Innovating for the Global South: New book offers practical insights

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Despite the vast wealth generated in the last half century, in today’s world inequality is worsening and poverty is becoming increasingly chronic. Hundreds of millions of people continue to live on less than $2 per day and lack basic human necessities such as nutritious food, shelter, clean water, primary health care, and education.
Innovating for the Global South: Towards an Inclusive Innovation Agenda, the latest book from Rotman-UTP Publishing and the first volume in the Munk Series on Global Affairs, offers fresh solutions for reducing poverty in the developing world. Highlighting the multidisciplinary expertise of the University of Toronto’s Global Innovation Group, leading experts from the fields of engineering, public health, medicine, management, and public policy examine the causes and consequences of endemic poverty and the challenges of mitigating its effects from the perspective of the world’s poorest of the poor.
Can we imagine ways to generate solar energy to run essential medical equipment in the countryside? Can we adapt information and communication technologies to provide up-to-the-minute agricultural market prices for remote farming villages? How do we create more inclusive innovation processes to hear the voices of those living in urban slums? Is it possible to reinvent a low-cost toilet that operates beyond the water and electricity grids?
Motivated by the imperatives of developing, delivering, and harnessing innovation in the developing world, Innovating for the Global South is essential reading for managers, practitioners, and scholars of development, business, and policy.
“As we see it, Innovating for the Global South is fundamentally about innovating scalable solutions that mitigate the effects of poverty and underdevelopment in the Global South. It is not about inventing some new gizmo for some untapped market in the developing world,” say Profs. Dilip Soman and Joseph Wong of the UofT, who are two of the editors of the volume.
The book is edited and also features contributions by three leading UofT thinkers who are tackling innovation in the global south from three different academic perspectives.

  • Dilip Soman is Corus Chair in Communication Strategy and a professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management.
  • Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs.
  • Joseph Wong is Ralph and Roz Halbert Professor of Innovation at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Canada Research Chair in Democratization, Health, and Development in the Department of Political Science.

The chapters in the book address the process of innovation from a number of vantage points.
Introduction: Rethinking Innovation – Joseph Wong and Dilip Soman
Chapter 1: Poverty, Invisibility, and Innovation – Joseph Wong
Chapter 2: Behaviourally Informed Innovation – Dilip Soman
Chapter 3: Appropriate Technologies for the Global South – Yu-Ling Cheng (University of Toronto, Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry) and Beverly Bradley (University of Toronto, Centre for Global Engineering)
Chapter 4: Globalization of Biopharmaceutical Innovation: Implications for Poor-Market Diseases – Rahim Rezaie (University of Toronto, Munk School of Global Affairs, Research Fellow)
Chapter 5: Embedded Innovation in Health – Anita M. McGahan (University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Associate Dean of Research), Rahim Rezaie and Donald C. Cole (University of Toronto, Dalla Lana School of Public Health)
Chapter 6: Scaling Up: The Case of Nutritional Interventions in the Global South – Ashley Aimone Phillips (Registered Dietitian), Nandita Perumal (University of Toronto, Doctoral Fellow, Epidemiology), Carmen Ho (University of Toronto, Doctoral Fellow, Political Science), and Stanley Zlotkin (University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children,Paediatrics, Public Health Sciences and Nutritional Sciences)
Chapter 7: New Models for Financing Innovative Technologies and Entrepreneurial Organizations in the Global South – Murray R. Metcalfe (University of Toronto, Centre for Global Engineering, Globalization)
Chapter 8: Innovation and Foreign Policy – Janice Gross Stein
Conclusion: Inclusive Innovation – Will Mitchell (University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, Strategic Management), Anita M. McGahan”

Selected Readings on Behavioral Economics: Nudges

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of behavioral economics was originally published in 2014.

