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Toward a Research Agenda on Opening Governance

Curated on May 7, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Members of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance at Medium: “Society is confronted by a number of increasingly complex problems — inequality, climate change, access to affordable healthcare — that often seem intractable. Existing societal institutions, including government agencies, corporations and NGOs, have repeatedly proven themselves unable to tackle these problems in their current composition. Unsurprisingly, trust in existing institutions is at an all-time low.

At the same time, advances in technology and sciences offer a unique opportunity to redesign and reinvent our institutions. Increased access to data may radically transform how we identify problems and measure progress. Our capacity to connect with citizens could greatly increase the knowledge and expertise available to solve big public problems. We are witnessing, in effect, the birth of a new paradigm of governance — labeled “open governance” — where institutions share and leverage data, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and partner with citizens to make better decisions. All of these developments offer a potential solution to the crisis of trust and legitimacy confronting existing institutions.

But for the promise of open governance, we actually know very little about its true impact, and about the conditions and contingencies required for institutional innovation to really work. Even less is known about the capabilities that institutions must develop in order to be able to take advantage of new technologies and innovative practices. The lack of evidence is holding back positive change. It is limiting our ability to improve people’s lives.

The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance seeks to address these shortcomings. Convened and organized by the GovLab, and made possible by a three-year, $5 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Network seeks to build an empirical foundation that will help us understand how democratic institutions are being (and should be) redesigned, and how this in turn influences governance. At its broadest level, the Network seeks to create a new science of institutional innovation.

In what follows, we outline a research agenda and a set of deliverables for the coming years that can deepen our understanding of “open governance.” More specifically the below seeks:

to frame and contextualize the areas of common focus among the members;
to guide the targeted advancement of Network activities;
to catalyze opportunities for further collaboration and knowledge exchange between Network members and those working in the field at large.

A core objective of the Network is to conduct research based on, and that has relevance for, real-world institutions. Any research that is solely undertaken in the lab, far from the actual happenings the Network seeks to influence and study, is deemed to be insufficient. As such, the Network is actively developing flexible, scalable methodologies to help analyze the impact of opening governance. In the spirit of interdisciplinarity and openness that defines the Network, these methodologies are being developed collaboratively with partners from diverse disciplines.

The below seeks to provide a framework for those outside the Network — including those who would not necessarily characterize their research as falling under the banner of opening governance — to undertake empirical, agile research into the redesign and innovation of governance processes and the solving of public problems….(More)”

Quality of Public Administration – A Toolbox for Practitioners

Curated on May 6, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “The quality of its institutions, both governmental and judicial, is a key determining factor for a country’s economic and societal well-being. Administrative capacity is increasingly recognised as a pre-requisite for delivering the EU’s treaty obligations and objectives, such as creating sustainable growth and jobs. The EU supports Member States’ administrations through the European Semester process and the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF). The Toolbox aims to support, guide and encourage those who want to build public administrations that will create prosperous, fair and resilient societies. It is intended as a reference and resource, not a prescription or a panacea, by signposting readers to existing EU policies and international practices, illustrated by almost 170 inspirational case studies.

This abridged version of the Toolbox (the full e-version will be published soon at http://ec.europa.eu/esf/toolbox) sets the scene for readers, lays out principles and values of good governance, summarises the seven thematic chapters (policy-making, ethics and anti-corruption, institutions, service delivery, business environment, justice systems and public finance management), and sets out some considerations for managing the ESIF’s thematic objective 11….(This publication is available in printed format in English)

Moving Cities Beyond Performance Measurement

Curated on May 5, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Pew Charitable Trust: “The recent explosion in the availability of data is changing the way Americans make decisions and do business in fields as diverse as sports, public health, shopping, and politics. The business of government is no exception. At the local level, new methods of collecting and analyzing information have varied and far-reaching effects on the ability of leaders to understand and work within their fiscal constraints and meet residents’ needs.

Local governments have used performance measurement—collecting and studying data with the aim of improving operating efficiency and effectiveness—for decades, but today’s cities have access to a wealth of other data. Those on the cutting edge are using these data with new analytical tools in innovative ways that often reach beyond the conventional definition of performance measurement. For example, theNew York City Fire Department compiles information from various city departments about building characteristics—such as construction material, fireproofing, height, date of construction, and last inspection date—to prioritize buildings for inspections.Boston uses a cellphone app, called Street Bump, to help detect potholes using the accelerometers built into cellphones.

