Pew Research: “A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the 10 most important global trends, based on a poll of 1,592 leaders from academia, business, government, and non-profits. Here are some data points that compare and contrast the public’s views around the world with the trends identified by the experts….
7. A lack of values in leadership – Between 2007 and 2012, confidence in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) national governments declined from 45% to 40% on average, making it difficult for national authorities to mobilize support for necessary reforms, according to a recent report by the OECD. In the U.S., public trust in government has fallen substantially since 1958 and is near an all-time low.…
9. The growing importance of megacities – Life is increasingly lived in the world’s urban centers. According to the United Nations Population Division, more than half of the world’s population lives in urban areas. However, not all of the world’s regions are equally urban. Africa, for example, is predicted to reach 50 percent urbanization by 2035.
10. The rapid spread of misinformation online – One-third (30%) of the world’s youth have been active online for at least five years, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Social networking has also spread around the world. In 19 of 21 countries, about three-in-ten or more of those polled use sites such as Facebook, according to our survey last year.”
Inside Avaaz – can online activism really change the world?
The Guardian: “With 30 million members, Avaaz is an organisation with ambitions to save us all through technology. Carole Cadwalladr meets its founder Ricken Patel to find out what it has achieved…But then, this is the reality of 21st century protest: it’s a beauty parade. A competition for the thing that we all seem to have less of: attention. The TV cameras do show up, though, and a young Rohingya woman from Burma’s Muslim minority gives moving interviews to journalists about the terrible human rights abuses her family have endured. And a dozen or so mostly fresh-faced young people show up to offer their support. The protest has been organised by Avaaz, an online activist organisation, and these are Avaazers. They may have just signed an online petition, or “liked” a cause on Facebook, or donated to a campaign – to save Europe’s bees from pesticides, or to defend Masai land rights in Tanzania, or to “stand by” Edward Snowden. And, depending on who you believe, they’re either inventing a new type of 21st-century protest or they’re a bunch of idle slacktivists who are about as likely to start a revolution as they are to renounce their iPhones and give up Facebook.
In just six years, Avaaz – which means “voice” in various languages – has become a global pressure group to be reckoned with. It’s a new kind of activism that isn’t issue-led, it’s issues-led. It’s human rights abuses in Burma, or it’s the Syrian civil war, or it’s threats against the Great Barrier Reef or it’s homophobia in Costa Rica. It’s whatever its supporters, guided by the Avaaz team, choose to click on most this month. And if you hadn’t heard of Avaaz before, it’s probably only a matter of time….
“We’re like a laboratory for virality. For every campaign we test perhaps 20 different versions of it to see what people want.” It tweaks and it tweaks and it tweaks, changing the wording, pictures, call for action, and only then does it send it out on public release. Sam Barratt, Avaaz’s head of press, shows me the previous versions of its email about the Burma campaign. “Changing the meme at the top, or the photograph, massively affects the number of clicks. Eighteen versions were tested. People think we just chuck it out there, but there’s a huge amount of data sophistry into how we design the campaigns.” And, just as Amazon and Google try to predict our behaviour, and adjust their offerings based on our past preferences, so does Avaaz. It uses algorithms to detect things we perhaps don’t even know about ourselves.
“It’s a tremendously evolving science, internet engagement,” says Patel. “But we develop a picture of someone from their previous engagements with us. So, for example, we can see that a certain set of people, based on their previous behaviour, might be interested in starting a campaign, and another set won’t be, but may be interested in signing something. We can tailor it to the individual.”
Everything is viral now, says Patel, “from financial crises to health epidemics to ideas”. And learning the lessons of that and of how to garner attention from some of the most attention-deficient people on the planet – young people with electronic devices – has been Avaaz’s masterstroke….
A crisistunity is another Avaaz-ism. “Though I think we originally got it from The Simpsons,” says Patel. “It’s a mixture of crisis and opportunity. We’re at this extraordinary moment in history. We have the power to wipe out our species. But at the same time, we’ve had tremendous progress in the past 30 years. We have more than halved global poverty. We’ve radically increased the status of women. There are tremendous reasons for hope and optimism.”
