Alicia Rouault at Data-Smart City Solutions: “America’s shrinking cities face a tide of disinvestment, abandonment, vacancy, and a shift toward deconstruction and demolition followed by strategic reinvestment, rightsizing, and a host of other strategies designed to renew once-great cities. Thriving megacity regions are experiencing rapid growth in population, offering a different challenge for city planners to redefine density, housing, and transportation infrastructure. As cities shrink and grow, policymakers are increasingly called to respond to these changes by making informed, data-driven decisions. What is the role of the citizen in this process of collecting and understanding civic data?
Writing for Forbes in “Open Sourcing the Neighborhood,” Professor of Sociology at Columbia University Saskia Sassen calls for “open source urbanism” as an antidote to the otherwise top-down smart city movement. This form of urbanism involves opening traditional verticals of information within civic and governmental institutions. Citizens can engage with and understand the logic behind decisions by exploring newly opened administrative data. Beyond opening these existing datasets, Sassen points out that citizen experts hold invaluable institutional memory that can serve as an alternate and legitimate resource for policymakers, economists, and urban planners alike.
In 2012, we created a digital platform called LocalData to address the production and use of community-generated data in a municipal context. LocalData is a digital mapping service used globally by universities, non-profits, and municipal governments to gather and understand data at a neighborhood scale. In contrast to traditional Census or administrative data, which is produced by a central agency and collected infrequently, our platform provides a simple method for both community-based organizations and municipal employees to gather real-time data on project-specific indicators: property conditions, building inspections, environmental issues or community assets. Our platform then visualizes data and exports it into formats integrated with existing systems in government to seamlessly provide accurate and detailed information for decision makers.
LocalData began as a project in Detroit, Michigan where the city was tackling a very real lack of standard, updated, and consistent condition information on the quality and status of vacant and abandoned properties. Many of these properties were owned by the city and county due to high foreclosure rates. One of Detroit’s strategies for combating crime and stabilizing neighborhoods is to demolish property in a targeted fashion. This strategy serves as a political win as much as providing an effective way to curb the secondary effects of vacancy: crime, drug use, and arson. Using LocalData, the city mapped critical corridors of emergent commercial property as an analysis tool for where to place investment, and documented thousands of vacant properties to understand where to target demolition.
Vacancy is not unique to the Midwest. Following our work with the Detroit Mayor’s office and planning department, LocalData has been used in dozens of other cities in the U.S. and abroad. Currently the Smart Chicago Collaborative is using LocalData to conduct a similar audit of vacant and abandoned property in southwest Chicagos. Though an effective tool for capturing building-specific information, LocalData has also been used to capture behavior and movement of goods. The MIT Megacities Logistics Lab has used LocalData to map and understand the intensity of urban supply chains by interviewing shop owners and mapping delivery routes in global megacities in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil and the U.S. The resulting information has been used with analytical models to help both city officials and companies to design better city logistics policies and operations….”
Open data and transparency: a look back at 2013
Web-based technology continued to offer increasing numbers of people the ability to share standardised data and statistics to demand better governance and strengthen accountability. 2013 seemed to herald the moment that the open data/transparency movement entered the mainstream.
Yet for those who have long campaigned on the issue, the call was more than just a catchphrase, it was a unique opportunity. “If we do get a global drive towards open data in relation to development or anything else, that would be really transformative and it’s quite rare to see such bold statements at such an early stage of the process. I think it set the tone for a year in which transparency was front and centre of many people’s agendas,” says David Hall Matthews, of Publish What You Fund.
This year saw high level discussions translated into commitments at the policy level. David Cameron used the UK’s presidency of the G8 to trigger international action on the three Ts (tax, trade and transparency) through the IF campaign. The pledge at Lough Erne, in Scotland, reaffirmed the commitment to the Busan open data standard as well as the specific undertaking that all G8 members would implement International Aid Transparency Index (IATI) standards by the end of 2015.
2013 was a particularly good year for the US Millenium Challenge Corporation (MCC) which topped the aid transparency index. While at the very top MCC and UK’s DfID were examples of best practice, there was still much room for improvement. “There is a really long tail of agencies who are not really taking transparency at all, yet. This includes important donors, the whole of France and the whole of Japan who are not doing anything credible,” says Hall-Matthews.