What’s new, beyond the sheer volume of data, to help governments improve?

Local governments previously examined statistics only within individual departments. Today, they are gleaning new insights by combining data across agencies.
Government officials typically reviewed performance statistics only periodically—annually, semiannually, or quarterly. Now they often have access to usable data in real time, allowing them to be more responsive and efficient.
In the past, cities primarily used analytics to understand past events. Today, some are exploring predictive analytics, using data to anticipate occurrences and outcomes….(More)”

Five Headlines from a Big Month for the Data Revolution

Curated on May 4, 2015May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Sarah T. Lucas at Post2015.org: “If the history of the data revolution were written today, it would include three major dates. May 2013, when theHigh Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda first coined the phrase “data revolution.” November 2014, when the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group (IEAG) set a vision for it. And April 2015, when five headliner stories pushed the data revolution from great idea to a concrete roadmap for action.

The April 2015 Data Revolution Headlines

1. The African Data Consensus puts Africa in the lead on bringing the data revolution to the regional level. TheAfrica Data Consensus (ADC) envisions “a profound shift in the way that data is harnessed to impact on development decision-making, with a particular emphasis on building a culture of usage.” The ADC finds consensus across 15 “data communities”—ranging from open data to official statistics to geospatial data, and is endorsed by Africa’s ministers of finance. The ADC gets top billing in my book, as the first contribution that truly reflects a large diversity of voices and creates a political hook for action. (Stay tuned for a blog from my colleague Rachel Quint on the ADC).

2. The Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) gets our minds (and wallets) around the data needed to measure the SDGs. The SDSN Needs Assessment for SDG Monitoring and Statistical Capacity Development maps the investments needed to improve official statistics. My favorite parts are the clear typology of data (see pg. 12), and that the authors are very open about the methods, assumptions, and leaps of faith they had to take in the costing exercise. They also start an important discussion about how advances in information and communications technology, satellite imagery, and other new technologies have the potential to expand coverage, increase analytic capacity, and reduce the cost of data systems.

3. The Overseas Development Institute (ODI) calls on us to find the “missing millions.” ODI’s The Data Revolution: Finding the Missing Millions presents the stark reality of data gaps and what they mean for understanding and addressing development challenges. The authors highlight that even that most fundamental of measures—of poverty levels—could be understated by as much as a quarter. And that’s just the beginning. The report also pushes us to think beyond the costs of data, and focus on how much good data can save. With examples of data lowering the cost of doing government business, the authors remind us to think about data as an investment with real economic and social returns.

4. Paris21 offers a roadmap for putting national statistic offices (NSOs) at the heart of the data revolution.Paris21’s Roadmap for a Country-Led Data Revolution does not mince words. It calls on the data revolution to “turn a vicious cycle of [NSO] underperformance and inadequate resources into a virtuous one where increased demand leads to improved performance and an increase in resources and capacity.” It makes the case for why NSOs are central and need more support, while also pushing them to modernize, innovate, and open up. The roadmap gets my vote for best design. This ain’t your grandfather’s statistics report!

5. The Cartagena Data Festival features real-live data heroes and fosters new partnerships. The Festival featured data innovators (such as terra-i using satellite data to track deforestation), NSOs on the leading edge of modernization and reform (such as Colombia and the Philippines), traditional actors using old data in new ways (such as the Inter-American Development Bank’s fantastic energy database), groups focused on citizen-generated data (such as The Data Shift and UN My World), private firms working with big data for social good (such asTelefónica), and many others—all reminding us that the data revolution is well underway and will not be stopped. Most importantly, it brought these actors together in one place. You could see the sparks flying as folks learned from each other and hatched plans together. The Festival gets my vote for best conference of a lifetime, with the perfect blend of substantive sessions, intense debate, learning, inspiration, new connections, and a lot of fun. (Stay tuned for a post from my colleague Kristen Stelljes and me for more on Cartagena).

This month full of headlines leaves no room for doubt—momentum is building fast on the data revolution. And just in time.

With the Financing for Development (FFD) conference in Addis Ababa in July, the agreement of Sustainable Development Goals in New York in September, and the Climate Summit in Paris in December, this is a big political year for global development. Data revolutionaries must seize this moment to push past vision, past roadmaps, to actual action and results…..(More)”

Data Fusion Heralds City Attractiveness Ranking

Curated on May 4, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “The ability of any city to attract visitors is an important metric for town planners, businesses based on tourism, traffic planners, residents, and so on. And there are increasingly varied ways of measuring this thanks to the growing volumes of city-related data generated by with social media, and location-based data.