There is something very Avaazian about the crisistunity, I come to think, in that it’s borrowed something slick and witty from popular culture and re-purposed it for something which used to be called the Greater Good. And then given it a thick dollop of added earnestness.”
Open Government Guide
Open Government Partnership: “We were proud to unveil the new Open Government Guide… The Guide—with its accompanying web site—has been developed to support this action planning in three ways :
- It gives readers an overview of what open government means across a range of topics, to help countries identify core ‘cross-cutting issues’ (like conflict of interest management, and public contracting) and to select amongst ‘focused’ issues (like land, police, and extractive industries).
- For each topic, it also provides a “deep dive”, outlining potential commitments tagged as basic, intermediate, advanced and innovative.
- It links to other resources – over 330 case studies and country examples, and external resources on standards .
To read the Guide go to OpenGovGuide.com. You can also use the Report Builder function and create a custom download tailored to your own country or to the officials and other audiences in the local planning process.
Anyone seeking governance reforms, from inside or outside government, faces political as well as logistical challenges, so the Guide is also intended to serve as a way to frame the sometimes difficult conversations about the steps to make reform a reality and show examples from other countries
The OGP process includes four “cohorts” of countries. The largest group are currently drafting their first action plans, and another cohort are already at work on their second plans. The Open Government Guide can help any group seeking to promote reform.
While the Guide is quite comprehensive, it is also a living document. We will continue to add more detailed topic areas. A new section is currently in development on the security sector, drafted by the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Initiative and including recommendations on transparency and accountability of military spending and on surveillance, drawing on the new International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance and the Global Principles on National Security and the Right to Information (The Tswhane Principles). To preview and comment on this document, please watch for the draft version at www.opengovguide.com/news. “
Peacekeeping 4.0: Harnessing the Potential of Big Data, Social Media, and Cyber Technologies
Chapter by John Karlsrud in “Cyberspace and International Relations: Theory, Prospects and Challenges”(Edited by Jan-Frederik Kremer, and Benedikt Müller): “Since the Cold War, peacekeeping has evolved from first-generation peacekeeping that focused on monitoring peace agreements, to third-generation multidimensional peacekeeping operations tasked with rebuilding states and their institutions during and after conflict. However, peacekeeping today is lagging behind the changes marking our time. Big Data, including social media, and the many actors in the field may provide peacekeeping and peacebuilding operations with information and tools to enable them to respond better, faster and more effectively, saving lives and building states. These tools are already well known in the areas of humanitarian action, social activism, and development. Also the United Nations, through the Global Pulse initiative, has begun to discover the potential of “Big Data for Development,” which may in time help prevent violent conflict. However, less has been done in the area of peacekeeping. UN member states should push for change so that the world organization and other multilateral actors can get their act together, mounting a fourth generation of peacekeeping operations that can utilize the potentials of Big Data, social media and modern technology—“Peacekeeping 4.0.” The chapter details some of the initiatives that can be harnessed and further developed, and offers policy recommendations for member states, the UN Security Council, and UN peacekeeping at UN headquarters and at field levels.”
NEW: The Open Governance Knowledge Base
In its continued efforts to organize and disseminate learnings in the field of technology-enabled governance innovation, today, The Governance Lab is introducing a collaborative, wiki-style repository of information and research at the nexus of technology, governance and citizenship. Right now we’re calling it the Open Governance Knowledge Base, and it goes live today.
Our goal in creating this collaborative platform is to provide a single source of research and insights related to the broad, interdiscplinary field of open governance for the benefit of: 1) decision-makers in governing institutions seeking information and inspiration to guide their efforts to increase openness; 2) academics seeking to enrich and expand their scholarly pursuits in this field; 3) technology practitioners seeking insights and examples of familiar tools being used to solve public problems; and 4) average citizens simply seeking interesting information on a complex, evolving topic area.
