When citizens set the budget: lessons from ancient Greece

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 and  in The Conversation: “Today elected representatives take the tough decisions about public finances behind closed doors. In doing so, democratic politicians rely on the advice of financial bureaucrats, who, often, cater to the political needs of the elected government. Politicians rarely ask voters what they think of budget options. They are no better at explaining the reasons for a budget. Explanations are usually no more than vacuous phrases, such as “jobs and growth” or “on the move”. They never explain the difficult trade-offs that go into a budget nor their overall financial reasoning.

This reluctance to explain public finances was all too evident during the global financial crisis.

In Australia, Britain and France, centre-left governments borrowed huge sums in order to maintain private demand and, in one case, to support private banks. In each country these policies helped a lot to minimise the crisis’s human costs.

Yet, in the elections that followed the centre-left politicians that had introduced these policies refused properly to justify them. They feared that voters would not tolerate robust discussion about public finances. Without a justification for their generally good policies each of these government was defeated by centre-right opponents.

In most democracies there is the same underlying problem: elected representatives do not believe that voters can tolerate the financial truth. They assume that democracy is not good at managing public finances. For them it can only balance the budget by leaving voters in the dark.

For decades, we, independently, have studied democracy today and in the ancient past. We have learned that this assumption is dead wrong. There are more and more examples of how involving ordinary voters results in better budgets.

In 1989, councils in poor Brazilian towns began to involve residents in setting budgets. This participatory budgeting soon spread throughout South America. It has now been successfully tried in Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, the United States, Poland and Australia, and some pilot projects were set up in France too. Participatory budgeting is based on the clear principle that those who will be most affected by a tough budget should be involved in setting it.

In spite of such successful democratic experiments, elected representatives still shy away from involving ordinary voters in setting budgets. This is very different from what happened in ancient Athens 2,500 years ago….

In Athenian democracy ordinary citizens actually set the budget. This ancient Greek state had a solid budget, in spite of, or, we would say, because of the involvement of the citizens in taking tough budget decisions….(More)”.

The nation state goes virtual

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Symons at Nesta’s Predictions for 2018: “As the world changes, people expect their governments and public services to do so too. When it’s easy to play computer games with someone on the other side of the world, or set up a company bank account in five minutes, there is an expectation that paying taxes, applying for services or voting should be too…..

To add to this, large political upheavals such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have left some people feeling alienated from their national identity. Since the the UK voted to leave the EU, demand for Irish passports has increased by 50 per cent, a sign that people feel dissatisfied by the constraints of geographically determined citizenship when they can no longer relate to their national identity.

In response, some governments see these changes as an opportunity to reconceptualise what we mean by a nation state.

The e-Residency offer

The primary actor in this disruption is Estonia, which leads the world in digital government. In 2015 they introduced an e-Residency, allowing anyone anywhere in the world to receive a government-issued digital identity. The e-Residency gives people access to digital public services and the ability to register and run online businesses from the country, in exactly the same way as someone born in Estonia. As of November 2017, over 27,000 people have applied to be Estonian e-Residents, and they have established over 4,200 companies. Estonia aims to have ten million virtual residents by 2025….

While Estonia is a sovereign nation using technology to redefine itself, there are movements taking advantage of decentralising technologies in a bid to do away with the nation state altogether. Bitnation is a blockchain-based technology which enables people to create and join virtual nations. This allows people to agree their own social contracts between one another, using smart contract technology, removing the need for governments as an administrator or mediator. Since it began in 2014, it has been offering traditional government services, such as notaries, dispute resolution, marriages and voting systems, without the need for a middleman.

As of November 2017, there are over 10,000 Bitnation citizens. …

As citizens, we may be able to educate our children in Finland, access healthcare from South Korea and run our businesses in New Zealand, all without having to leave the comfort of our homes. Governments may see this as means of financial sustainability in the longer term, generating income by selling such services to a global population instead of centralised taxation systems levied on a geographic population.

Such a model has been described as ‘nation-as-a-service’, and could mean countries offering different tiers of citizenship, with taxes based on the number of services used, or tier of citizenship chosen. This could also mean multiple citizenships, including of city-states, as well as nations….

This is the moment for governments to start taking the full implications of the digital age seriously. From electronic IDs and data management through to seamless access to services, citizens will only demand better digital services. Countries such as Azerbaijan, are already developing their own versions of the e-Residency. Large internet platforms such as Amazon are gearing up to replace entire government functions. If governments don’t grasp the nettle, they may find themselves left behind by technology and other countries which won’t wait around for them….(More)”.

