Open eGovernment practices in all EU Member States make public services more collaborative, efficient and inclusive

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “In a digital single market, public services should be digital, open and cross-border by design. As part of the eGovernment Action Plan, public administrations and public institutions should be providing borderless user-friendly and end-to-end digital public services to all citizens and businesses by 2020. Two Commission studies highlight how collaborative and digitally-based Open eGovernment Services (OGS) can enhance transparency and responsiveness in citizens’ dealings with administration, build trust across sectors and provide better public services.
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The studies provide a valuable information base and could inspire current and future activities under the European Commission e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020, in particular those related to facilitating digital interaction between administrations and citizens/businesses.

The emergence of Open Government in Member States

The study “Towards faster implementation and uptake of open government” maps 395 inspiring examples of Open eGovernment Services across Europe. This wealth of data and practices, is proof of successful cooperation between public administrations, companies, organizations and citizens. It demonstrates how the process of digitalisation can create better opportunities for everyone and shows concretely how to make it happen. The European Commission will give visibility to these best practices, support the policy processes and invest in digital innovation in the public sector.

Openness between public administrations

This is mostly driven by administrations seeking better efficiency and cost reduction. For example, applying once-only principle – under which people and businesses provide information only once to public authorities – may result in increasingly automated exchanges. For example,

  • By applying the once-only principle, the Spanish government saved € 2.8 million (costs of exchange of paper documents between administrations) by introducing SIR (System of Interconnection of Registers).
  • In the Netherlands, public administrations share among them the data hosted in 12 existing base registers., This helps to speed up administrative processes and citizens or companies no longer need to provide the same information time and again.
  • Agiv, the agency for geographical information in Flanders (Belgium) has a central platform KLIP where administrations share the location of underground cables and pipes, helping thus companies to plan construction works. Its services were requested 100.000 times during the first six months after its launch.

Openness towards third parties

Openess towards third parties aims at increasing transparency and responsiveness and even participation in decision-making, for instance,

  • Greek citizens use the Vouliwatch platform to publicly question government officials and share their own expertise;
  • More and more cities foresee that citizens can have a say about how their money gets spent. The residents of Madrid vote online on 2% of city budget and those of Paris even on 5% of municipal expenses and can suggest projects within these financial limits; the inhabitants of Southern Italy submit formal web-based evaluations of public services and infrastructure thanks to cooperation of administration with the third sector.
  • OpenSpending, an initiative by the Open Knowledge Foundation, contains datasets  on public administrations expenditure in 76 countries so that citizens can see how authorities spend taxpayers’ money. Moreover, it allowed the UK government to save  £ 4 million in only 15 minutes by simply comparing markets for different services.

Open government can also unlock economic potential for growth and jobs, for example,

  • The Belgian Mercurius e-invoicing and e-procurement platform which allows all levels of administrations and businesses to cooperate and reduces the costs of invoices for companies by 62% (with expected 4,5 M € of savings per year)
  • The Dutch Base Register Topography works as open data for anyone interested and has developed TopoGPS , a GPS application, based on data from the base registry, with an economic effect estimated at €9 million.
  • The British NHS Job Platform, now used by 500 NHS employers,  is a focal point for job seekers in the medical sector. Also in the UK, TransportAPI aggregates and analyses public transport data, allowing users and developers to access the transport data opened up by public transportation bodies and to work on their own applications.

Numerous initiatives also support inclusion:

  • Konto Bariery uses accessibility data for an app-based map of buildings accessible to disabled people in Czech Republic and the non-profit
  • Techfugees is an initiative organised by tech professionals that makes engineers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, public administrations collaborate in order to provide innovative technology solutions to help refugees….(More)

Fighting Exclusion, Inequality and Distrust: The Open Government Challenge

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Remarks by Manish Bapna delivered at the Open Government Partnership Global Summit: “To the many heads of state, ministers, mayors, civil society colleagues gathered in this great hall, this is an important moment to reflect on the remarkable challenges of the past year.

We have seen the rise of various forms of populism and nationalism in the United States, Britain, the Philippines, Italy, and many other countries. This has led to surprise election results and an increase in anti-immigrant and anti-government movements.

We have seen the tragic results of conflict-driven migration, as captured in the iconic image of a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on the Turkish shore.

We have seen governments struggle to respond to the refugee crisis. Some open their arms while others close their doors.

We have seen deadly terrorist attacks in cities around the world – including this one — that have forced governments to walk a fine line between the need to protect their people and the risk of infringing on their civil liberties.