While you can already find some pre-populated information and research on the platform, we need your help! The field of open governance is too vast, complex and interdisciplinary to meaningfully document without broad collaboration.
Here’s how you can help to ensure this shared resource is as useful and engaging as possible:
- What should we call the platform? We want your title suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments or tweet them to us @TheGovLab.
- And more importantly: Share your knowledge and research. Take a look at what we’ve posted, create an account, refer to this MediaWiki formatting guide as needed and start editing!
Index: Trust in Institutions
The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on trust in institutions and was originally published in 2013.
Trust in Government
- How many of the global public feel that their governments listen to them: 17%
- How much of the global population trusts in institutions: almost half
- The number of Americans who trust institutions: less than half
- How many people globally believe that business leaders and government officials will tell the truth when confronted with a difficult issue: Less than one-fifth
- The average level of confidence amongst citizens in 25 OECD countries:
- In national government: 40%, down from 45% in 2007
- In financial institutions: 43%
- In public services such as local police and healthcare: 72% and 71% respectively
Executive Government
- How many Americans trust the government in Washington to do what is right “just about always or most of the time” in September 2013: 19%
- Those who trust the “men and women … who either hold or are running for public office”: 46%
- Number of Americans who express a great deal or fair amount of trust in:
- Local government: 71%
- State government: 62%
- Federal government: 52%
- How many Americans trust in the ability of “the American people” to make judgments about political issues facing the country: 61%, declining every year since 2009
- Those who have trust and confidence in the federal government’s ability to handle international problems: 49%
- Number of Americans who feel “angry” at the federal government: 3 in 10, all-time high since first surveyed in 1997
Congress
- Percentage of Americans who say “the political system can work fine, it’s the members of Congress that are the problem” in October 2013: 58%
- Following the government shutdown, number of Americans who stated that Congress would work better if nearly every member was replaced next year: nearly half
- Those who think that even an entire overhaul of Congress would not make much difference: 4 in 10
- Those who think that “most members of Congress have good intentions, it’s the political system that is broken” in October 2013: 32%
Trust in Media
- Global trust in media (traditional, social, hybrid, owned, online search): 57% and rising
- The percentage of Americans who say they have “a great deal or fair amount of trust and confidence in the mass media”: 44% – the lowest level since first surveyed in 1997
- How many Americans see the mass media as too liberal: 46%
- As too conservative: 13%
- As “just about right”: 37%
- The number of Americans who see the press as fulfilling the role of political watchdog and believe press criticism of political leaders keeps them from doing things that should not be done: 68%
- The proportion of Americans who have “only a little/not at all” level of trust in Facebook to protect privacy and personal information: three in four
- In Google: 68%
- In their cell phone provider: 63%
Trust in Industry
- Global trust in business: 58%
- How much of the global public trusts financial institutions: 50%
- Proportion of the global public who consider themselves informed about the banking scandals: more than half
- Of those, how many Americans report they now trust banks less: almost half
- Number of respondents globally who say they trust tech companies to do what’s right: 77%, most trusted industry
- Number of consumers across eight markets who were “confident” or “somewhat confident” that the tech sector can provide long-term solutions to meet the world’s toughest challenges: 76%
Sources
- Edelman, “Edelman Trust Barometer 2013: Annual Global Study,” 2013.
- Gallup Poll, “In U.S., Political Trust in “American People” at New Low,” September 27, 2013.
- Gallup Poll, “Fewer Americans Than Ever Trust Gov’t to Handle Problems,” September 13, 2013.
- Gallup Poll, “Americans’ Trust in Government Generally Down This Year,” September 26, 2013.
- Gallup Poll, “In U.S., Trust in Media Recovers Slightly From All-Time Low,” September 19, 2013.
- Maassen, Paul, and Vasani, Dolar, “Only 17% of the population feel their governments listens to them,” The Guardian, October 31, 2013.
- OECD, “Government at a Glance 2013,” OECD Publishing, 2013 (Preliminary).
- Pedersen, Pete. “In Tech We Trust,” Edelman, January 25, 2013.