Yet given the increasing number of emerging and ‘frontier‘ markets whose growth is driven in large part by wealth derived from natural resources, 2013 saw a growing sense of urgency for transparency to be applied to revenues from oil, gas and mineral resources that may far outstrip aid. In May, the new Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative standard (EITI) was adopted, which is said to be far broader and deeper than its previous incarnation.
Several countries have done much to ensure that transparency leads to accountability in their extractive industries. In Nigeria, for example, EITI reports are playing an important role in the debate about how resources should be managed in the country. “In countries such as Nigeria they’re taking their commitment to transparency and EITI seriously, and are going beyond disclosing information but also ensuring that those findings are acted upon and lead to accountability. For example, the tax collection agency has started to collect more of the revenues that were previously missing,” says Jonas Moberg, head of the EITI International Secretariat.
But just the extent to which transparency and open data can actually deliver on its revolutionary potential has also been called into question. Governments and donors agencies can release data but if the power structures within which this data is consumed and acted upon do not shift is there really any chance of significant social change?
The complexity of the challenge is illustrated by the case of Mexico which, in 2014, will succeed Indonesia as chair of the Open Government Partnership. At this year’s London summit, Mexico’s acting civil service minister, spoke of the great strides his country has made in opening up the public procurement process, which accounts for around 10% of GDP and is a key area in which transparency and accountability can help tackle corruption.
There is, however, a certain paradox. As SOAS professor, Leandro Vergara Camus, who has written extensively on peasant movements in Mexico, explains: “The NGO sector in Mexico has more of a positive view of these kinds of processes than the working class or peasant organisations. The process of transparency and accountability have gone further in urban areas then they have in rural areas.”…
With increasing numbers of organisations likely to jump on the transparency bandwagon in the coming year the greatest challenge is using it effectively and adequately addressing the underlying issues of power and politics.
Top 2013 transparency publications
Open data, transparency and international development, The North South Institute
Data for development: The new conflict resource?, Privacy International
The fix-rate: a key metric for transparency and accountability, Integrity Action
Making UK aid more open and transparent, DfID
Getting a seat at the table: Civil Society advocacy for budget transparency in “untransparent” countries, International Budget Partnership
The dates that mattered
23-24 May: New Extractive Industries Transparency Index standard adopted
30 May: Post 2015 high level report calling for a ‘data revolution’ is published
17-18 June: UK premier, David Cameron, campaigns for tax, trade and transparency during the G8
24 October: US Millenium Challenge Corporation tops the aid transparency index”
30 October – 1 November: Open Government Partnership in London gathers civil society, governments and data experts
Buenos Aires, A Pocket of Civic Innovation in Argentina
Rebecca Chao in TechPresident: “…In only a few years, the government, civil society and media in Buenos Aires have actively embraced open data. The Buenos Aires city government has been publishing data under a creative commons license and encouraging civic innovation through hackathons. NGOs have launched a number of tech-driven tools and Argentina’s second largest newspaper, La Nación, has published several hard-hitting data journalism projects. The result is a fledgling but flourishing open data culture in Buenos Aires, in a country that has not yet adopted a freedom of information law.
A Wikipedia for Open Government Data
In late August of this year, the Buenos Aires government declared a creative commons license for all of its digital content, which allows it be used for free, like Wikipedia content, with proper attribution. This applies to their new open data catalog that allows users to visualize the data, examine apps that have been created using the data and even includes a design lab for posting app ideas. Launched only in March, the government has already published fairly substantial data sets, including the salaries of city officials. The website also embodies the principals of openness in its design; it is built with open-source software and its code is available for reuse via GitHub.
“We were the first city in Argentina doing open government,” Rudi Borrmann tells techPresident over Skype. Borrmann is the Director of Buenos Aires’ Open Government Initiative. Previously, he was the social media editor at the city’s New Media Office but he also worked for many years in digital media…
While the civil society and media sectors have forged ahead in using open data, Borrmann tells techPresident that up in the ivory tower, openness to open data has been lagging. “Only technical schools are starting to create areas focused on working on open data,” he says.