And we continue to confront two inter-linked challenges: the moral challenge of 700 million people in extreme poverty, living on less than $2 a day, and the existential challenge of a changing climate.

All of these point to a failure of governance and, if we are honest, to a lack of open government that truly connects, engages and meets the needs of all people.

World’s Problems Can’t Be Solved Without Open Government

The crux of the matter is this: While open government alone can’t fix the world’s problems, they can’t be solved without it.

Too many people feel excluded and marginalized. They believe that only elites reap the benefits of growth and globalization. They feel left out of decision-making. They distrust public institutions.

How we collectively confront these challenges will be OGP’s most important test….

Here are five essential steps we can take – we, the people here today – to help accelerate the shift toward open government.

The first step: We must protect civic space – the rights to free speech, assembly and association – because these bedrock rights are at the heart of a functioning society. Serious violations of these rights have been recently reported by CIVICUS in over 100 countries. In 25 active OGP countries, these rights are repressed or obstructed….

The second step: We must foster citizen-centered governance.

We cherish OGP as a unique platform where government and civil society are equal partners in a way that amplifies the concerns of ordinary citizens.

We commend the many OGP countries that have made significant strides. But we recognize that for others, this remains a major struggle.

As heads of state and ministers, we need you to embrace the concept of co-creation. …

The third step: We must make changes that are transformational, not incremental.

Drawing on our commitment to open government and the urgency of this moment, we must be willing to go further, faster…..

Transforming government brings us to the fourth step.

We need to make a real difference in people’s lives.

This is our Partnership’s ultimate aim. Because when open government works, it improves every facet of people’s lives.

• This means giving all people safe drinking water and clean air.
• It means reliable electricity so children can have light to do homework and play.
• It means health clinics where the sick can go to get quality care, where medicines are available
• And it means building trust in public officials who are untainted by corruption….

The fifth and final step: We need to reinvigorate the Partnership’s political leadership….(More)”

A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept

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Press Release: “UNDP and UN Global Pulse today released a comprehensive guide on how to integrate new sources of data into development and humanitarian work.

New and emerging data sources such as mobile phone data, social media, remote sensors and satellites have the potential to improve the work of governments and development organizations across the globe.

Entitled ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept,’ this publication was developed by practitioners for practitioners. It provides step-by-step guidance for working with new sources of data to staff of UN agencies and international Non-Governmental Organizations.

The guide is a result of a collaboration of UNDP and UN Global Pulse with support from UN Volunteers. Led by UNDP innovation teams in Europe and Central Asia and Arab States, six UNDP offices in Armenia, Egypt, Kosovo[1], fYR Macedonia, Sudan and Tunisia each completed data innovation projects applicable to development challenges on the ground.

The publication builds on these successful case trials and on the expertise of data innovators from UNDP and UN Global Pulse who managed the design and development of those projects.

It provides practical guidance for jump-starting a data innovation project, from the design phase through the creation of a proof-of-concept.

The guide is structured into three sections – (I) Explore the Problem & System, (II) Assemble the Team and (III) Create the Workplan. Each of the sections comprises of a series of tools for completing the steps needed to initiate and design a data innovation project, to engage the right partners and to make sure that adequate privacy and protection mechanisms are applied.

…Download ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept’ here.”

Self-organised scientific crowds to remedy research bureaucracy

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 at EuroScientist: “Imagine a world without peer review committees, project proposals or activity reports. Imagine a world where research funds seamlessly flow where they are best employed, like nutrients in a food-web or materials in a river network. Many scientists would immediately signup to live in such a world.

The Netherlands is set to become the place where this academic paradise will be tested, in the next few years. In July 2016, the Dutch parliament approved a motion related to implementing alternative funding procedures to alleviate the research bureaucracy, which is increasingly burdening scientists. Here EuroScientistinvestigates whether the self-organisation power of the scientific community could help resolve one of researchers’ worse burden.

Self-organisation

The Dutch national funding agency is planning to adopt a radically new system to allocate part of its funding, promoted by ecologist Marten Sheffer, who is professor of aquatic ecology and water quality management at Wageningen University and Research Centre. Under the proposed approach, funds would intially be evenly divided among all scientists in the country. Then, they would each have to allocate half of what they have received to the person who, in their opinion, is the most deserving scientist in their network. Then, the process would be iterated.

The promoters of the system believe that the “wisdom of the crowd” of the scientific community would assigning more funds to the most deserving scientists among them; with minimal amount of paperwork. The Dutch initiative is part of a broader effort to use a scientific approach to improve science.

