A Fix-It Job for Government Tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Shira Ovide at the New York Times: “U.S. government technology has a mostly deserved reputation for being expensive and awful.

Computer systems sometimes operate with Sputnik-era software. A Pentagon project to modernize military technology has little to show after five years. During the coronavirus pandemic, millions of Americans struggled to get government help like unemployment insurance, vaccine appointments and food stamps because of red tape, inflexible technology and other problems.

Whether you believe that the government should be more involved in Americans’ lives or less, taxpayers deserve good value for the technology we pay for. And we often don’t get it. It’s part of Robin Carnahan’s job to take on this problem.

A former secretary of state for Missouri and a government tech consultant, Carnahan had been one of my guides to how public sector technology could work better. Then in June, she was confirmed as the administrator of the General Services Administration, the agency that oversees government acquisitions, including of technology.

Carnahan said that she and other Biden administration officials wanted technology used for fighting wars or filing taxes to be as efficient as our favorite app.

“Bad technology sinks good policy,” Carnahan told me. “We’re on a mission to make government tech more user-friendly and be smarter about how we buy it and use it.”

Carnahan highlighted three areas she wanted to address: First, change the process for government agencies to buy technology to recognize that tech requires constant updates. Second, simplify the technology for people using government services. And third, make it more appealing for people with tech expertise to work for the government, even temporarily.

All of that is easier said than done, of course. People in government have promised similar changes before, and it’s not a quick fix. Technology dysfunction is also often a symptom of poor policies.

But in Carnahan’s view, one way to build faith in government is to prove that it can be competent. And technology is an essential area to show that…(More)”.

Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Aaron Sankin, Dhruv Mehrotra for Gizmodo, Surya Mattu, and Annie Gilbertson: “Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime prediction software called PredPol.

The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.

The Markup and Gizmodo analyzed them and found persistent patterns.

Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.

By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.

These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years. A few neighborhoods in our data were the subject of more than 11,000 predictions.

The software often recommended daily patrols in and around public and subsidized housing, targeting the poorest of the poor.

“Communities with troubled relationships with police—this is not what they need,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “They need resources to fill basic social needs.”…(More)”.

How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The Pew Charitable Trusts: “To begin to assess whether, and to what extent, the rapid improvements in court technology undertaken in 2020 and 2021 made the civil legal system easier to navigate, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined pandemic-related emergency orders issued by the supreme courts of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The researchers supplemented that review with an analysis of court approaches to virtual hearings, e-filing, and digital notarization, with a focus on how these tools affected litigants in three of the most common types of civil cases: debt claims, evictions, and child support. The key findings of this research are:

  • Civil courts’ adoption of technology was unprecedented in pace and scale. Despite having almost no history of using remote civil court proceedings, beginning in March 2020 every state and D.C. initiated online hearings at record rates to resolve many types of cases. For example, the Texas court system, which had never held a civil hearing via video before the pandemic, conducted 1.1 million remote proceedings across its civil and criminal divisions between March 2020 and February 2021. Similarly, Michigan courts held more than 35,000 video hearings totaling nearly 200,000 hours between April 1 and June 1, 2020, compared with no such hearings during the same two months in 2019.Courts moved other routine functions online as well. Before the pandemic, 37 states and D.C. allowed people without lawyers to electronically file court documents in at least some civil cases. But since March 2020, 10 more states have created similar processes, making e-filing available to more litigants in more jurisdictions and types of cases. In addition, after 11 states and D.C. made pandemic-driven changes to their policies on electronic notarization (e-notarization), 42 states and D.C. either allowed it or had waived notarization requirements altogether as of fall 2020.
  • Courts leveraged technology not only to stay open, but also to improve participation rates and help users resolve disputes more efficiently. Arizona civil courts, for example, saw an 8% drop year-over-year in June 2020 in the rate of default, or automatic, judgment—which results when defendants fail to appear in court—indicating an increase in participation. Although national and other state data is limited, court officials across the country, including judges, administrators, and attorneys, report increases in civil court appearance rates.
  • The accelerated adoption of technology disproportionately benefited people and businesses with legal representation—and in some instances, made the civil legal system more difficult to navigate for those without...(More)”.