- Pew Research Center, “Trust in Government Nears Record Low, But Most Federal Agencies Are Viewed Favorably,” October 18, 2013.
- Pew Research Center, “Views of Government: Key Data Points,” October 22, 2013.
- Pew Research Center, “Amid Criticism, Support for Media’s ‘Watchdog’ Role Stands Out,” August 8, 2013.
- USA Today/Princeton Survey Research Poll, “Poll: Nearly half say replace everyone in Congress,” October 21, 2013.
- Reason Rupe Public Opinion Survey, “September 2013 Topline Results,” September 2013.
Organizational Innovation in Public Services: Forms and Governance
New edited book by Pekka Valkama, Stephen James Bailey, Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko: “Reforming public services has become an integral part of instituting austerity measures as governments around the world struggle to balance the books in the wake of the financial crisis. Vital public services and government departments have been given the seemingly impossible task of delivering better services to the public while receiving less funding. This excellent and highly original collection brings together contributors from across the globe to explore and analyse innovational methods aimed at helping overburdened and under-funded public services cope with the demands of austerity and continue to deliver high quality services to the public. In the process this book develops new theoretical models and analyses case studies to provide an important and timely insight into how to reform public services across the globe…
Table of Contents:
1. Contexts and Challenges of Organisational Innovation in Public Services
2. Supporting Organisational Innovation in the Public Sector: Creative Councils in England
3. Analysis Organisational Innovation in Public Services: Conceptual and Theoretical Issues
4. Agentifcation Processes and Agency Governance: Organisational Innovation at a Global Scale?
5. Corporatisation as Organisational Innovation
6. Mutulatisation and Public Services
7. Organisational Innovation in Public Procurement in Scotland: The Scottish Futures Trust (SFT)
8. Outsourcing Public Services: Process Innovation in Dutch Municipalities
9. Governance of Public Service Companies: Australian Cases and Examples
10. Governance of Social Enterprises as Producers of Public Services
11. Championing and Governing UK Public Service Mutuals
12. Improving Governance Arrangements for Academic Entrepreneurships
13. Governance and Accountability of Joint Ventures: A Swedish Case Study
14. Contractual Governance: A Social Learning Perspective
15. Lessons for the Governance of Organisational Innovations”
Findings from the emerging field of Transparency Research
Tiago Peixoto: “HEC Paris has just hosted the 3rd Global Conference on Transparency Research, and they have made the list of accepted papers available. …
As one goes through the papers, it is clear that unlike most of the open government space, when it comes to research, transparency is treated less as a matter of technology and formats and more as a matter of social and political institutions. And that is a good thing.”
This year’s papers are listed below:
- Hannes Meissner: “Functioning , Effects and Perspectives of Transparency Initiatives – The Example of Azerbaijan“
- Luis Emilio Cuenca Botey & Laure Célérier: ‘Participatory Budgeting: a Bourdieusian Interpretation‘
- Tsvetelina Yordanova: ‘Transparency in Foreign Policy and International Relations‘
- Maarten Hillebrandt: ‘A Map without a Compass? Evaluating the Transparency-Democracy Fit in the Council of the EU‘
- Silvana Fumega: ‘Opening the Cities: Open Government Data in Local Governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay – Buenos Aires Preliminary Report‘
- Leopold Ringel: ‘The Uneasy Relationship of Organizations and Expectations of Transparency – A Theoretical Framework‘
- Carolyn Ball: ‘Indicators of Transparency and Trustworthiness in Nonprofits – Should we trust Nonprofits?‘
- Omar E. Hawthorne: ‘Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index: “best flawed”measure on Corruption?‘
- James H. Irving & Kimberley J. Smith: ‘Off-balance Sheet Arrangements, Transparency and the 2007-2009 Financial Crisis‘
- Robert Podolnjak & Đorđe Gardašević: ‘Great Expectations: The New Croatian Freedom of Information Act‘
- Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen & Jyldyz Kasymova: ‘A tale of empowering versus informing: a qualitative comparison of environmental transparency in New Jersey and the Netherlands‘
- Albert van Zyl: “Greasing the Wheels of the Accountability System: How Civil Society Organizations close the Gap between Transparency and Accountability“
- Claudia Cappelli, Renata Mendes de Araujo & Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite: “Managing Transparency guided by a Maturity Model“
- Jenny de Fine Licht:”The Effect of Transparency in Decision Making for Public Perceptions of Legitimacy in different Policy-areas“
- Ezekiel Mbitha Mwenzwa: “Transparency and Accountability in Kenya: A Review of the Institutional Framework for Public Service Delivery“
- Michelle Gallant: “Lawyers and Money Laundering Regulation: Testing the Limits of the Secrecy in Canada“
- Mark Aspinwall: “Transparency and rule of Law: Conceptualizing the relationship“
- Albert J. Meijer: “The History of Transparency: Analysing the Long-term Socio-Political Construction of Transparency in the Netherlands“
- Oana B. Albu & Mikkel Flyverbom: “Categories and Dimensions of Organizational Transparency“
- Frankie Schram: “The relationship between the protection of privacy, the processing of personal data and the FOI-legislation in Belgium“
- Laurent Bibard: “On Transparency and the Common Good: A Temperate Approach“
- Mark Fenster: “Transparency as a Theory of Communication“
- Lars Thøger Christensen & George Cheney: “Peering into Transparency – Ideals Proxies and Organizational Practices“
- Abiola O. Makinwa: “Transparency and Corruption: Bypassing the Compromised State“
- Sandrine Baume: “Does Transparency Engender the Confidence of the Governed? A Contribution to Political Thought“
- Milena Mihaylova: “Implementation of the Concept of Transparency by EU Institutions: Access to documents“
- Prashant Sharma: “Turbid Transparency: The Making of the Right to Information Act in India“
- Rodrigo Mora Ortega: “Strategic Litigation on Access to Public Employees’ e-mails in Chile: putting things right?“
- Atina Krajewska: “In Search of the Holy Grail of Transparent and Coherent Global Health Law“
- Megan Donaldson: “Transparency and the Construction of a Global Public: Formal Transparency Policies in the Multilateral Development Banks“
- Benjamin Greer & Jeffery G. Purvis: “Human Trafficking Corporate Supply Chain Transparency: How best to legislatively approach disclosure“
- Imelda Maher: “Transparency and Networks: Accounting for Governance in the Competition Sphere“
- Benjamin Worthy: “David Cameron’s Transparency Revolution?
- Mikkel Flyverbom & Christina Garsten: “The sway of (big) data – calculations and advocacy in the name of transparency“
- Alon Peled: “Effective Openness – The Role of Open Data 2.0 in a wider Transparency Program“
- Gregory Michener and Benjamin Worthy, “From Fishing to Experimentation: Transparency as Information Gathering – A Typology and Framework for Analysis“
- Harmen H. P. Groenhart: “From Punishment to reward: Shifting perspectives on public media accountability“
The GovLab Academy: A Community and Platform for Learning and Teaching Governance Innovations
Press Release: “Today the Governance Lab (The GovLab) launches The GovLab Academy at the Open Government Partnership Annual Meeting in London.
Available at www.thegovlabacademy.org, the Academy is a free online community for those wanting to teach and learn how to solve public problems and improve lives using innovations in governance. A partnership between The GovLab at New York University and MIT Media Lab’s Online Learning Initiative, the site launching today offers curated videos, podcasts, readings and activities designed to enable the purpose driven learner to deepen his or her practical knowledge at her own pace.
The GovLab Academy is funded by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “The GovLab Academy addresses a growing need among policy makers at all levels – city, federal and global – to leverage advances in technology to govern differently,” says Carol Coletta, Vice President of Community and National Initiatives at the Knight Foundation. “By connecting the latest technological innovations to a community of willing mentors, the Academy has the potential to catalyze more experimentation in a sector that badly needs it.”
