Southeast Asia

Want To Complain To Cambodia’s Gov’t? There’s An App for That

Curated on February 22, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Wilwohl in Forbes: “A new mobile and web application will help Cambodians better track complaints registered with local governments, but part of the app’s effectiveness hinges on whether the country’s leaders are receptive to the technology.

Known as Transmit, the app works by allowing selected government and grassroots leaders to enter in complaints made by citizens during routine community council meetings.

The app then sends the complaints to an online database. Once in the database, the government officials referenced by the issues can address them and indicate the status of the complaints.

The database is public and offers registered users the opportunity to comment on the complaints.

Currently, citizens register complaints with pen and paper or in a spreadsheet on an official’s computer….

Earlier this month, Pact began training officials in Pursat province to use the app and will expand training this week to local governments and community-based organizations in Kampong Cham, Battambang and Mondulkiri provinces, saidCenter.

But the app relies on government officials using the technology to keep the community informed about the progress of the complaints—a task that may be easier said than done in a country that is well-documented for its lack of transparency…(More)”

Sticky-note strategy: How federal innovation labs borrow from Silicon Valley

Curated on February 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carten Cordell in the Federal Times: “The framework for an integrated security solution in the Philippines is built on a bedrock of sticky notes. So is the strategy for combating piracy in East Africa and a handful of other plans that Zvika Krieger is crafting in a cauldron of collaboration within the State Department.

More specifically, Krieger, a senior adviser for strategy within the department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, is working in the bureau’s Strategy Lab, just one pocket of federal government where a Silicon Valley-playbook for innovation is being used to develop policy solutions….

Krieger and a host of other policy thinkers learned a new way to channel innovation for policy solutions called human-centered design, or design thinking. While arguably new in government, the framework has long been in use by the tech sector to design products that will serve the needs of their customers. The strategy of group thinking towards a policy — which is more what these innovation labs seek to achieve — has been used before as well….Where the government has started to use HCD is in developing new policy solutions within a multifaceted group of stakeholders that can contribute a well-rounded slate of expertise. The product is a strategy that is developed from the creative thoughts of a team of experts, rather than a single specialized source….

The core tenet of HCD is to establish a meritocracy of ideas that is both empathetic of thought and immune to hierarchy. In order to get innovative solutions for a complex problem, Krieger forms a team of experts and stakeholders. He then mixes in outside thought leaders he calls “wild cards” to give the group outside perspective.

The delicate balance opens discussion and the mix of ideas ultimately form a strategy for handling the problem. That strategy might involve a technology; but it could also be a new partnership, a new function within an office, or a new acquisition program. Because the team is comprised of multiple experts, it can navigate the complexity more thoroughly, and the wild cards can offer their expertise to provide solutions the stakeholders may not have considered….

Human-centered design has been working its way through pockets of the federal government for a few years now. The Office of Personnel Management opened its Innovation Lab in 2012 and was tasked with improving the USAJobs website. The Department of Health and Human Services opened the IDEA Lab in 2013 to address innovation in its mission. The Department of Veteran Affairs has a Center of Innovation to identify new approaches to meet the current and future needs of veterans, and the departments of Defense and State both have innovation labs tackling policy solutions.

The concept is gaining momentum. This fall, the Obama administration released a strategy report calling for a network of innovation labs throughout federal agencies to develop new policy solutions through HCD.

“I think the word is spreading. It’s kind of like a whisper campaign, in the most positive way,” said an administration official with knowledge of innovation labs and HCD strategies, who was not authorized to speak to the press. “I think, again, the only constraint here is that we don’t have enough of them to be able to imbue this knowledge across government. We need many more people.”

A March 2014 GAO report said that the OPM Innovation Lab had not developed consistent performance targets that would allow it to assess the success of its projects. The report recommended more consistent milestones to assess progress, which the agency addressed through a series of pilot programs….

In the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, an innovation lab called the Collaboratory is in its second year of existence, using HCD strategies to improve projects like the Fulbright program and other educational diplomacy efforts.