The 2008 publication of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge ushered in a new era of behavioral economics, and since then, policy makers in the United States and elsewhere have been applying behavioral economics to the field of public policy. Like Smart Disclosure, behavioral economics can be used in the public sector to improve the decisionmaking ability of citizens without relying on regulatory interventions. In the six years since Nudge was published, the United Kingdom has created the Behavioural Insights Team (also known as the Nudge Unit), a cross-ministerial organization that uses behavioral economics to inform public policy, and the White House has recently followed suit by convening a team of behavioral economists to create a behavioral insights-driven team in the United States. Policymakers have been using behavioral insights to design more effective interventions in the fields of long term unemployment; roadway safety; enrollment in retirement plans; and increasing enrollment in organ donation registries, to name some noteworthy examples. The literature of this nascent field provides a look at the growing optimism in the potential of applying behavioral insights in the public sector to improve people’s lives.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

  • John Beshears, James Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian – The Importance of Default Options for Retirement Savings Outcomes: Evidence from the United States – a paper examining the role default options play in encouraging intelligent retirement savings decisionmaking.
  • Cabinet Office and Behavioural Insights Team, United Kingdom – Applying Behavioural Insights to Health – a paper outlining some examples of behavioral economics being applied to the healthcare landscape using cost-efficient interventions.
  • Matthew Darling, Saugato Datta and Sendhil Mullainathan – The Nature of the BEast: What Behavioral Economics Is Not – a paper discussing why control and behavioral economics are not as closely aligned as some think, reiterating the fact that the field is politically agnostic.
  • Antoinette Schoar and Saugato Datta – The Power of Heuristics – a paper exploring the concept of “heuristics,” or rules of thumb, which can provide helpful guidelines for pushing people toward making “reasonably good” decisions without a full understanding of the complexity of a situation.
  • Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein – Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness – an influential book describing the many ways in which the principles of behavioral economics can be and have been used to influence choices and behavior through the development of new “choice architectures.” 
  • U.K. Parliament Science and Technology Committee – Behaviour Change – an exploration of the government’s attempts to influence the behaviour of its citizens through nudges, with a focus on comparing the effectiveness of nudges to that of regulatory interventions.

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Beshears, John, James Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian. “The Importance of Default Options for Retirement Savings Outcomes: Evidence from the United States.” In Jeffrey R. Brown, Jeffrey B. Liebman and David A. Wise, editors, Social Security Policy in a Changing Environment, Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009. http://bit.ly/LFmC5s.

  • This paper examines the role default options play in pushing people toward making intelligent decisions regarding long-term savings and retirement planning.
  • Importantly, the authors provide evidence that a strategically oriented default setting from the outset is likely not enough to fully nudge people toward the best possible decisions in retirement savings. They find that the default settings in every major dimension of the savings process (from deciding whether to participate in a 401(k) to how to withdraw money at retirement) have real and distinct effects on behavior.

Cabinet Office and Behavioural Insights Team, United Kingdom. “Applying Behavioural Insights to Health.” December 2010. http://bit.ly/1eFP16J.

  • In this report, the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team does not attempt to “suggest that behaviour change techniques are the silver bullet that can solve every problem.” Rather, they explore a variety of examples where local authorities, charities, government and the private-sector are using behavioural interventions to encourage healthier behaviors.  
  • The report features case studies regarding behavioral insights ability to affect the following public health issues:
    • Smoking
    • Organ donation
    • Teenage pregnancy
    • Alcohol
    • Diet and weight
    • Diabetes
    • Food hygiene
    • Physical activity
    • Social care
  • The report concludes with a call for more experimentation and knowledge gathering to determine when, where and how behavioural interventions can be most effective in helping the public become healthier.

Darling, Matthew, Saugato Datta and Sendhil Mullainathan. “The Nature of the BEast: What Behavioral Economics Is Not.” The Center for Global Development. October 2013. https://bit.ly/2QytRmf.

  • In this paper, Darling, Datta and Mullainathan outline the three most pervasive myths that abound within the literature about behavioral economics:
    • First, they dispel the relationship between control and behavioral economics.  Although tools used within behavioral economics can convince people to make certain choices, the goal is to nudge people to make the choices they want to make. For example, studies find that when retirement savings plans change the default to opt-in rather than opt-out, more workers set up 401K plans. This is an example of a nudge that guides people to make a choice that they already intend to make.
    • Second, they reiterate that the field is politically agnostic. Both liberals and conservatives have adopted behavioral economics and its approach is neither liberal nor conservative. President Obama embraces behavioral economics but the United Kingdom’s conservative party does, too.
    • And thirdly, the article highlights that irrationality actually has little to do with behavioral economics. Context is an important consideration when one considers what behavior is rational and what behavior is not. Rather than use the term “irrational” to describe human beings, the authors assert that humans are “infinitely complex” and behavior that is often considered irrational is entirely situational.