Initial topics include using data to improve policymaking and cover the role of big data, urban analytics, smart disclosure and open data in governance. A second track focuses on online engagement and includes practical strategies for using crowdsourcing to solicit ideas, organize distributed work and gather data. The site features both curated content drawn from a variety of sources and original interviews with innovators from government, civil society, the tech industry, the arts and academia talking about their work around the world implementing innovations in practice, what worked and what didn’t, to improve real people’s lives.
Beth Noveck, Founder and Director of The GovLab, describes its mission: “The Academy is an experiment in peer production where every teacher is a learner and every learner a teacher. Consistent with The GovLab’s commitment to measuring what works, we want to measure our success by the people contributing as well as consuming content. We invite everyone with ideas, stories, insights and practical wisdom to contribute to what we hope will be a thriving and diverse community for social change”.”
New U.S. Open Government National Action Plan
The White House Fact Sheet: “In September 2011, President Obama joined the leaders of seven other nations in announcing the launch of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance.
Two years later, OGP has grown to 60 countries that have made more than 1000 commitments to improve the governance of more than two billion people around the globe. OGP is now a global community of government reformers, civil society leaders, and business innovators working together to develop and implement ambitious open government reforms and advance good governance…
Today at the OGP summit in London, the United States announced a new U.S. Open Government National Action Plan that includes six ambitious new commitments that will advance these efforts even further. Those commitments include expanding open data, modernizing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), increasing fiscal transparency, increasing corporate transparency, advancing citizen engagement and empowerment, and more effectively managing public resources.
Expand Open Data: Open Data fuels innovation that grows the economy and advances government transparency and accountability. Government data has been used by journalists to uncover variations in hospital billings, by citizens to learn more about the social services provided by charities in their communities, and by entrepreneurs building new software tools to help farmers plan and manage their crops. Building upon the successful implementation of open data commitments in the first U.S. National Action Plan, the new Plan will include commitments to make government data more accessible and useful for the public, such as reforming how Federal agencies manage government data as a strategic asset, launching a new version of Data.gov, and expanding agriculture and nutrition data to help farmers and communities.
Modernize the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): The FOIA encourages accountability through transparency and represents a profound national commitment to open government principles. Improving FOIA administration is one of the most effective ways to make the U.S. Government more open and accountable. Today, the United States announced a series of commitments to further modernize FOIA processes, including launching a consolidated online FOIA service to improve customers’ experience and making training resources available to FOIA professionals and other Federal employees.
Increase Fiscal Transparency: The Administration will further increase the transparency of where Federal tax dollars are spent by making federal spending data more easily available on USASpending.gov; facilitating the publication of currently unavailable procurement contract information; and enabling Americans to more easily identify who is receiving tax dollars, where those entities or individuals are located, and how much they receive.
Increase Corporate Transparency: Preventing criminal organizations from concealing the true ownership and control of businesses they operate is a critical element in safeguarding U.S. and international financial markets, addressing tax avoidance, and combatting corruption in the United States and abroad. Today we committed to take further steps to enhance transparency of legal entities formed in the United States.
Advance Citizen Engagement and Empowerment: OGP was founded on the principle that an active and robust civil society is critical to open and accountable governance. In the next year, the Administration will intensify its efforts to roll back and prevent new restrictions on civil society around the world in partnership with other governments, multilateral institutions, the philanthropy community, the private sector, and civil society. This effort will focus on improving the legal and regulatory framework for civil society, promoting best practices for government-civil society collaboration, and conceiving of new and innovative ways to support civil society globally.
More Effectively Manage Public Resources: Two years ago, the Administration committed to ensuring that American taxpayers receive every dollar due for the extraction of the nation’s natural resources by committing to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). We continue to work toward achieving full EITI compliance in 2016. Additionally, the U.S. Government will disclose revenues on geothermal and renewable energy and discuss future disclosure of timber revenues.
For more information on OGP, please visit www.opengovpartnership.org or follow @opengovpart on Twitter.”
See also White House Plans a Single FOIA Portal Across Government