In an interview with NYU’s govlab, Borrmann explained the significance of academia in using and pushing for more open data. “They have the means, the resources, the methodology to analyze…because in government you don’t have that time to analyze,” he said.
Another issue with open data is getting other branches of the government to modernize. Borrmann says that a lot of the Open Government’s work is done behind the scenes. “In general, you have very poor IT infrastructure all over Latin America” that interferes with the gathering and publishing of data, he says. “So in some cases it’s not about publishing or not publishing,” but about “having robust infrastructure for the information.”
It seems that the behind the scenes work is bearing some fruit. Just last week, on Dec. 6, the team behind the Buenos Aires open data website launched an impressive, interactive timeline, based on a similar timelapse map developed by a 2013 Knight-Mozilla Fellow, Noah Veltman. Against faded black and white photos depicting the subway from different decades over the last century, colorful pops of the Subterráneo lines emerge alongside factoids that go all the way back to 1910.”
Phone Apps Help Government, Others Counter Violence Against Women
NextGov: “Smart and mobile phones have helped authorities solve crimes from beatings that occurred during the London riots to the Boston Marathon bombing. A panel of experts gathered on Monday said the devices can also help reduce and combat rapes and other gender-based violence.
Smartphone apps and text messaging services proliferated in India following a sharp rise in reported gang rapes, including the brutal 2012 rape and murder of a 23-year-old medical student in Delhi, according to panelists at the Wilson Center event on gender-based violence and innovative technologies.
The apps fall into four main categories, said Alex Dehgan, chief data scientist at the United States Agency for International Development: apps that aid sexual assault and domestic violence victims, apps that empower women to fight back against gender-based violence, apps focused on advocacy and apps that crowdsource and map cases of sexual assault.
The final category of apps is largely built on the Ushahidi platform, which was developed to track reports of missing people following the 2010 Haiti earthquake.
One of the apps, Safecity, offers real-time alerts about sexual assaults across India to help women identify unsafe areas.
Similar apps have been launched in Egypt and Syria, Dehgan said. In lower-tech countries the systems often operate using text messages rather than smartphone apps so they’re more widely accessible.
One of the greatest impediments to using mobile technology to reduce gender violence is third world nations in which women often don’t have access to their own mobile or smartphones and rural areas in the U.S. and abroad in which there is limited service or broadband, Christopher Burns, USAID’s team leader for mobile access, said.
Burns suggested international policymakers should align plans for expanding broadband and mobile service with crowdsourced reports of gender violence.
“One suggestion for policy makers to focus on is to take a look at the crowd maps we’ve talked about today and see where there are greater incidences of gender-based violence and violence against women,” he said. “In all likelihood, those pockets probably don’t have the connectivity, don’t have the infrastructure [and] don’t have the capacity in place for survivors to benefit from those tools.”
One tool that’s been used in the U.S. is Circle of 6, an app for women on college campuses to automatically draw on friends when they think they’re in danger. The app allows women to pick six friends they can automatically text if they think they’re in a dangerous situation, asking them to call with an excuse for them to leave.
The app is designed to look like a game so it isn’t clear women are using their phones to seek help, said Nancy Schwartzman, executive director of Tech 4 Good, which developed the app.
Schwartzman has heard reports of gay men on college campuses using the app as well, she said. The military has been in contact with Tech 4 Good about developing a version of the app to combat sexual assault on military bases, she said.”
The Age of Democracy
Xavier Marquez at Abandoned Footnotes: “This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases.
Here is a figure I’ve been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project). The figure shows all countries that have ever had some kind of identifiable constitutional document (broadly defined) that mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (in any context – new constitution, amendment, interim constitution, bill of rights, etc.), arranged from earliest to latest mention. Each symbol represents a “constitutional event” – a new constitution adopted, an amendment passed, a constitution suspended, etc. – and colored symbols indicate that the text associated with the constitutional event in question mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic”…
The earliest mentions of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional document occurred in Switzerland and France in 1848, as far as I can tell.[1] Participatory Switzerland and revolutionary France look like obvious candidates for being the first countries to embrace the “democratic” self-description; yet the next set of countries to embrace this self-description (until the outbreak of WWI) might seem more surprising: they are all Latin American or Caribbean (Haiti), followed by countries in Eastern Europe (various bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain), Russia, and Cuba. Indeed, most “core” countries in the global system did not mention democracy in their constitutions until much later, if at all, despite many of them having long constitutional histories; even French constitutions after the fall of the Second Republic in 1851 did not mention “democracy” until after WWII. In other words, the idea of democracy as a value to be publicly affirmed seems to have caught on first not in the metropolis but in the periphery. Democracy is the post-imperial and post-revolutionary public value par excellence, asserted after national liberation (as in most of the countries that became independent after WWII) or revolutions against hated monarchs (e.g., Egypt 1956, Iran 1979, both of them the first mentions of democracy in these countries but not their first constitutions).