Schoar, Antoinette and Saugato Datta. “The Power of Heuristics.” Ideas42. January 2014. https://bit.ly/2UDC5YK.

  • This paper explores the notion that being presented with a bevy of options can be desirable in many situations, but when making an intelligent decision requires a high-level understanding of the nuances of vastly different financial aid packages, for example, options can overwhelm. Heuristics (rules of thumb) provide helpful guidelines that “enable people to make ‘reasonably good’ decisions without needing to understand all the complex nuances of the situation.”
  • The underlying goal heuristics in the policy space involves giving people the type of “rules of thumb” that enable make good decisionmaking regarding complex topics such as finance, healthcare and education. The authors point to the benefit of asking individuals to remember smaller pieces of knowledge by referencing a series of studies conducted by psychologists Beatty and Kahneman that showed people were better able to remember long strings of numbers when they were broken into smaller segments.
  • Schoar and Datta recommend these four rules when implementing heuristics:
    • Use heuristics where possible, particularly in complex situation;
    • Leverage new technology (such as text messages and Internet-based tools) to implement heuristics.
    • Determine where heuristics can be used in adult training programs and replace in-depth training programs with heuristics where possible; and
    • Consider how to apply heuristics in situations where the exception is the rule. The authors point to the example of savings and credit card debt. In most instances, saving a portion of one’s income is a good rule of thumb. However, when one has high credit card debt, paying off debt could be preferable to building one’s savings.

Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press, 2008. https://bit.ly/2kNXroe.

  • This book, likely the single piece of scholarship most responsible for bringing the concept of nudges into the public consciousness, explores how a strategic “choice architecture” can help people make the best decisions.
  • Thaler and Sunstein, while advocating for the wider and more targeted use of nudges to help improve people’s lives without resorting to overly paternal regulation, look to five common nudges for lessons and inspiration:
    • The design of menus gets you to eat (and spend) more;
    • “Flies” in urinals improve, well, aim;
    • Credit card minimum payments affect repayment schedules;
    • Automatic savings programs increase savings rate; and
    • “Defaults” can improve rates of organ donation.
  • In the simplest terms, the authors propose the wider deployment of choice architectures that follow “the golden rule of libertarian paternalism: offer nudges that are most likely to help and least likely to inflict harm.”

U.K. Parliament Science and Technology Committee. “Behaviour Change.” July 2011. http://bit.ly/1cbYv5j.

  • This report from the U.K.’s Science and Technology Committee explores the government’s attempts to influence the behavior of its citizens through nudges, with a focus on comparing the effectiveness of nudges to that of regulatory interventions.
  • The author’s central conclusion is that, “non-regulatory measures used in isolation, including ‘nudges,’ are less likely to be effective. Effective policies often use a range of interventions.”
  • The report’s other major findings and recommendations are:
    • Government must invest in gathering more evidence about what measures work to influence population behaviour change;
    • They should appoint an independent Chief Social Scientist to provide them with robust and independent scientific advice;
    • The Government should take steps to implement a traffic light system of nutritional labelling on all food packaging; and
    • Current voluntary agreements with businesses in relation to public health have major failings. They are not a proportionate response to the scale of the problem of obesity and do not reflect the evidence about what will work to reduce obesity. If effective agreements cannot be reached, or if they show minimal benefit, the Government should pursue regulation.”

