicable-disease tracking.31 By encouraging proactive standardization of hashtags, emergency responders may be able to reduce a big-data challenge and better leverage crowdsourced information for operational planning and response.
- Twitter is the primary social media platform discussed in this Think Brief. However, the use of hashtags has spread to other social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora. As a result, the ideas behind hashtag standardization may have a much larger sphere of influence than just this one platform.
- Three hashtag standards are encouraged and discussed: early standardization of the disaster name (e.g., #Fay), how to report non-emergency needs (e.g., #PublicRep) and requesting emergency assistance (e.g., #911US).
- As well as standardizing hashtags, emergency response agencies should encourage the public to enable Global Positioning System (GPS) when tweeting during an emergency. This will provide highly detailed information to facilitate response.
- Non-governmental groups, national agencies and international organizations should discuss the potential added value of monitoring social media during emergencies. These groups need to agree who is establishing the standards for a given country or event, which agency disseminates these prescriptive messages, and who is collecting and validating the incoming crowdsourced reports.
- Additional efforts should be pursued regarding how to best link crowdsourced information into emergency response operations and logistics. If this information will be collected, the teams should be ready to act on it in a timely manner.”