Today only 16 countries have ever failed to mention their “democratic” character in their constitutional documents (Australia, Brunei, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Monaco, Nauru, Oman, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Vatican City).[2] And no country that has ever mentioned “democracy” in an earlier constitutional document fails to mention it in its current constitutional documents (though some countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries went back and forth – mentioning democracy in one constitution, not mentioning it in the next). Indeed, after WWII the first mention of democracy in constitutions tended to be contemporaneous with the first post-independence constitution of the country; and with time, even countries with old and settled constitutional traditions seem to be more and more likely to mention “democracy” or “democratic” in some form as amendments or bills of rights accumulate (e.g., Belgium in 2013, New Zealand in 1990, Canada in 1982, Finland in 1995). The probability of a new constitution mentioning “democracy” appears to be asymptotically approaching 1. To use the language of biology, the democratic “meme” has nearly achieved “fixation” in the population, despite short-term fluctuations, and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular correlation between a state calling itself democratic and actually being democratic, either today or in the past.[3]
Though the actual measured level of democracy around the world has trended upwards (with some ups and downs) over the last two centuries, I don’t think this is the reason why the idea of democracy has achieved near-universal recognition in public documents. Countries do not first become democratic and then call themselves democracies; if anything, most mentions of democracy seem to be rather aspirational, if not entirely cynical. (Though many constitutions that mention democracy were also produced by people who seem to have been genuinely committed to some such ideal, even if the regimes that eventually developed under these constitutions were not particularly democratic). What we see, instead, is a broad process in which earlier normative claims about the basis of authority – monarchical, imperial, etc. – get almost completely replaced, regardless of the country’s cultural context, by democratic claims, regardless of the latter’s effectiveness as an actual basis for authority or the existence of working mechanisms for participation or vertical accountability. (These democratic claims to authority also sometimes coexist in uneasy tension with other claims to authority based on divine revelation, ideological knowledge, or tradition, invented or otherwise; consider the Chinese constitution‘s claims about the “people’s democratic dictatorship” led by the CCP).
I thus suspect the conquest of ideological space by “democratic” language did not happen just because democratic claims to authority (especially in the absence of actual democracy) have proved more persuasive than other claims to authority. Rather, I think the same processes that resulted in the emergence of modern national communities – e.g. the rituals associated with nationalism, which tended to “sacralize” a particular kind of imagined community – led to the symbolic production of the nation not only as the proper object of government but also as its proper active agent (the people, actively ruling itself), regardless of whether or not “the people” had any ability to rule or even to exercise minimal control over the rulers.[4] There thus seems to have been a kind of co-evolution of symbols of nationality and symbols of democracy, helped along by the practice/ritual of drafting constitutions and approving them through plebiscites or other forms of mass politics, a ritual that already makes democratic assumptions about “social contracts.” The question is whether the symbolic politics of democracy eventually has any sort of impact on actual institutions. But more on this later….”
DataViva: a Big Data Engine for the Brazilian Economy
Piece by André Victor dos Santos Barrence and Cesar A. Hidalgo: “The current Internet paradigm in which one can search about anything and retrieve information is absolutely empowering. We can browse files, websites and indexes and effortlessly reach good amount of information. Google, for instance, was explicitly built on a library analogy available to everyone. However, it is a world where information that should be easily accessible is still hidden in unfriendly databases, and that the best-case scenario is finding few snippets of information embedded within the paragraphs of a report. But is this the way it should be? Or is this just the world we are presently stuck with?
The last decade has been particularly marked by an increasing hype on big data and analytics, mainly fueled by those who are interested in writing narratives on the topic but not necessarily coding about it, even when data itself is not the problem.