NativeDATA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “NativeDATA is a free online resource that offers practical guidance for Tribes and Native-serving organizations. For this resource, Native-serving organizations includes Tribal and urban Indian organizations and Tribal Epidemiology Centers (TECs). 

Tribal and urban Indian communities need correct health information (data), so that community leaders can:

  • Watch disease trends
  • Respond to health threats
  • Create useful health policies…

Throughout, this resource offers practical guidance for obtaining and sharing health data in ways that honor Tribal sovereignty, data sovereignty, and public health authorityis the authority of a sovereign government to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its citizens. As sovereign nations, Tribes have the power to define how they will use this authority to protect and promote the health of their communities. The federal government recognizes Tribes and Tribal Epidemiology Centers (TECs) as public health authorities under federal law. More.

Inside you will find expert advice to help you:

Academic Incentives and Research Impact: Developing Reward and Recognition Systems to Better People’s Lives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Jonathan Grant: “…offers new strategies to increase the societal impact that health research can have on the community and critiques the existing academic reward structure that determines the career trajectories of so many academics—including, tenure, peer-review publication, citations, and grant funding, among others. The new assessment illustrates how these incentives can lead researchers to produce studies as an end-goal, rather than pursuing impact by applying the work in real world settings.

Dr. Grant also outlines new system-, institution-, and person-level changes to academic incentives that, if implemented, could make societal impact an integral part of the research process. Among the changes offered by Dr. Grant are tying a percentage of grant funding to the impact the research has on the community, breaking from the tenure model to incentivize ongoing development and quality research, and encouraging academics themselves to prioritize social impact when submitting or reviewing research and grant proposals…(More)”.

Open Data Standard and Analysis Framework: Towards Response Equity in Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joy Hsu, Ramya Ravichandran, Edwin Zhang, and Christine Keung: “There is an increasing need for open data in governments and systems to analyze equity at large scale. Local governments often lack the necessary technical tools to identify and tackle inequities in their communities. Moreover, these tools may not generalize across departments and cities nor be accessible to the public. To this end, we propose a system that facilitates centralized analyses of publicly available government datasets through 1) a US Census-linked API, 2) an equity analysis playbook, and 3) an open data standard to regulate data intake and support equitable policymaking….(More)”.

New York City passed a bill requiring ‘bias audits’ of AI hiring tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kate Kaye at Protocol: “Let the AI auditing vendor brigade begin. A year since it was introduced, New York City Council passed a bill earlier this week requiring companies that sell AI technologies for hiring to obtain audits assessing the potential of those products to discriminate against job candidates. The bill requiring “bias audits” passed with overwhelming support in a 38-4 vote.

The bill is intended to weed out the use of tools that enable already unlawful employment discrimination in New York City. If signed into law, it will require providers of automated employment decision tools to have those systems evaluated each year by an audit service and provide the results to companies using those systems.

AI for recruitment can include software that uses machine learning to sift through resumes and help make hiring decisions, systems that attempt to decipher the sentiments of a job candidate, or even tech involving games to pick up on subtle clues about someone’s hiring worthiness. The NYC bill attempts to encompass the full gamut of AI by covering everything from old-school decision trees to more complex systems operating through neural networks.

The legislation calls on companies using automated decision tools for recruitment not only to tell job candidates when they’re being used, but to tell them what information the technology used to evaluate their suitability for a job.

The bill, however, fails to go into detail on what constitutes a bias audit other than to define one as “an impartial evaluation” that involves testing. And it already has critics who say it was rushed into passage and doesn’t address discrimination related to disability or age…(More)”.