Unbundling the nation state

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist on Government-to-government trade: “NIGERIAN pineapple for breakfast, Peruvian quinoa for lunch and Japanese sushi for dinner. Two centuries ago, when David Ricardo advocated specialisation and free trade, the notion that international exchange in goods and services could make such a cosmopolitan diet commonplace would have seemed fanciful.
Today another scenario may appear equally unlikely: a Norwegian government agency managing Algeria’s sovereign-wealth fund; German police overseeing security in the streets of Mumbai; and Dubai playing the role of the courthouse of the Middle East. Yet such outlandish possibilities are more than likely if a new development fulfils its promise. Ever more governments are trading with each other, from advising lawmakers to managing entire services. They are following businesses, which have long outsourced much of what they do. Is this the dawn of the government-to-government era?
Such “G2G” trade is not new, though the name may be. After the Ottoman empire defaulted on its debt in 1875 foreign lenders set up an “Ottoman Public Debt Administration”, its governing council packed with European government officials. At its peak it had 9,000 employees, more than the empire’s finance ministry. And the legacy of enforced G2G trade—colonialism, as it was known—is still visible even today. Britain’s Privy Council is the highest court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries. France provides a monetary-policy service to several west African nations by managing their currency, the CFA franc.
One reason G2G trade is growing is that it is a natural extension of the trend for governments to pinch policies from each other. “Policymaking now routinely occurs in comparative terms,” says Jamie Peck of the University of British Columbia, who refers to G2G advice as “fast policy”. Since the late 1990s Mexico’s pioneering policy to make cash benefits for poor families conditional on things like getting children vaccinated and sending them to school has been copied by almost 50 other countries….Budget cuts can provide another impetus for G2G trade. The Dutch army recently sold its Leopard II tanks and now sends tank crews to train with German forces. That way it will be able to reform its tank squadrons quickly if they are needed. Britain, with a ten-year gap between scrapping old aircraft-carriers and buying new ones, has sent pilots to train with the American marines on the F-35B, which will fly from both American and British carriers.
…
No one knows the size of the G2G market. Governments rarely publicise deals, not least because they fear looking weak. And there are formidable barriers to trade. The biggest is the “Westphalian” view of sovereignty, says Stephen Krasner of Stanford University: that states should run their own affairs without foreign interference. In 2004 Papua New Guinea’s parliament passed a RAMSI-like delegation agreement, but local elites opposed it and courts eventually declared it unconstitutional. Honduras attempted to create independent “charter cities”, a concept developed by Paul Romer of New York University (NYU), whose citizens would have had the right of appeal to the supreme court of Mauritius. But in 2012 this scheme, too, was deemed unconstitutional.
Critics fret about accountability and democratic legitimacy. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, endorsed by governments and aid agencies, made much of the need for developing countries to design their own development strategies. And providers open themselves to reputational risk. British police, for instance, have trained Bahraini ones. A heavy-handed crackdown by local forces during the Arab spring reflected badly on their foreign teachers…
When San Francisco decided to install wireless control systems for its streetlights, it posted a “call for solutions” on Citymart, an online marketplace for municipal projects. In 2012 it found a Swiss firm, Paradox Engineering, which had built such systems for local cities. But though members often share ideas, says Sascha Haselmayer, Citymart’s founder, most still decide to implement their chosen policies themselves.
Weak government services are the main reason poor countries fail to catch up with rich ones, says Mr Romer. One response is for people in poorly run places to move to well governed ones. Better would be to bring efficient government services to them. In a recent paper with Brandon Fuller, also of NYU, Mr Romer argues that either response would bring more benefits than further lowering the barriers to trade in privately provided goods and services. Firms have long outsourced activities, even core ones, to others that do them better. It is time governments followed suit.”

AskThem.io – Questions-and-Answers with Every Elected Official

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “AskThem.io, launching Feb. 10th, is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. AskThem is like a version of the White House’s “We The People” petition platform, where over 8 million people have taken action to support questions for a public response – but for the first time, for every elected official nationwide…AskThem.io has official government data for over 142,000 U.S. elected officials at every level of government: federal, state, county, and municipal. Also, AskThem allows anyone to ask a question to any verified Twitter account, for online dialogue with public figures.