Research reveals de-identified patient data can be re-identified

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Vanessa Teague, Chris Culnane and Ben Rubinstein in PhysOrg: “In August 2016, Australia’s federal Department of Health published medical billing records of about 2.9 million Australians online. These records came from the Medicare Benefits Scheme (MBS) and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) containing 1 billion lines of historical health data from the records of around 10 per cent of the population.

These longitudinal records were de-identified, a process intended to prevent a person’s identity from being connected with information, and were made public on the government’s open data website as part of its policy on accessible public …

We found that patients can be re-identified, without decryption, through a process of linking the unencrypted parts of the  with known information about the individual.

Our findings replicate those of similar studies of other de-identified datasets:

  • A few mundane facts taken together often suffice to isolate an individual.
  • Some patients can be identified by name from publicly available information.
  • Decreasing the precision of the data, or perturbing it statistically, makes re-identification gradually harder at a substantial cost to utility.

The first step is examining a patient’s uniqueness according to medical procedures such as childbirth. Some individuals are unique given public information, and many patients are unique given a few basic facts, such as year of birth or the date a baby was delivered….

The second step is examining uniqueness according to the characteristics of commercial datasets we know of but cannot access directly. There are high uniqueness rates that would allow linking with a commercial pharmaceutical dataset, and with the billing data available to a bank. This means that ordinary people, not just the prominent ones, may be easily re-identifiable by their bank or insurance company…

These de-identification methods were bound to fail, because they were trying to achieve two inconsistent aims: the protection of individual privacy and publication of detailed individual records. De-identification is very unlikely to work for other rich datasets in the government’s care, like census data, tax records, mental health records, penal information and Centrelink data.

While the ambition of making more data more easily available to facilitate research, innovation and sound public policy is a good one, there is an important technical and procedural problem to solve: there is no good solution for publishing sensitive complex individual records that protects privacy without substantially degrading the usefulness of the data.

Some data can be safely published online, such as information about government, aggregations of large collections of material, or data that is differentially private. For sensitive, complex data about individuals, a much more controlled release in a secure research environment is a better solution. The Productivity Commission recommends a “trusted user” model, and techniques like dynamic consent also give patients greater control and visibility over their personal information….(More).

How Blockchain Technology Is Helping Syrian Refugees

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Siobhan Kenna at the Huffpost: “Azraq Refugee Camp is a 15 kilometre-wide sea of corrugated aluminium houses in the heart of the vast Jordanian desert. The people that live there are detained by the barbed wire that surrounds the entire complex which is located an hour and a half from the country’s capital city, Amman….

From within the strange environment of the camp and the indistinct future, lies a bastion of normalcy for these people — the supermarket.

In the refugee camp the supermarket is much more than a place to shop or purchase food though: Here it is a vital fibre in the social fabric of a makeshift community….

It’s unbelievable to think then, that a place that is so remote and isolated could be home to a world first initiative involving the emerging Blockchain technology.

The Building Blocks Project is the brain child of Houman Haddad, Regional CBT Advisor for United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). The project aims to make cash-based transactions between the WFP and the beneficiary faster, cheaper and more secure.

Prior to the project’s launch at the Azraq Refugee Camp in Jordan in May 2017, it was first trialled in Pakistan and also in King Abduallah Park Refugee Camp as a means of testing the robustness of the technology. On May 31st 2017 the pilot in Azraq was extended indefinitely.

Traditionally, payments are made to refugees from the WFP via a third party financial service provider. The entity could be a bank, mobile monetary company or something similar and the WFP instructs the financial service provider to credit some of the funds to the refugee so they can spend it at the supermarket or elsewhere.

On top of that, the WFP also needs to transfer the funds to the third party so they can actually pay the beneficiary. Sounds complicated right? Well, the Building Blocks Project aims to eliminate reliance on a third party and with this comes plenty of savings.

“So, what we have done is essentially replaced that financial service provider with the Blockchain,” Houman Haddad told HuffPost Australia.

“So instead of having someone else create virtual accounts and credit functions and so on and so forth, we create the virtual account on the Blockchain for beneficiaries, we upload entitlements to them, and currently in the supermarket where they go, the supermarket requests an authorisation code for transactions from the Blockchain as opposed to the bank….(More)”.