The Education Diplomacy initiative, for example, used HCD to devise ways to increase education access abroad using State resources. Defining U.S. embassies as the end user, the Collaboratory then analyzed the areas of need at the installations and began crafting policies.

“We identified a couple of area where we thought we could make substantial gains quite quickly and in a budget neutral way,” Collaboratory Deputy Director Paul Kruchoski said. The process allowed multiple stakeholders like the U.S. Agency for International Development, Peace Corps and the Department of Education to help craft the policy and create what Kruchoski called “feedback loops” to refine throughout the embassies…(More)”

Open data and (15 million!) new measures of democracy

Curated on February 13, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Joshua Tucker in the Washington Post: “Last month the University of Gothenberg’s V-Dem Institute released a new“Varieties of Democracy” dataset. It provides about 15 million data points on democracy, including 39 democracy-related indices. It can be accessed at v-dem.net along with supporting documentation. I asked Staffan I. Lindberg, Director of the V-Dem Institute and one of the directors of the project, a few questions about the new data. What follows is a lightly edited version of his answers.

Women’s Political Empowerment Index for Southeast Asia (Data: V-Dem data version 5; Figure V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenberg, Sweden)

Joshua Tucker: What is democracy, and is it even really to have quantitative measures on democracy?

Staffan Lindberg: There is no consensus on the definition of democracy and how to measure it. The understanding of what a democracy really is varies across countries and regions. This motivates the V-Dem approach not to offer one standard definition of the concept but instead to distinguish among five principles different versions of democracy: Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative, and Egalitarian democracy. All of these principles have played prominent roles in current and historical discussions about democracy. Our measurement of these principles are based on two types of data, factual data collected by assisting researchers and survey responses by country experts, which are combined using a rather complex measurement model (which is a“custom-designed Bayesian ordinal item response theory model”, for details see the V-Dem Methodology document)….(More)

Dive Against Debris: Employing 25,600 scuba divers to collect data

Curated on February 9, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

DataDrivenJournalism: “In 2011, the team at Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris program with the objective of better documenting the amount of marine debris found in the world’s oceans. This global citizen science program trains volunteer scuba divers from across the globe to conduct underwater surveys, generating quantitative data on the debris they see. After cleaning this data for quality assurance, it is then published on their interactive Dive Against Debris Map. This data and visualization informs the team’s advocacy work, ultimately seeking to generate changes in policy.

The impact of marine debris is devastating, killing marine life and changing their habitats and ecosystems. Animals are extremely vulnerable to ingestion or entanglement which leads to death, as they are unable to distinguish between what is trash and what is not.

Beyond this, as microscopic pieces of plastic enter the food chain, most seafood ingested by humans also likely contains marine debris.

Project AWARE is a growing movement of scuba divers protecting the ocean, with a long history of working on the marine debris issue. Through its work, the Project AWARE team found that there was a significant lack of data available regarding underwater marine debris.

To remedy this, the Dive Against Debris program was launched in 2011. The programs seeks to collect and visualise data generated by their volunteers, then use this data to influence policy changes and raise social awareness around the world. This data collection is unique in that it focuses exclusively on yielding data about the types and quantities of marine debris items found beneath in the ocean, an issue Hannah Pragnell-Raasch, a Program Specialist with Project AWARE, told us “has previously been disregarded as out of sight, out of mind, as the everyday person is not exposed to the harmful impacts.”

To date, Dive Against Debris surveys have been conducted in over 50 countries, with the top reporting countries being the United States, Thailand and Greece. As more divers get involved with Dive Against Debris, Project AWARE continues to bring visibility to the problem of marine debris and helps to identify target areas for waste prevention efforts.

….

Anyone can take part in a Dive Against Debris survey, as long as they are a certified diver. As described in their “Action Zone”, scuba divers can either “join” or “create” an action. To further support the program, Project AWARE launched the Dive Against Debris Distinctive Specialty, a course of divers, which “aims to equip students (scuba divers) with the skills and knowledge necessary to conduct their own Dive Against Debris Surveys.”