Here’s how AskThem works for online public dialogue:

  • For the first time in an open-source website, visitors enter their street address to see all their elected officials, from federal down to the city levels, or search for a verified Twitter account.
  • Individuals & organizations submit a question to their elected officials – for example, asking a city council member about a proposed ban on plastic bags.
  • People then sign on to the questions and petitions they support, voting them up on AskThem and sharing them over social media, as with online petitions.
  • When a question passes a certain threshold of signatures, AskThem delivers it to the recipient over email & social media and encourages a public response – creating a continual, structured dialogue with elected officials at every level of government.

AskThem also incorporates open government data, such as city council agendas and key vote information, to inform good questions of people in power. Open government advocate, Chicago, IL Clerk Susana Mendoza, joined AskThem because she believes that “technology should bring residents and the Office of the Chicago City Clerk closer together.”

Elected officials who sign up with AskThem agree to respond to the most popular questions from their constituents (about two per month). Interested elected officials can sign up now to become verified, free & open to everyone.

Issue-based organizations can use question & petition info from AskThem to surface political issues in their area that people care about, stay continuously engaged with government, and promote public accountability. Participating groups on AskThem include the internet freedom non-profit Fight For the Future, the social media crowd-speaking platform Thunderclap.it, the Roosevelt Institute National Student Network, and more.”

DARPA Open Catalog Makes Agency-Sponsored Software and Publications Available to All

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Public website aims to encourage communities interested in DARPA research to build off the agency’s work, starting with big data…
DARPA has invested in many programs that sponsor fundamental and applied research in areas of computer science, which have led to new advances in theory as well as practical software. The R&D community has asked about the availability of results, and now DARPA has responded by creating the DARPA Open Catalog, a place for organizing and sharing those results in the form of software, publications, data and experimental details. The Catalog can be found at http://go.usa.gov/BDhY.
Many DoD and government research efforts and software procurements contain publicly releasable elements, including open source software. The nature of open source software lends itself to collaboration where communities of developers augment initial products, build on each other’s expertise, enable transparency for performance evaluation, and identify software vulnerabilities. DARPA has an open source strategy for areas of work including big data to help increase the impact of government investments in building a flexible technology base.
“Making our open source catalog available increases the number of experts who can help quickly develop relevant software for the government,” said Chris White, DARPA program manager. “Our hope is that the computer science community will test and evaluate elements of our software and afterward adopt them as either standalone offerings or as components of their products.”

Nudging News Producers and Consumers Toward More Thoughtful, Less Polarized Discourse

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
New paper by Darrel West and Beth Stone from Brookings: “At a time of extraordinary domestic and international policy challenges, Americans need high-quality news.  Readers and viewers must decipher the policy options that the country faces and the manner in which various decisions affect them personally.  It often is not readily apparent how to assess complicated policy choices and what the best steps are for moving forward.

Having poor quality news coverage is especially problematic when the political process is sharply polarized.  As has been documented by political scientists Tom Mann and Norman Ornstein, the United States has a Congress today where the most conservative Democrat is to the left of the most moderate Republican. [1]  There are many reasons for this spike in polarization, but there is little doubt that the news media amplify and exacerbate social and political divisions.
Too often, journalists follow a “Noah’s Ark” approach to coverage in which a strong liberal is paired with a vocal conservative in an ideological food fight.  The result is polarization of discourse and “false equivalence” in reporting. This lack of nuanced analysis confuses viewers and makes it difficult for them to sort out the contrasting facts and opinions.  People get the sense that there are only two policy options and that there are few gradations or complexities in the positions that are reported.
In this paper, West and Stone review challenges facing the news media in an age of political polarization.  This includes hyper-competitiveness in news coverage, a dramatic decline in local journalism and resulting nationalization of the news, and the personalization of coverage.  After discussing these problems and how they harm current reporting, they present several ideas for nudging news producers and consumers towards more thoughtful and less polarizing responses.”