Let’s take the case of governments. Governments have plenty of data and in many cases it is actually public (at least in principle). Governments “know” how many people work in every occupation, in every industry and in every location; they know their salaries, previous employers and education history. From a pure data perspective all that is embedded in tax, social security records or annual registrations. From a more pragmatic perspective, it is still inaccessible and hidden even when it is legally open the public. We live in a world where the data is there, but where the statistics and information are not.
The state government of Minas Gerais in Brazil (3rd economy the country, territory larger than France and 20 millions inhabitants) made an important step in that direction by releasing DataViva.info, a platform that opens data for exports and occupations for the entire formal sector of the Brazilian economy through more than 700 million interactive visualizations. Instead of poorly designed tables and interfaces, it guides users to answer questions or freely discover locations, industries and occupations in Brazil that are of interest to them. DataViva allows users to explore simple questions such as the evolution of exports in the last decade for each of the 5,567 municipalities in the country, or highly specific queries, for instance, the average salaries paid to computer scientists working in the software development industry in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas.
DataViva’s visualizations are built on the idea that the industrial and economic activity development of locations is highly path dependent. This means that locations are more likely to be successful at developing industries and activities that are related to the ones already existing, since it indicates the existence of labor inputs, and other capabilities, that are specific and that can often be redeployed to a few related industries and activities. Thus, it informs the processes by which opportunities can be explored and prospective pathways for greater prosperity.
The idea that information is key for the functioning of economies is at least as old as Friedrich Hayek’s seminal paper The Use of Knowledge in Society from 1945. According to Hayek, prices help coordinate economic activities by providing information about the wants and needs of goods and services. Yet, the price information can only serve as a signal as long as people know those prices. Maybe the salaries for engineers in the municipality of Betim (Minas Gerais) are excellent and indicate a strong need for them? But who would have known how many engineers are there in Betim and what are their average salaries?
But the remaining question is: why is Minas Gerais making all of this public data easily available? More than resorting to the contemporary argument of open government Minas understands this is extremely valuable information for investors searching for business opportunities, entrepreneurs pursuing new ventures or workers looking for better career prospects. Lastly, the ultimate goal of DataViva is to provide a common ground for open discussions, moving away from the information deprived idea of central planning and into a future where collaborative planning might become the norm. It is a highly creative attempt to renew public governance for the 21st century.
Despite being a relatively unknown state outside of Brazil, by releasing a platform as DataViva, Minas is providing a strong signal about where in world governments are really pushing forward innovation rather than simply admiring and copying solutions that used to come from trendsetters in the developed world. It seems like real innovation isn’t necessarily taking place in Washington, Paris or London anymore.”
El Hacker Cívico: Civic-Minded Techies Gain Sway with Government in Mexico and Beyond
Theresa Bradley in the Huffington Post: “A handful of young hackers looked up from their laptops when Jorge Soto burst into the upstairs office they shared in an old Mexico City house one morning last spring. Soto wanted to be sure they’d seen the front-page headline then flying across Twitter: Mexico’s congress was set to spend 115 million pesos (then US $9.3 million) on a mobile app that would let 500 lawmakers track legislative affairs from their cellphones — more than a hundred times what such software could cost.
To many in Mexico, what became known as the “millionaire’s app” was just the latest in an old story of bloated state spending; but Soto and his colleagues saw a chance to push a new approach instead. In two days, they’d covered their white office walls with ideas for a cheaper alternative and launched an online contest that drew input from more than 150 software developers and designers, producing five open-source options in two weeks.
Lawmakers soon insisted they’d never known about the original app, which had been quietly approved by a legislative administrative board; and a congressional spokesman rushed to clarify that the project had been suspended. Invited to pitch their alternatives to Congress, a half-dozen young coders took the podium in a sloping auditorium at the legislature. The only cost for their work: a 11,500-peso (then US $930) prize for the winner.
“We didn’t just ‘angry tweet,’ we actually did something,” Soto, a 28-year-old IT engineer and social entrepreneur, said at the time. “Citizens need to understand democracy beyond voting every few years, and government needs to understand that we’re willing to participate.”