In other words, it is part of a trend aiming to employ scientific evidence to tweak the social mechanisms of academia. Specifically, findings from what is known as complexity research are increasingly brought forward as a way of reducing bureaucracy, removing red tape, and maximising the time scientists spend in thinking….

Abandoning the current bureaucratic, top-down system to evaluate and fund research, based on labour-intensive peer-review, may not be too much of a loss. “Peer-review is an imperfect, fragile mechanism. Our simulations show that assigning funds at random would not distort too much the results of the traditional mechanism,” says Flaminio Squazzoni, an economist at the University of Brescia, Italy, and the coordinator of the PEERE-New Frontiers of Peer Review COST action.

In reality peer-review is never quite neutral. “If scientists behave perfectly, then peer review works,” Squazzoni explains, “but if strategic motivations are taken into account, like saving time or competition, then the results are worse than random.” Squazzoni believes that automation, economic incentives, or the creation of professional reviewers may improve the situation….(More)”

Portugal has announced the world’s first nationwide participatory budget

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Graça Fonseca at apolitical:”Portugal has announced the world’s first participatory budget on a national scale. The project will let people submit ideas for what the government should spend its money on, and then vote on which ideas are adopted.

Although participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular around the world in the past few years, it has so far been confined to cities and regions, and no country that we know of has attempted it nationwide. To reach as many people as possible, Portugal is also examining another innovation: letting people cast their votes via ATM machines.

‘It’s about quality of life, it’s about the quality of public space, it’s about the quality of life for your children, it’s about your life, OK?’ Graça Fonseca, the minister responsible, told Apolitical. ‘And you have a huge deficit of trust between people and the institutions of democracy. That’s the point we’re starting from and, if you look around, Portugal is not an exception in that among Western societies. We need to build that trust and, in my opinion, it’s urgent. If you don’t do anything, in ten, twenty years you’ll have serious problems.’

Although the official window for proposals begins in January, some have already been submitted to the project’s website. One suggests equipping kindergartens with technology to teach children about robotics. Using the open-source platform Arduino, the plan is to let children play with the tech and so foster scientific understanding from the earliest age.

Proposals can be made in the areas of science, culture, agriculture and lifelong learning, and there will be more than forty events in the new year for people to present and discuss their ideas.

The organisers hope that it will go some way to restoring closer contact between government and its citizens. Previous projects have shown that people who don’t vote in general elections often do cast their ballot on the specific proposals that participatory budgeting entails. Moreover, those who make the proposals often become passionate about them, campaigning for votes, flyering, making YouTube videos, going door-to-door and so fuelling a public discussion that involves ever more people in the process.

On the other side, it can bring public servants nearer to their fellow citizens by sharpening their understanding of what people want and what their priorities are. It can also raise the quality of public services by directing them more precisely to where they’re needed as well as by tapping the collective intelligence and imagination of thousands of participants….

Although it will not be used this year, because the project is still very much in the trial phase, the use of ATMs is potentially revolutionary. As Fonseca puts it, ‘In every remote part of the country, you might have nothing else, but you have an ATM.’ Moreover, an ATM could display proposals and allow people to vote directly, not least because it already contains a secure way of verifying their identity. At the moment, for comparison, people can vote by text or online, sending in the number from their ID card, which is checked against a database….(More)”.

Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Survey by Pew Global: “Signs of political discontent are increasingly common in many Western nations, with anti-establishment parties and candidates drawing significant attention and support across the European Union and in the United States. Meanwhile, as previous Pew Research Center surveys have shown, in emerging and developing economies there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way the political system is working.

As a new nine-country Pew Research Center survey on the strengths and limitations of civic engagement illustrates, there is a common perception that government is run for the benefit of the few, rather than the many in both emerging democracies and more mature democracies that have faced economic challenges in recent years. In eight of nine nations surveyed, more than half say government is run for the benefit of only a few groups in society, not for all people.1

However, this skeptical outlook on government does not mean people have given up on democracy or the ability of average citizens to have an impact on how the country is run. Roughly half or more in eight nations – Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, the U.S., India, Greece, Italy and Poland – say ordinary citizens can have a lot of influence on government. Hungary, where 61% say there is little citizens can do, is the lone nation where pessimism clearly outweighs optimism on this front.

Many people in these nine nations say they could potentially be motivated to become politically engaged on a variety of issues, especially poor health care, poverty and poor-quality schools. When asked what types of issues could get them to take political action, such as contacting an elected official or taking part in a protest, poor health care is the top choice among the six issues tested in six of eight countries. Health care, poverty and education constitute the top three motivators in all nations except India and Poland….(More)

For Better Citizenship, Scratch and Win

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg in the New York Times: “China, with its largely cash economy, has a huge problem with tax evasion. Not just grand tax evasion, but the everyday “no receipt, please” kind, even though there have been harsh penalties: Before 2011, some forms of tax evasion were even punishable by death.