Civic Works Project translates data into community tools

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The blog of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation:”The Civic Works Project is a two-year effort to create apps and other tools to help increase the utility of local government data to benefit community organizations and the broader public. w
This project looks systemically at public and private information that can be used to engage residents, solve community problems and increase government accountability. We believe that there is a new frontier where information can be used to improve public services and community building efforts that benefit local residents.
Through the Civic Works Project, we’re seeking to improve access to information and identify solutions to problems facing diverse communities. Uncovering the value of data—and the stories behind it—can enhance the provision of public services through the smart application of technology.
Here’s some of what we’ve accomplished.
Partnership with WBEZ Public Data Blog
The WBEZ Public Data Blog is dedicated to examining and promoting civic data in Chicago, Cook County and Illinois. WBEZ is partnering with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to provide news and analysis on open government by producing content items that explain and tell stories hidden in public data. The project seeks to increase the utility, understanding, awareness and availability of local civic data. It comprises blog postings on the hidden uses of data and stories from the data, while including diverse voices and discussions on how innovations can improve civic life. It also features interviews with community organizations, businesses, government leaders and residents on challenges that could be solved through more effective use of public data.
Crime and Punishment in Chicago
The Crime and Punishment in Chicago project will provide an index of data sources regarding the criminal justice system in Chicago. This site will aggregate sources of data, how this data is generated, how to get it and what data is unavailable.
Illinois OpenTech Challenge
The Illinois Open Technology Challenge aims to bring governments, developers and communities together to create digital tools that use public data to serve today’s civic needs and promote economic development. Smart Chicago and our partners worked with government officials to publish 138 new datasets (34 in Champaign, 15 in Rockford, 12 in Belleville, and 77 from the 42 municipalities in the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association) on the State of Illinois data portal. Smart Chicago has worked with developers in meet-ups all over the state—in six locations in four cities with 149 people. The project has also allowed Smart Chicago to conduct outreach in each of our communities to reach regular residents with needs that can be addressed through data and technology.
LocalData + SWOP
The LocalData + SWOP project is part of our effort to help bridge technology gaps in high-capacity organizations. This effort helps the Southwest Organizing Project collect information about vacant and abandoned housing using the LocalData tool.
Affordable Care Act Outreach App
With the ongoing implementation of the Affordable Care Act, community organizations such as LISC-Chicago have been hard at work providing navigators to help residents register through the healthcare.gov site.
Currently, LISC-Chicago organizers are in neighborhoods contacting residents and encouraging them to go to their closest Center for Working Families. Using a combination of software, such as Wufoo and Twilio, Smart Chicago is helping LISC with its outreach by building a tool that enables organizers to send text reminders to sign up for health insurance to residents.
Texting Tools: Twilio and Textizen
Smart Chicago is expanding the Affordable Care Act outreach project to engage residents in other ways using SMS messaging.
Smart Chicago is also a local provider for Textizen,  an SMS-based survey tool that civic organizations can use to obtain resident feedback. Organizations can create a survey campaign and then place the survey options on posters, postcards or screens during live events. They can then receive real-time feedback as people text in their answers.
WikiChicago
WikiChicago will be a hyper-local Wikipedia-like website that anyone can edit. For this project, Smart Chicago is partnering with the Chicago Public Library to feature local authors and books about Chicago, and to publish more information about Chicago’s rich history.”

Give the Data to the People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Harlan Krumholz in the New York Times: “LAST week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has hired my group, Yale University Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.

This is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.

Today, more than half of the clinical trials in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is, at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be discovered or released.

Even when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers — are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation of a central tenet of the scientific method.

To be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of these problems fail to materialize….

This program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers, but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and contribute to overall scientific knowledge.

There are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia, wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its own products.

For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.”

Boston's Building a Synergy Between City Hall & Startups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

at BostInno: “Boston’s local government and startup scene want to do more than peacefully co-exist. They want to co-create. The people perhaps credited for contributing the most buzz to this trend are those behind relatively new parking ticket app TicketZen. Cort Johnson, along with a few others from Terrible Labs, a Web and mobile app design consultancy in Chinatown, came up with the idea for the app after spotting a tweet from one of Boston’s trademark entrepreneurs. A few months back, ex-KAYAK CTO (and Blade co-founder) Paul English sent out a 140-character message calling for an easy, instantaneous payment solution for parking tickets, Johnson told BostInno.