Seven months later, Mexico’s president appears to have heard them, hiring Soto and nine others to launch one of the world’s first federal civic innovation offices, part of a broader national digital agenda to be formally unveiled today. Building on a model pioneered in a handful of U.S. cities since 2010, Mexico’s civic innovation team aims to integrate so-called “civic hackers” with policy experts already inside government — to not only build better technology, but to seed a more tech-minded approach to problem-solving across federal processes and policy. What began as outside activism is slowly starting to creep into government….Mexico’s app incident reflects a common problem in that process: wasteful spending by non-techie bureaucrats who don’t seem to know what they’re buying — at best, out-of-touch; at worst, party to crony contracting; and overseen, if at all, by officials even less tech-savvy than themselves. Citizens, in contrast, are adopting new technologies faster than much of the public sector, growing the gap between the efficiency and accountability that they expect as private consumers, and the bureaucratic, buggy experience that government still provides.
To break that cycle, a movement of community-minded “civic hackers” like Soto has stepped into the void, offering their own low-cost tools to make government more efficient, collaborative and transparent….The platform, named Codeando Mexico, has since hosted more than 30 civic-themed challenges.
With Soto as an advisor, the team seized on the scandal surrounding the “millionare’s app” to formally launch in March, calling for help “taking down the Mexican tech mafia” – a play on the big, slow software makers that dominate public contracting around the world. In that, Codeando Mexico tackled a central civic-tech target: procurement, widely considered one of the public spheres ripest for reform. Its goal, according to Wilhelmy, was to replace clueless or “compadrismo” crony contracting with micro-procurement, swapping traditional suppliers for leaner teams of open-source coders who can release and revise what they build in near real-time. “It’s like the Robin Hood of procurement: You take money that’s being spent on big projects and bring it to the developer community, giving them an opportunity to work on stuff that matters,” he said. “There’s a whole taboo around software: government thinks it has to be expensive. We’re sending a message that there are different ways to do this; it shouldn’t cost so much.”
The maker of the costly congressional app in question, Mexico City consultancy Pulso Legislativo, insisted last spring that its hefty price tag didn’t reflect its software as much as the aggregated data and analysis behind it. But critics were quick to note that Mexican lawmakers already had access to similar data compiled by at least five publicly-funded research centers – not to mention from INFOPAL, a congressional stats system with its own mobile application. With Mexico then in the midst of a contentious telecom reform, the public may’ve been especially primed to pounce on any hint of corruption or wasteful IT spending. Codeando Mexico saw an opening.
So it was that a crew of young coders, almost all under 23-years-old, traipsed into the legislature, a motley mix of suits and skinny jeans, one-by-one pitching a panel of judges that included the head of the congressional Science and Technology Committee. Drawing on public data culled by local transparency groups, their Android and iOS apps – including the winner, “Diputados” — allowed citizens to track and opine on pending bills and to map and contact their representatives — still a relatively new concept in Mexico’s young democracy.”
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.”
Citizen participation in municipal budgeting: Origins, practices, impact
Leighton Walter Kille: “Citizen participation in governance is generally limited to the ballot box in the United States: If you don’t like what the last year’s crop of politicians is up to, throw them out of office next year. Residents almost never have a say on budget decisions beyond holding protests at press conferences or picketing city hall. Appointed community boards are found in New York and other municipalities, but their roles are strictly advisory. Still, more participation can lead to greater perceptions of procedural fairness and support for government, some research has shown.
For residents of other countries, more options exist. A practice known as “participatory budgeting” (PB) allows citizens to determine how some government funds are used. As detailed in a 2010 study by political scientist Yves Sintomer of the University of Paris and others, “Learning from the South: Participatory Budgeting Worldwide,” it was first developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the late 1980s. Residents took part in local and citywide assemblies to help establish spending priorities for a select portion of the city’s spending budget. Larger issues such as taxation, debt service and pensions were specifically excluded. (A 2003 study from the Inter-American Development Bank and Harvard University goes deep into the specifics of the Brazilian experience.)
Since this beginning, participatory budgeting has spread to hundreds of other cities around the world, Sintomer and his team state: “There are between 511 and 920 participatory budgets in Latin America: more than the half of the participatory budgets in the world, where we can count between 795 and 1,469 experiences.” The range of numbers is an indication of how widely definition of participatory budgeting varies. Interest in the United States has been growing, with a number of New York council districts using the technique, as well as Chicago and Vallejo, California.