So it’s only natural that researchers would like to draw these data sets together to see what kind of insight they can get from this form of data fusion.

And so it has turned out thanks to the work of Stanislav Sobolevsky at MIT and a few buddies. These guys have fused three wildly different data sets related to the attractiveness of a city that allows them to rank these places and to understand why people visit them and what they do when they get there.

The work focuses exclusively on cities in Spain using data that is relatively straightforward to gather. The first data set consists of the number of credit and debit card transactions carried out by visitors to cities throughout Spain during 2011. This includes each card’s country of origin, which allows Sobolevsky and co to count only those transactions made by foreign visitors—a total of 17 million anonymized transactions from 8.6 million foreign visitors from 175 different countries.

The second data set consists of over 3.5 million photos and videos taken in Spain and posted to Flickr by people living in other countries. These pictures were taken between 2005 and 2014 by 16,000 visitors from 112 countries.

The last data set consists of around 700,000 geotagged tweets posted in Spain during 2012. These were posted by 16,000 foreign visitors from 112 countries.

Finally, the team defined a city’s attractiveness, at least for the purposes of this study, as the total number of pictures, tweets and card transactions that took place within it……

That’s interesting work that shows how the fusion of big data sets can provide insights into the way people use cities. It has its limitations of course. The study does not address the reasons why people find cities attractive and what draws them there in the first place. For example, are they there for tourism, for business, or for some other reason. That would require more specialized data.

But it does provide a general picture of attractiveness that could be a start for more detailed analyses. As such, this work is just a small part of a new science of cities based on big data, but one that shows how much is becoming possible with just a little number crunching.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1504.06003 : Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economic and social media activity”

From “Economic Man” to Behavioral Economics

Curated on April 30, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Justin Fox at the Harvard Business Review: “When we make decisions, we make mistakes. We all know this from personal experience, of course. But just in case we didn’t, a seemingly unending stream of experimental evidence in recent years has documented the human penchant for error. This line of research—dubbed heuristics and biases, although you may be more familiar with its offshoot, behavioral economics—has become the dominant academic approach to understanding decisions. Its practitioners have had a major influence on business, government, and financial markets. Their books—Predictably Irrational; Thinking, Fast and Slow; and Nudge, to name three of the most important—have suffused popular culture.

So far, so good. This research has been enormously informative and valuable. Our world, and our understanding of decision making, would be much poorer without it.

It is not, however, the only useful way to think about making decisions. Even if you restrict your view to the academic discussion, there are three distinct schools of thought. Although heuristics and biases is currently dominant, for the past half century it has interacted with and sometimes battled with the other two, one of which has a formal name—decision analysis—and the other of which can perhaps best be characterized as demonstrating that we humans aren’t as dumb as we look.

Adherents of the three schools have engaged in fierce debates, and although things have settled down lately, major differences persist. This isn’t like David Lodge’s aphorism about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so small. Decision making is important, and decision scholars have had real influence.

This article briefly tells the story of where the different streams arose and how they have interacted, beginning with the explosion of interest in the field during and after World War II (for a longer view, see “A Brief History of Decision Making,” by Leigh Buchanan and Andrew O’Connell, HBR, January 2006). The goal is to make you a more informed consumer of decision advice—which just might make you a better decision maker….(More)”

The Design Economy primer: how design is revolutionising health, business, cities and government

Curated on April 28, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

James Pallister at the Design Council: “In the four sections that follow, we offer a guide to the design economy in the twenty-first century – a flavour of the critical issues, leading companies, research institutes and designers in:

1. Health

A growing awareness of the social impact of design has led to an increasing number of designers working in health and well-being.

2. Business

Global corporations, following in the tracks of Apple, Philips and IBM, are building design studios and seeking Chief Design Officers to join their boards and orchestrate the transition from marketing-led to design-led businesses.

3. Cities

With a rapidly increasing proportion of the population living in cities, design is being used to tackle the implications of this demographic shift in areas like housing and infrastructure.

4. Government

In the UK, Europe and the US, designers can now be found close to the seat of government, employing design to improve public services and policies.

With design expanding into these important and largely uncharted areas, we urgently need to begin asking informed questions about design and its practical and ethical territory.