Pandemic Privacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

A Preliminary Analysis of Collection Technologies, Data Collection Laws, and Legislative Reform during COVID-19 by Benjamin Ballard, Amanda Cutinha, and Christopher Parsons: “…a preliminary comparative analysis of how different information technologies were mobilized in response to COVID-19 to collect data, the extent to which Canadian health or privacy or emergencies laws impeded the response to COVID-19, and ultimately, the potential consequences of reforming data protection or privacy laws to enable more expansive data collection, use, or disclosure of personal information in future health emergencies. In analyzing how data has been collected in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, we found that while many of the data collection methods could be mapped onto a trajectory of past collection practices, the breadth and extent of data collection in tandem with how communications networks were repurposed constituted novel technological responses to a health crisis. Similarly, while the intersection of public and private interests in providing healthcare and government services is not new, the ability for private companies such as Google and Apple to forcefully shape some of the technology-enabled pandemic responses speaks to the significant ability of private companies to guide or direct public health measures that rely on contemporary smartphone technologies. While we found that the uses of technologies were linked to historical efforts to combat the spread of disease, the nature and extent of private surveillance to enable public action was arguably unprecedented….(More)”.

The Census Mapper

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google blog: “…The U.S. Census is one of the largest data sets journalists can access. It has layers and layers of important data that can help reporters tell detailed stories about their own communities. But the challenge is sorting through that data and visualizing it in a way that helps readers understand trends and the bigger picture.

Today we’re launching a new tool to help reporters dig through all that data to find stories and embed visualizations on their sites. The Census Mapper project is an embeddable map that displays Census data at the national, state and county level, as well as census tracts. It was produced in partnership with Pitch Interactive and Big Local News, as part of the 2020 Census Co-op (supported by the Google News Initiative and in cooperation with the JSK Journalism Fellowships).

This image shows a detailed, country level view of the Census Mapper, showing arrows across the US depicting movements of people and other demographic information from the Census

Census Mapper shows where populations have grown over time.

The Census data is pulled from the data collected and processed by The Associated Press, one of the Census Co-op partners. Census Mapper then lets local journalists easily embed maps showing population change at any level, helping them tell powerful stories in a more visual way about their communities.

This image shows changing demographic data from North Carolina, with arrows showing different movements around the state.

With the tool, you can zoom into states and below, such as North Carolina, shown here.

As part of our investment in data journalism we’re also making improvements to our Common Knowledge Project, a data explorer and visual journalism project to allow US journalists to explore local data. Built with journalists for journalists, the new version of Common Knowledge integrates journalist feedback and new features including geographic comparisons, new charts and visuals…(More)”.

Adopting Agile in State and Local Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Sukumar Ganapati: “Agile emerged initially as a set of values and principles for software development formalized in 2001 with the Agile Manifesto. For two decades, it helped revolutionize software development. Today, Agile approaches have been adapted to government services beyond software development, offering a new way of thinking and delivering in areas such as project management, policymaking, human resources, and procurement. 

The basics of Agile and associated methods have been covered in previous IBM Center for The Business of Government reports. These reports provide a good overview of Agile principles, use of Lean, and application of user-centered design. They provide insights into the evolution of Agile adoption in public sector over the last two decades. This new report, Adopting Agile in State and Local Governments, by Sukumar Ganapati of Florida International University, examines the adoption of Agile among state and local governments. State and local governments have increasingly adopted Agile methods in the last decade, applying them across a range of applications. At the same time, they vary widely in terms of their maturity levels in the adoption and implementation.

Professor Ganapati identifies three broad phases in this lifecycle of Agile maturity among public agencies in general.  The three phases are not clear cut, with distinctive breaks between where one phase ends and the next one begins. Rather, they could be conceived as a continuum, as public agencies evolve through the lifecycle of implementing Agile. The report highlights the evolution of the use of Agile methods in two states (Connecticut and California) and two local cities (New York and Austin). The cases show the rich contextual evolution of Agile and how the methods are applied for using technology to streamline enterprise processes and to address social policy problems. The four case studies show different trajectories of adopting Agile in state and local governments. The strategies for adopting and implementing Agile methods broadly differ in the three lifecycle phases of infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. The case studies offer lessons for enabling strategies to adopt Agile across these three phases…(More)”.