SAM, the first A.I. politician on Messenger

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 at Digital Trends: “It’s said that all politicians are the same, but it seems safe to assume that you’ve never seen a politician quite like this. Meet SAM, heralded as the politician of the future. Unfortunately, you can’t exactly shake this politician’s hand, or have her kiss your baby. Rather, SAM is the world’s first Virtual Politician (and a female presence at that), “driven by the desire to close the gap between what voters want and what politicians promise, and what they actually achieve.”

The artificially intelligent chat bot is currently live on Facebook Messenger, though she probably is most helpful to those in New Zealand. After all, the bot’s website notes, “SAM’s goal is to act as a representative for all New Zealanders, and evolves based on voter input.” Capable of being reached by anyone at just about anytime from anywhere, this may just be the single most accessible politician we’ve ever seen. But more importantly, SAM purports to be a true representative, claiming to analyze “everyone’s views [and] opinions, and impact of potential decisions.” This, the bot notes, could make for better policy for everyone….(More)”.

The world watches Reykjavik’s digital democracy experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Jacobs at the Financial Times: “When Iceland’s banks collapsed and mistrust of politicians soared during the 2008 financial crisis, two programmers thought software could help salvage the country’s democracy. They created Your Priorities, a platform that allows citizens to suggest laws, policies and budget measures, which can then be voted up or down by other users. “

We thought: If we manage somehow to connect regular citizens with government then we create a dialogue that will ultimately result in better decisions,” says Robert Bjarnason, chief executive of Citizens Foundation, the company that created Your Priorities. Mr Bjarnason and his fellow co-founder of Citizens Foundation, Gunnar Grimsson, used the software to create a policy website called Better Reykjavik just before the city’s 2010 elections.

Jon Gnarr, Reykjavik’s then mayor, encouraged people to use the platform to give him policy suggestions and he committed to funding the top 10 ideas each month. Seven years on, Better Reykjavik has some 20,000 users and 769 of their ideas have been approved by the city council. These include increasing financial support for the city’s homeless, converting a former power station into a youth centre, introducing gender-neutral toilets and naming a street after Darth Vader, the character from Star Wars.

Your Priorities has also been tested in other countries, including Estonia, Australia, Scotland, Wales, Norway and Malta. In Estonia, seven proposals have become law, including one limiting donations from companies to political parties and another that requires the national parliament to debate any proposal with more than 1,000 votes.

The software is part of a global trend for people to seek more influence over their politicians. In Australia, for example, the MiVote app allows people to vote on issues being debated in parliament.

…At times, the portal can become a “crazy sounding board” Mr Svansson concedes. The Reykjavik council has put in quality controls to filter out hare-brained proposals, although Mr Bjarnason says he has had to remove inappropriate content only a handful of times….During Iceland’s parliamentary elections last month, 10 out of 11 political parties published their election pitches on Your Priorities, allowing voters to comment on policies and propose new ones. This interactive manifesto website attracted 22,000 visitors.

Testing the efficacy of platforms such as Your Priorities is perhaps easier in Reykjavik — population 123,000 — than in larger cities. Even so, integrating the site into the council’s policymaking apparatus has been slower than Mr Bjarnason had foreseen. “Everything takes a long time and sometimes it is like you are swimming in syrup,” he says. “Still, it has been a really good experience working with the city.”…(More).

“Nudge units” – where they came from and what they can do

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Zeina Afif at the Worldbank: “You could say that the first one began in 2009, when the US government recruited Cass Sunstein to head The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) to streamline regulations. In 2010, the UK established the first Behavioural Insights Unit (BIT) on a trial basis, under the Cabinet Office. Other countries followed suit, including the US, Australia, Canada, Netherlands, and Germany. Shortly after, countries such as India, Indonesia, Peru, Singapore, and many others started exploring the application of behavioral insights to their policies and programs. International institutions such as the World Bank, UN agencies, OECD, and EU have also established behavioral insights units to support their programs. And just this month, the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland launched its own Behavioral Economics Unit.

The Future
As eMBeD, the behavioral science unit at the World Bank, continues to support governments across the globe in the implementation of their units, here are some common questions we often get asked.

What are the models for a Behavioral Insights Unit in Government?
As of today, over a dozen countries have integrated behavioral insights with their operations. While there is not one model to prescribe, the setup varies from centralized or decentralized to networked….