A 2013 paper in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, “The Struggle for a Voice: Tensions between Associations and Citizens in Participatory Budgeting,” notes that “the heterogeneous nature of the existing experiments calls into question even the possibility of defining [participatory budgeting].” Similarly, in a 2012 issue of the Journal of Public Deliberation dedicated to the issue, the authors note that “there is no standardized set of ‘best practices’ that governments are adopting, but there are a broader set of principles that are adapted by local governments to meet local circumstances.” Writing in the issue, Brian Wampler of Boise State University, states that there are four main principles: active citizen participation; increased citizen authority; improved governmental transparency; and reallocation of resources to improve social justice.
A 2013 study in the American Review of Public Administration, “Citizen Input in the Budget Process: When Does It Matter Most?” examines the impact of public participation on organizational effectiveness. The researchers, Hai (David) Guo and Milena I. Neshkova of Florida International University, used survey data from state departments of transportation to examine the effectiveness of citizen input at four different stages of the budgeting process: information sharing, budget discussion, budget decision and program assessment.
The findings of the study include:
- Citizen participation is positively correlated with higher organizational performance. “In general if a state DOT adopts more citizen input strategies in the budget process, it achieves better outcomes. In other words, other things held equal, more citizen participation in the budget process is associated with fewer poor-quality roads and less fatalities on state highways.”
- In terms of road condition, citizen participation makes a difference at all but the budget discussion stage.
- Overall, citizen input matters most at the information-sharing and program-assessment stages. Consequently, “public managers should seek public input at these stages not only because it is normatively desirable but also for the very practical reasons of achieving better performance. When conveyed at the information-sharing stage, citizens’ preferences can be taken into account by decision makers and incorporated into the budget priorities.”
13 ways to unlock the potential of open government
The Guardian: “Nine experts offer their thoughts on making open data initiatives work for all citizens…
Tiago Peixoto, open government specialist, The World Bank, Washington DC, US. @participatory
Open data is an enabler – not a guarantee – of good participation: Participation implies creating legitimate channels of communication between citizens and governments, and opening up data does not create that channel. We need to consider which structures enable us to know about citizens’ needs and preferences.
Both governments and civil society are responsible for connecting governments to the people: If we assume institutional or regulatory reforms are needed, then clearly governments (at both the legislative and executive level) should take a big part of the responsibility. After that, it is civil society’s role (and individual citizens) to further promote and strengthen those institutions….
Ben Taylor, open data consultant, Twaweza, UK and Tanzania. @mtega
We need to put people before data: The OGP Summit raised some interesting questions on open data and open government in developing countries. In a particular session discussing how to harness data to drive citizens engagement, the consensus was that this was the wrong way around. It should instead be reversed, putting the real, everyday needs of citizens first, and then asking how can we use data to help meet these.
Open government is not all about technology: Often people assume that open government means technology, but I think that’s wrong. For me, open government is a simple idea: it’s about making the nuts and bolts of how government works visible to citizens. Even open data isn’t always just about technology, for example postings on noticeboards and in newspapers are also valuable. Technology has a lot to offer, but it has limitations as well…
Juan M Casanueva, director, SocialTIC, Mexico City, Mexico. @jm_casanueva
Closed working cultures stifle open government initiatives: It is interesting to think about why governments struggle to open up. While closed systems tend to foster corruption and other perverse practices, most government officials also follow a pre-established closed culture that has become ingrained in their working practices. There are sometimes few incentives and high risks for government officials that want to make career in the public service and some also lack capacities to handle technology and citizen involvement. It is very interesting to see government officials that overcome these challenges actually benefiting politically for doing innovative citizen-centered actions. Unfortunately, that is too much of a risk at higher levels of government.
NGOs in Mexico are leading the way with access to information and citizen involvement: Sonora Ciudana recently opened the state’s health payroll and approached the public staff so that they could compare what they earn with the state expense reports. Pacto por Juarez has created grassroots transparency and accountability schools and even have a bus tour that goes around the city explaining the city’s budget and how it is being spent….”