The idea was that in the time it takes for Boston’s enforcement office to process a parking ticket, its recipient has already forgotten his or her frustration or misplaced the bright orange slip, thus creating a situation in which both parties lose: the local government’s collection process is held up and the recipient is forced to pay a larger fine for the delay.

With the problem posed and the spark lit, the Terrible Labs team took to building TicketZen, an app which allows people to scan their tickets and immediately send validation to City Hall to kick off the process.

“When we first came up with the prototype, [City Hall was] really excited and worked to get it launched in Boston first,” said Johnson. “But we have built a bunch of integrations for major cities where most of the parking tickets are issued, which will launch early this year.”

But in order to even get the app up-and-running, Terrible Labs needed to work with some local government representatives – namely, Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob of the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics….

Since its inception in 2010, the City Hall off-shoot has worked with all kinds of Boston citizens to create civic-facing innovations that would be helpful to the city at large.

For example, a group of mothers with children at Boston Public Schools approached New Urban Mechanics to create an app that shares when the school bus will arrive, similar to that of the MBTA’s, which shows upcoming train times. The nonprofit then arranged a partnership with Vermonster LLC, a software application development firm in Downtown Boston to create the Where’s My School Bus app.

“There’s a whole host of different backgrounds, from undergrad students to parents, who would never consider themselves to be entrepreneurs or innovators originally … There are just so many talented, driven and motivated folks that would likely have a similar interest in doing work in the civic space. The challenge is to scale that beyond what’s currently out there,” shared Osgood. “We’re asking, ‘How can City Hall do a better job to support innovators?’”

Of course, District Hall was created for this very purpose – supporting creatives and entrepreneurs by providing them a perpetually open door and an event space. Additionally, there have been a number of events geared toward civic innovation within the past few months targeting both entrepreneurs and government.

The former mayor Thomas Menino led the charge in opening the Office of Business Development, which features a sleek new website and focuses on providing entrepreneurs and existing businesses with access to financial and technical resources. Further, a number of organizations collaborated in early December 2013 to host a free-to-register event dubbed MassDOT Visualizing Transportation Hackathon to help generate ideas for improving public transit from the next generation’s entrepreneurs; just this month, the Venture Café and the Cambridge Innovation Center hosted Innovation and the City, a conference uniting leading architects, urban planners, educators and business leaders from different cities around the U.S. to speak to the changing landscape of civic development.”

Civic Tech Forecast: 2014

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Dyson from Code for America: “Last year was a big year for civic technology and government innovation, and if last week’s Municipal Innovation discussion was any indication, 2014 promises to be even bigger. More than sixty civic innovators from both inside and outside of government gathered to hear three leading civic tech experts share their “Top Five” list of civic tech trends from 2013m, and predictions for what’s to come in 2014. From responsive web design to overcoming leadership change, guest speakers Luke Fretwell, Juan Pablo Velez, and Alissa Black covered both challenges and opportunities. And the audience had a few predictions of their own. Highlights included:
Mark Leech, Application Development Manager, City of Albuquerque: “Regionalization will allow smaller communities to participate and act as a force multiplier for them.”
Rebecca Williams, Policy Analyst, Sunlight Foundation: “Open data policy (law and implementation) will become more connected to traditional forms of governance, like public records and town hall meetings.”
Rick Dietz, IT Director, City of Bloomington, Ind.: “I think governments will need to collaborate directly more on open source development, particularly on enterprise scale software systems — not just civic apps.”
Kristina Ng, Office of Financial Empowerment, City and County of San Francisco: “I’m excited about the growing community of innovative government workers.”
Hillary Hartley, Presidential Innovation Fellow: “We’ll need to address sustainability and revenue opportunities. Consulting work can only go so far; we must figure out how to empower civic tech companies to actually make money.”
An informal poll of the audience showed that roughly 96 percent of the group was feeling optimistic about the coming year for civic innovation. What’s your civic tech forecast for 2014? Read on to hear what guest speakers Luke Fretwell, Juan Pablo Velez, and Alissa Black had to say, and then let us know how you’re feeling about 2014 by tweeting at @codeforamerica.”