The country needed a different approach. So what did it do to get people to pay sales tax?
A. Hired a force of inspectors to raid restaurants and stores to catch people skipping the receipt, accompanied by big fines and prison terms.
B. Started an “It’s a citizen’s duty to denounce” exhortation campaign.
C. Installed cameras to photograph every transaction.
D. Turned receipts into scratch-off lottery games.

One of these things is not like the other, and that’s the answer: D. Instead of punishing under-the-table transactions, China wisely decided to encouragelegal transactions by starting a receipt lottery. Many places have done this — Brazil, Chile, Malta, Portugal, Slovakia and Taiwan, among others. In Taiwan, for example, every month the tax authorities post lottery numbers; match a few numbers for a small prize, or all of them to win more than $300,000.

China took it further. Customers need not store their receipts and wait until the end of the month to see if they’ve won money. Gratification is instant: Each receipt, known as a fapiao, is a scratch-off lottery ticket. People still game the system, but much less. The fapiao system has greatly raised collections of sales tax, business income tax and total tax. And it’s cheap to administer: one study found that new tax revenue totaled 30 times (PDF) the cost of the lottery prizes.

When a receipt is a lottery ticket, people ask for a receipt. They hope to get money, but just as important, they like to play games. Those axioms apply around the globe.

“We have groups that say: we can give out an incentive to our customers worth $15,” said Aron Ezra, chief executive of OfferCraft, an American company that designs games for businesses. “They could do that and have everyone get an incentive for $15. But they’d get better results for the same average price by having variability — some get $10, some get $100.” The lottery makes it exciting.

The huge popularity of lotteries shows this. Another example is the Save to Win program, which credit unions are using in seven states. Microscopic interest rates weren’t enough to get low-income customers to save. So instead, for every $25 they put into a savings account, depositors get one lottery entry. They can win a grand prize — in some states, $10,000 — or $100 prizes every month.

What else could lotteries do?

Los Angeles and Philadelphia have been the sites of experiments to increase dismal voter turnout in local elections by choosing a voter at random to win a large cash prize. In May 2015, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in Los Angeles offered $25,000 to a random voter in one district during a school board election, in a project named Voteria.

Health-related lotteries aren’t new. In 1957, Glasgow held a mass X-ray campaign to diagnose tuberculosis. Health officials aimed to X-ray 250,000 people and in the end got three times that many. One reason for the enthusiasm: a weekly prize draw. A lovely vintage newsreel reported on the campaign.

More than 50 years later, researchers set up a lottery among young adults in Lesotho, designed to promote safe sex practices. Every four months the subjects were tested for two sexually transmitted diseases, syphilis and trichonomiasis. A negative test got them entered into a lottery to win either $50 (equivalent to a week’s average salary) or $100. The idea was to see if incentives to reduce the spread of syphilis would also protect against HIV.

The results were significant — a 21.4 percent reduction in the rate of new H.I.V. infections, and a 3.4 percent lower prevalence rate of HIV in the treatment group after two years. And the effect was lasting — the gains persisted a year after the experiment ended. The lottery worked in large part because it was most attractive to those most at risk: many people who take sexual risks also enjoy taking monetary risks, and might be eager to play a lottery.

The authors wrote in a blog post: “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first H.I.V. prevention intervention focusing on sexual behavior changes (as opposed to medical interventions) to have been demonstrated to lead to a significant reduction in H.I.V. incidence, the ultimate objective of any H.I.V. prevention intervention.”…(More)”

Living labs: Implementing open innovation in the public sector

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Paper by Mila Gascó in Government Information Quarterly: “Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies. Living labs are environments that can support public open innovation processes.

This article makes a practical contribution to understand the role of living labs as intermediaries of public open innovation. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of these innovation intermediaries, their outcomes, and their main challenges. In particular, it adopts a qualitative approach (fourteen semi-structured interviews and one focus group were conducted) in order to analyze two living labs: Citilab in the city of Cornellà and the network of fab athenaeums (public fab labs) in the city of Barcelona, both in Spain. After a thorough analysis of the attributes of these living labs, the article concludes that 1) living labs provide the opportunity for public agencies to meet with private sector organizations and thus function as innovation intermediaries, 2) implementing an open innovation perspective is considered more important than obtaining specific innovation results, and 3) scalability and sustainability are the main problems living labs encounter as open innovation intermediaries….(More)”

How Technology is Crowd-Sourcing the Fight Against Hunger

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Beth Noveck at Media Planet: “There is more than enough food produced to feed everyone alive today. Yet access to nutritious food is a challenge everywhere and depends on getting every citizen involved, not just large organizations. Technology is helping to democratize and distribute the job of tackling the problem of hunger in America and around the world.