In some countries, the units were first established at the ministerial level. One example is MineduLab in Peru, which was set up with eMBeD’s help. The unit works as an innovation lab, testing rigorous and leading research in education and behavioral science to address issues such as teacher absenteeism and motivation, parents’ engagement, and student performance….

What should be the structure of the team?
Most units start with two to four full-time staff. Profiles include policy advisors, social psychologists, experimental economists, and behavioral scientists. Experience in the public sector is essential to navigate the government and build support. It is also important to have staff familiar with designing and running experiments. Other important skills include psychology, social psychology, anthropology, design thinking, and marketing. While these skills are not always readily available in the public sector, it is important to note that all behavioral insights units partnered with academics and experts in the field.

The U.S. team, originally called the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, is staffed mostly by seconded academic faculty, researchers, and other departmental staff. MineduLab in Peru partnered with leading experts, including the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Fortalecimiento de la Gestión de la Educación (FORGE), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and the World Bank….(More)”

The role of policy entrepreneurs in open government data policy innovation diffusion: An analysis of Australian Federal and State Governments

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Akemi TakeokaChatfield and Christopher G.Reddick: “Open government data (OGD) policy differs substantially from the existing Freedom of Information policies. Consequently OGD can be viewed as a policy innovation. Drawing on both innovation diffusion theory and its application to public policy innovation research, we examine Australia’s OGD policy diffusion patterns at both the federal and state government levels based on the policy adoption timing and CKAN portal “Organization” and “Category” statistics. We found that state governments that had adopted OGD policies earlier had active policy entrepreneurs (or lead departments/agencies) responsible for the policy innovation diffusion across the different government departments. We also found that their efficacy ranking was relatively high in terms of OGD portal openness when openness is measured by the greater number of datasets proactively and systematically published through their OGD portals. These findings have important implications for the role played by OGD policy entrepreneurs in openly sharing the government-owned datasets with the public….(More)”.

Internet of Things tackles global animal poaching

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Springwise: “ZSL (Zoological Society of London), one of the most famous zoos in Europe, has teamed up with non-profit technology company Digital Catapult to support the development of anti-poaching technology. The partnership will use the Internet of Things (IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies to create a sensor and satellite-enabled network that will be able to help conservationists monitor wildlife and respond to poaching threats on land and sea in some of the world’s most remote national parks.

Up to 35,000 African elephants were killed by poachers in 2016, and black rhino and mountain gorilla populations continue to be at high risk. LPWAN could help prevent poaching in game reserves by enabling remote sensors to communicate with one another over long distance while using only a small amount of power. These connected sensors are able to detect activities nearby and determine whether these originate from wildlife or poachers, creating immediate alerts for those monitoring the area.

Digital Catapult has installed a LPWAN base station at the ZSL headquarters at London Zoo, which will enable prototypes to be tested on site. This technology will build on the revolutionary work already underway in areas including Kenya, Nepal, Australia, the Chagos Archipelago, and Antarctica.

The practise of poaching has been the target of many technology companies, with a similar project using artificial intelligence to monitor poachers recently coming to light. One of the many devastating impacts of poaching is the potential to cause extinction of some animals, and one startup has tackled this potential catastrophe with rhinos by producing a 3D printed horn that could help the species avoid being a target….(More)”.

The Death of Public Knowledge? How Free Markets Destroy the General Intellect

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book edited by Aeron Davis: “...argues for the value and importance of shared, publicly accessible knowledge, and suggests that the erosion of its most visible forms, including public service broadcasting, education, and the network of public libraries, has worrying outcomes for democracy.

With contributions from both activists and academics, this collection of short, sharp essays focuses on different aspects of public knowledge, from libraries and education to news media and public policy. Together, the contributors record the stresses and strains placed upon public knowledge by funding cuts and austerity, the new digital economy, quantification and target-setting, neoliberal politics, and inequality. These pressures, the authors contend, not only hinder democracies, but also undermine markets, economies, and social institutions and spaces everywhere.

Covering areas of international public concern, these polemical, accessible texts include reflections on the fate of schools and education, the takeover of public institutions by private interests, and the corruption of news and information in the financial sector. They cover the compromised Greek media during recent EU negotiations, the role played by media and political elites in the Irish property bubble, the compromising of government policy by corporate interests in the United States and Korea, and the squeeze on public service media in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.

Individually and collectively, these pieces spell out the importance of maintaining public, shared knowledge in all its forms, and offer a rallying cry for doing so, asserting the need for strong public, financial, and regulatory support….(More)”