John Mathers, Chief Executive of the Design Council, asks us to pause for a moment to consider, “How has design, which many still associate largely with style and consumerism, come to be something one might look to for solutions to the most complex and challenging problems facing humanity today – problems requiring not just local fixes using clever design objects, but solutions that reimagine systems themselves? Are we, at this point, really even still talking about the same discipline?”

The questions, perhaps, boil down to one: ‘What should design do?’ …(More)”

How Digital Transparency Became a Force of Nature

Curated on April 20, 2015August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel C. Dennett and Deb Roy in Scientific American: “More than half a billion years ago a spectacularly creative burst of biological innovation called the Cambrian explosion occurred. In a geologic “instant” of several million years, organisms developed strikingly new body shapes, new organs, and new predation strategies and defenses against them. Evolutionary biologists disagree about what triggered this prodigious wave of novelty, but a particularly compelling hypothesis, advanced by University of Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker, is that light was the trigger. Parker proposes that around 543 million years ago, the chemistry of the shallow oceans and the atmosphere suddenly changed to become much more transparent. At the time, all animal life was confined to the oceans, and as soon as the daylight flooded in, eyesight became the best trick in the sea. As eyes rapidly evolved, so did the behaviors and equipment that responded to them.

Whereas before all perception was proximal — by contact or by sensed differences in chemical concentration or pressure waves — now animals could identify and track things at a distance. Predators could home in on their prey; prey could see the predators coming and take evasive action. Locomotion is a slow and stupid business until you have eyes to guide you, and eyes are useless if you cannot engage in locomotion, so perception and action evolved together in an arms race. This arms race drove much of the basic diversification of the tree of life we have today.

Parker’s hypothesis about the Cambrian explosion provides an excellent parallel for understanding a new, seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the spread of digital technology. Although advances in communications technology have transformed our world many times in the past — the invention of writing signaled the end of prehistory; the printing press sent waves of change through all the major institutions of society — digital technology could have a greater impact than anything that has come before. It will enhance the powers of some individuals and organizations while subverting the powers of others, creating both opportunities and risks that could scarcely have been imagined a generation ago.

Through social media, the Internet has put global-scale communications tools in the hands of individuals. A wild new frontier has burst open. Services such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, WhatsApp and SnapChat generate new media on a par with the telephone or television — and the speed with which these media are emerging is truly disruptive. It took decades for engineers to develop and deploy telephone and television networks, so organizations had some time to adapt. Today a social-media service can be developed in weeks, and hundreds of millions of people can be using it within months. This intense pace of innovation gives organizations no time to adapt to one medium before the arrival of the next.

The tremendous change in our world triggered by this media inundation can be summed up in a word: transparency. We can now see further, faster, and more cheaply and easily than ever before — and we can be seen. And you and I can see that everyone can see what we see, in a recursive hall of mirrors of mutual knowledge that both enables and hobbles. The age-old game of hide-and-seek that has shaped all life on the planet has suddenly shifted its playing field, its equipment and its rules. The players who cannot adjust will not last long.

The impact on our organizations and institutions will be profound. Governments, armies, churches, universities, banks and companies all evolved to thrive in a relatively murky epistemological environment, in which most knowledge was local, secrets were easily kept, and individuals were, if not blind, myopic. When these organizations suddenly find themselves exposed to daylight, they quickly discover that they can no longer rely on old methods; they must respond to the new transparency or go extinct. Just as a living cell needs an effective membrane to protect its internal machinery from the vicissitudes of the outside world, so human organizations need a protective interface between their internal affairs and the public world, and the old interfaces are losing their effectiveness….(More at Medium)”

21st-Century Public Servants: Using Prizes and Challenges to Spur Innovation

Curated on April 20, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Jenn Gustetic at the Open Government Initiative Blog: “Thousands of Federal employees across the government are using a variety of modern tools and techniques to deliver services more effectively and efficiently, and to solve problems that relate to the missions of their Agencies. These 21^st-century public servants are accomplishing meaningful results by applying new tools and techniques to their programs and projects, such as prizes and challenges, citizen science and crowdsourcing, open data, and human-centered design.