Before the data appears on the interactive Dive Against Debris Map, it goes through a quality review in order to ensure data integrity. The survey leader at Project AWARE corrects any data inconsistencies. Then, as the focus is exclusively on what is found underwater, all land data is removed. Project AWARE Aware aims to create “an accurate perspective about underwater marine debris, that policy-makers simply cannot ignore”…. Explore the Dive Against Debris project here…. (More)

Idea to retire: Leaders can’t take risks or experiment

Curated on February 1, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

David Bray at TechTank: “Technology is rapidly changing our world. Traditionally, a nation’s physical borders could mark the beginning of their sovereign space, but in the early to mid-20^th century airplanes challenged this notion. Later on, space-based satellites began flying in space above all nations. By the early 21^st century, smartphone technologies costing $100 or so gave individuals computational capabilities that dwarfed the multi-million dollar computers operated by large nation-states just three decades earlier.

In this period of exponential change, all of us across the public sector must work together, enabling more inclusive work across government workers, citizen-led contributions, and public-private partnerships. Institutions must empower positive change agents on the inside of public service to pioneer new ways of delivering superior results. Institutions must also open their data for greater public interaction, citizen-led remixing, and discussions.

All together, these actions will transform public service to truly be “We the (mobile, data-enabled, collaborative) People” working to improve our world. These actions all begin creating creative spaces that allow public service professionals the opportunities to experiment and explore new ways of delivering superior results to the public.

21st Century Reality #1: Public service must include workspaces for those who want to experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.

The world we face now is dramatically different then the world of 50, 100, or 200 years ago. More technological change is expected to occur in the next five years than the last 15 years combined. Advances in technology have blurred what traditionally was considered government, and consequentially we must experiment and explore new ways of delivering results.

21st Century Reality #2: Public service agencies need, within reason, to be allowed to have things fail, and be allowed to take risks.

The words “expertise” and “experiments” have the same etymological root, which is “exper,” meaning “out of danger.” Whereas the motto in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs around the world might be “fail fast and fail often,” such a model is not going to work for public service, where certain endeavors absolutely must succeed and cannot waste taxpayer funds.

The only way public sector technologists will gain the expertise needed to respond to and take advantage of the digital disruptions occurring globally will be to do “dangerous experiments” as positive change agents akin to what entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley also do….

21st Century Reality #3: Public service cannot be done solely by government professionals in a top-down fashion.

With the communication capabilities provided by smartphones, social media, and freely available apps, individual members of the public can voluntarily access, analyze, remix, and choose to contribute data and insights to better inform public service. Recognizing this shift from top-down to bottom-up activities represents the first step to the resiliency of our legacy institutions….

Putting a cultural shift into practice

Senior executives need to shift from managing those who report to them to championing and creating spaces for creativity within their organizations. Within any organization, change agents should be able to approach an executive, pitch new ideas, bring data to support these ideas, and if a venture is approved move forward with speed to transform public service away from our legacy approaches….

The work of public service also can be done by public-private partnerships acting beyond their own corporate interests to benefit the nation and local communities. Historically the U.S. has lagged other nations, like Singapore or the U.K., in exploring new innovative forms of public-private partnerships. This could change by examining the pressing issues of the day and considering how the private sector might solve challenging issues, or complement the efforts of government professionals. This could include rotations of both government and private sector professionals as part of public-private partnerships to do public service that now might be done more collaboratively, effectively, and innovatively using alternative forms of organizational design and delivery.