Real-time research

One of the hardest problems is the difficulty of gaining real-time insight into food prices and shortages. Enter technology. We no longer have to rely on professional inspectors slowly collecting information face-to-face. The UN World Food Programme, which provides food assistance to 80 million people each year, together with Nielsen is conducting mobile phone surveys in 15 countries (with plans to expand to 30), asking people by voice and text about what they are eating. Formerly blank maps are now filled in with information provided quickly and directly by the most affected people, making it easy to prioritize the allocation of resources.

Technology helps the information flow in both directions, enabling those in need to reach out, but also to become more effective at helping themselves. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture, in collaboration with Reuters Market Light, provides information services in nine Indian languages to 1.4 million registered farmers in 50,000 villages across 17 Indian states via text and voice messages.

“In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure…”

Data to the people

New open data laws and policies that encourage more transparent publication of public information complement data collection and dissemination technologies such as phones and tablets. About 70 countries and hundreds of regions and cities have adopted open data policies, which guarantee that the information these public institutions collect be available for free use by the public. As a result, there are millions of open datasets now online on websites such as the Humanitarian Data Exchange, which hosts 4,000 datasets such as country-by-country stats on food prices and undernourishment around the world.

Companies are compiling and sharing data to combat food insecurity, too. Anyone can dig into the data on the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition platform, a data collaborative where 300 private and public partners are sharing information.

Importantly, this vast quantity of open data is available to anyone, not only to governments. As a result, large and small entrepreneurs are able to create new apps and programs to combat food insecurity, such as Plantwise, which uses government data to offer a knowledge bank and run “plant clinics” that help farmers lose less of what they grow to pests. Google uses open government data to show people the location of farmers markets near their homes.

Students, too, can learn to play a role. For the second summer in a row, the Governance Lab at New York University, in partnership with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), mounted a two-week open data summer camp for 40 middle and high school students. The next generation of problem solvers is learning new data science skills by working on food safety and other projects using USDA open data.

Enhancing connection

Ultimately, technology enables greater communication and collaboration among the public, social service organizations, restaurants, farmers and other food producers who must work together to avoid food crises. The European Food Safety Authority in Italy has begun exploring how to use internet-based collaboration (often called citizen science or crowdsourcing) to get more people involved in food and feed risk assessment.

In the United States, 40 percent of the food produced here is wasted, and yet 1 in 4 American children (and 1 in 6 adults) remain food insecure, according to the Rockefeller Foundation. Copia, a San Francisco based smartphone app facilitates donations and deliveries of those with excess food in six cities in the Bay Area. Zero Percent in Chicago similarly attacks the distribution problem by connecting restaurants to charities to donate their excess food. Full Harvest is a tech platform that facilitates the selling of surplus produce that otherwise would not have a market.

Mobilizing the world

Prize-backed challenges create the incentives for more people to collaborate online and get involved in the fight against hunger….(More)”

Trust in Government

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First issue of the Government Oxford Review focusing on trust (or lack of trust) in government:

“In 2016, governments are in the firing line. Their populations suspect them of accelerating globalisation for the benefit of the few, letting trade drive away jobs, and encouraging immigration so as to provide cheaper labour and to fill skills-gaps without having to invest in training. As a result the ‘anti-government’, ‘anti-expert’, ‘anti-immigration’ movements are rapidly gathering support. The Brexit campaign in the United Kingdom, the Presidential run of Donald Trump in the United States, and the Five Star movement in Italy are but three examples.” Dean Ngaire Woods

Our contributors have shed an interesting, and innovative, light on this issue. McKinsey’s Andrew Grant and Bjarne Corydon discuss the importance of transparency and accountability of government, while Elizabeth Linos, from the Behavioural Insights Team in North America, and Princeton’s Eldar Shafir discuss how behavioural science can be utilised to implement better policy, and Geoff Mulgan, CEO at Nesta, provides insights into how harnessing technology can bring about increased collective intelligence.

The Conference Addendum features panel summaries from the 2016 Challenges of Government Conference, written by our MPP and DPhil in Public Policy students.

Documents:
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – The Trust Issue
PDF icon Oxford Government Review 1 – Conference addendum (More)”