Prizes and challenges have been a particularly popular tool at Federal agencies. With 397 prizes and challenges posted on challenge.gov since September 2010, there are hundreds of examples of the many different ways these tools can be designed for a variety of goals. For example:

NASA’s Mars Balance Mass Challenge: When NASA’s Curiosity rover pummeled through the Martian atmosphere and came to rest on the surface of Mars in 2012, about 300 kilograms of solid tungsten mass had to be jettisoned to ensure the spacecraft was in a safe orientation for landing. In an effort to seek creative concepts for small science and technology payloads that could potentially replace a portion of such jettisoned mass on future missions, NASA released the Mars Balance Mass Challenge. In only two months, over 200 concepts were submitted by over 2,100 individuals from 43 different countries for NASA to review. Proposed concepts ranged from small drones and 3D printers to radiation detectors and pre-positioning supplies for future human missions to the planet’s surface. NASA awarded the $20,000 prize to Ted Ground of Rising Star, Texas for his idea to use the jettisoned payload to investigate the Mars atmosphere in a way similar to how NASA uses sounding rockets to study Earth’s atmosphere. This was the first time Ted worked with NASA, and NASA was impressed by the novelty and elegance of his proposal: a proposal that NASA likely would not have received through a traditional contract or grant because individuals, as opposed to organizations, are generally not eligible to participate in those types of competitions.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (BCSC): The primary goals of the BCSC were to accelerate the process of bringing emerging breast cancer technologies to market, and to stimulate the creation of start-up businesses around nine federally conceived and owned inventions, and one invention from an Avon Foundation for Women portfolio grantee. While NIH has the capacity to enable collaborative research or to license technology to existing businesses, many technologies are at an early stage and are ideally suited for licensing by startup companies to further develop them into commercial products. This challenge established 11 new startups that have the potential to create new jobs and help promising NIH cancer inventions support the fight against breast cancer. The BCSC turned the traditional business plan competition model on its head to create a new channel to license inventions by crowdsourcing talent to create new startups.

These two examples of challenges are very different, in terms of their purpose and the process used to design and implement them. The success they have demonstrated shouldn’t be taken for granted. It takes access to resources (both information and people), mentoring, and practical experience to both understand how to identify opportunities for innovation tools, like prizes and challenges, to use them to achieve a desired outcome….

Last month, the Challenge.gov program at the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s Innovation Lab, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and a core team of Federal leaders in the prize-practitioner community began collaborating with the Federal Community of Practice for Challenges and Prizes to develop the other half of the open innovation toolkit, the prizes and challenges toolkit. In developing this toolkit, OSTP and GSA are thinking not only about the information and process resources that would be helpful to empower 21^st-century public servants using these tools, but also how we help connect these people to one another to add another meaningful layer to the learning environment…..

Creating an inventory of skills and knowledge across the 600-person (and growing!) Federal community of practice in prizes and challenges will likely be an important resource in support of a useful toolkit. Prize design and implementation can involve tricky questions, such as:

Do I have the authority to conduct a prize or challenge?
How should I approach problem definition and prize design?
Can agencies own solutions that come out of challenges?
How should I engage the public in developing a prize concept or rules?
What types of incentives work best to motivate participation in challenges?
What legal requirements apply to my prize competition?
Can non-Federal employees be included as judges for my prizes?
How objective do the judging criteria need to be?
Can I partner to conduct a challenge? What’s the right agreement to use in a partnership?
Who can win prize money and who is eligible to compete? …(More)

Beta Release of the NETmundial Solutions Map

Curated on April 16, 2015July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

“…the GovLab is pleased to announce the beta release of the NETmundial Solutions Map for further public comment (from April 1 -May 1, 2015). The release is the culmination of a 6-month engagement and development strategy to ensure that the tool reflects input from a diverse set of global stakeholders. The NETmundial Solutions Map is co-developed by the GovLab and Second Rise, and is facilitated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The tool seeks to support innovation in global governance toward a more distributed Internet Governance approach. It is designed to enable information sharing and collaboration across Internet governance issues. It will serve as a repository of information that links issues, actors, solutions and resources, and help users understand the current landscape of Internet governance.

Today, information about internet governance is scattered and hard to find. At the same time we need more coordination and collaboration to address specific issues. The Map seeks to facilitate a more collaborative and distributed way of solving Internet governance issues by providing users with a baseline of what responses already exist and who is working on what — Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief of Research and Development of the GovLab.

..This beta version of the NETmundial Solutions Map seeks to explore how to map the Internet governance landscape in a useful and sustainable way. Future revisions will continue to be guided by community feedback.

To this end, we welcome your comments on the following (period runs till May 1st):