If public service returns to first principles – namely, what “We the People” choose to do together – new forms of organizing, collaborating, incentivizing, and delivering results will emerge. Our exponential era requires such transformational partnerships for the future ahead….(More)”

Design-Led Innovation in the Public Sector

Curated on January 28, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Manuel Sosa at INSEAD Knowledge: “When entering a government permit office, virtually everyone would prepare themselves for a certain amount of boredom and confusion. But resignation may well turn to surprise or even shock, if that office is Singapore’s Employment Pass Service Centre (EPSC), where foreign professionals go to receive their visa to work in the city-state. The ambience more closely resembles a luxury hotel lobby than a grim government agency, an impression reinforced by the roaming reception managers who greet arriving applicants, directing them to a waiting area with upholstered chairs and skyline views.

In a new case study, “Designing the Employment Pass Service Centre for the Ministry of Manpower, Singapore”, Prof. Michael Pich and I explore how even public organizations are beginning to use design to find and tap into innovation opportunities where few have thought to look. In the case of Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM), a design-led transformation of a single facility was the starting point of a drastic reconsideration of what a government agency could be.

Efficiency is not enough

Prior to opening the EPSC in July 2009, MOM’s Work Pass Division (WPD) had developed hyper-efficient methods to process work permits for foreign workers, who comprise approximately 40 percent of Singapore’s workforce. In fact, it was generally considered the most efficient department of its kind in the world. After 9/11, a mandatory-fingerprinting policy for white-collar workers was introduced, necessitating a standalone centre. The agency saw this as an opportunity to raise the efficiency bar even further.

Giving careful consideration to every aspect of the permit-granting process, the project team worked with a local vendor to overhaul the existing model. The proposal they ultimately presented to MOM assured almost unheard-of waiting times, as well as a more aesthetically pleasing look and feel….

Most public-sector organisations’ prickly interactions with the public can be explained with the simple fact that they lack competition. Government bodies are generally monopolies dispensing necessities, so on the whole they don’t feel compelled to agonise over their public face.

MOM and the Singapore government had a different idea. Aware that they were competing with other countries for top global talent, they recognised that the permit-granting process, in a very real sense, set the tone for foreign professionals’ entire experience of Singapore. Expats would be unlikely to remember precisely how long it took to get processed, but the quality of the service received would resonate in their minds and affect their impression of the country as a whole.

IDEO typically begins by concentrating on the user experience. In this case, in addition to observing and identifying what goes through the mind of a typical applicant during his or her journey in the existing system, the observation stage included talking to foreigners who were arriving in Singapore about their experience. IDEO discovered that professionals newly arrived in Singapore were embarking on an entirely new chapter of their lives, with all the expected stresses. The last thing they needed was more stress when receiving their permit. Hence, the EPSC entry hall is airy and free of clutter to create a sense of calm. The ESPC provides toys to keep kids entertained while their parents meet with agents and register for work passes. Visitors are always called by name, not number. Intimidating interview rooms were done away with in favour of open cabanas….In its initial customer satisfaction survey in 2010, the EPSC scored an average rating of 5.7 out of 6….(More)”

Humanity 360: World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2015

Curated on January 13, 2016August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

OCHA: “WORLD HUMANITARIAN DATA AND TRENDS

Highlights major trends, challenges and opportunities in the nature of humanitarian crises, showing how the humanitarian landscape is evolving in a rapidly changing world.

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LEAVING NO ONE BEHIND: HUMANITARIAN EFFECTIVENESS IN THE AGE OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS

Exploring what humanitarian effectiveness means in today’s world ‐ better meeting the needs of people in crisis, better moving people out of crisis.

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TOOLS FOR DATA COORDINATION AND COLLECTION

Initial Conditions Matter: Social Capital and Participatory Development

Curated on January 11, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Lisa A. Cameron et al: “Billions of dollars have been spent on participatory development programs in the developing world. These programs give community members an active decision-making role. Given the emphasis on community involvement, one might expect that the effectiveness of this approach would depend on communities’ pre-existing social capital stocks. Using data from a large randomised field experiment of Community-Led Total Sanitation in Indonesia, we find that villages with high initial social capital built toilets and reduced open defecation, resulting in substantial health benefits. In villages with low initial stocks of social capital, the approach was counterproductive – fewer toilets were built than in control communities and social capital suffered….(More)”