Robyn Scott & Lisa Witter at SSIR: “…Our research found that “disconnection” falls into five, negatively reinforcing categories in the public sector; a closer look at these categories may help policy makers see the challenge before them more clearly:
1. Disconnected Governments
There is a truism in politics and government that all policy is local and context-dependent. Whether this was ever an accurate statement is questionable; it is certainly no longer. While all policy must ultimately be customized for local conditions, it absurd to assume there is little or nothing to learn from other countries. Three trends, in fact, indicate that solutions will become increasingly fungible between countries…..
2. Disconnected Issues
What climate change policy can endure without a job-creation strategy? What sensible criminal justice reform does not consider education? Yet even within countries, departments and their employees often remain as foreign to each other as do nations….
3. Disconnected Public Servants
The isolation of governments, and of government departments, is caused by and reinforces the isolation of people working in government, who have few incentives—and plenty of disincentives—to share what they are working on…..
4. Disconnected Citizens
…There are areas of increasingly visible progress in bridging the disconnections of government, citizen engagement being one. We’re still in the early stages, but private sector fashions such as human-centered design and design thinking have become government buzzwords. And platforms enabling new types of citizen engagement—from participatory budgeting to apps that people use to report potholes—are increasingly popping up around the world…..
5. Disconnected Ideas
According to the World Bank’s own data, one third of its reports are never read, even once. Foundations and academia pour tens of millions of dollars into policy research with few targeted channels to reach policymakers; they also tend to produce and deliver information in formats that policymakers don’t find useful. People in government, like everyone else, are frequently on their mobile phones, and short of time….(More)”
Catherine Althaus & David Threlfall in The Mandarin: “Who remembers Google Schemer, the Apple Pippin, or Microsoft Zune? No one — and yet such no-go ideas didn’t hold back these prominent companies. In IT, such high profile failures are simply steps on the path to future success. When a start-up or major corporate puts a product onto the market they identify the kinks in their invention immediately, design a fix, and release a new version. If the whole idea falls flat — and who ever listened to music on a Zune instead of an iPod? — the next big thing is just around the corner. Learning from failure is celebrated as a key feature of innovation.
But in the world of public policy, this approach is only now creeping into our collective consciousness. We tread ever so lightly.
Drug policy, childcare reform, or information technology initiatives are areas where innovation could provide policy improvements, but who is going to be a first-mover innovator in this policy area without fearing potential retribution should anything go wrong?…
Public servants don’t have the luxury of ‘making a new version’ without fear of blame or retribution. Critically, their process often lacks the ability to test assumptions before delivery….
The most persuasive or entertaining narrative often trumps the painstaking work — and potential missteps — required to build an evidence base to support political and policy decisions. American academics Elizabeth Shanahan, Mark McBeth and Paul Hathaway make a remarkable claim regarding the power of narrative in the policy world: “Research in the field of psychology shows that narratives have a stronger ability to persuade individuals and influence their beliefs than scientific evidence does.” If narrative and stories overtake what we normally accept as evidence, then surely we ought to be taking more notice of what the narratives are, which we choose and how we use them…
Failing the right way
Essential policy spheres such as health, education and social services should benefit from innovative thinking and theory testing. What is necessary in these areas is even more robust attention to carefully calibrated and well-thought through experimentation. Rewards need to outweigh risks, and risks need to be properly managed. This has always been the case in clinical trials in medicine. Incredible breakthroughs in medical practice made throughout the 20th century speak to the success of this model. Why should policymaking suffer from a timid inertia given the potential for similar success?
An innovative approach, focused on learning while failing right, will certainly require a shift in thinking. Every new initiative will need to be designed in a holistic way, to not just solve an issue but learn from every stage of the design and delivery process. Evaluation doesn’t follow implementation but instead becomes part of the entire cycle. A small-scale, iterative approach can then lead to bigger successes down the track….(More)”.
Keith Burnett at Campaign for Social Science: “The greatest challenge we face is to use our intellects to guide our actions in making the world a better place for us and our fellow human beings.
This is no easy task and its history is littered with false dawns and doctrines. You would have to be blind to the lessons of the past to fail to appreciate the awful impact that delusional ideas have had on mankind. Some of the worst are those meant to save us.
There are some who take this as a warning against intervention at all, who say it can never be done and shouldn’t even be attempted. That the forces of nature blow winds in society that we can never tame. That we are bound to suffer like a small ship in a stormy sea.
They might be right, but it would be the utmost dereliction of academia to give up on this quest. And in any case, I don’t believe it is true. These forces may be there, but there is much we can do, a lot of it deeply practical to make the journey more comfortable and so we even end up in the right port.
Of course, there are those who believe we academics simply don’t care. That scholarship is happiest at a distance from messy, contradictory humanity and prefers in its detached world of conferences and publications. That we are content to analyse rather than heal.
Well I can tell you that my social sciences colleagues at Sheffield are not content in an ivory tower and they never have been. They feel the challenges of our world as keenly as any. And they know if we ever needed understanding, and a vision of what society could be, we need it now.
I am confident they are not alone and, as a scientist all my life, it has become apparent to me that, to translate insights into change, we must frequently overcome barriers of perception and culture, of politics and prejudice. Our great challenges are not only technical but matters of education and economics. Our barriers those of opportunity, power and purpose.
If we want solutions to reach those who desperately need them, we must understand how to take the word and make it flesh. Ideas alone are not enough, they come to life through people. They need money, armies of changed opinion.
If we don’t do this work, the risk is truly terrible – that the armies and the power, the public opinion and votes, will be led by ignorance and profit. As the ancient Greeks knew, a demos could only function when citizens could grasp the consequences of their choices.
Perhaps we had forgotten; thought ‘it can’t happen here’? If so, this year has been a stark reminder of why we dare not be complacent. For who would deny the great political lessons we are almost choking on as we see Brexit evolve from fringe populist movement to a force that is shaking us to pieces? Who will have failed to understand, in the frustrations of Trump, the value of a constitution designed to protect citizens against the ravages of a tyrant?
Why do the social sciences matter? Just look around us. Who would deny the need for new ways to organise our industry and our economy as real incomes fade? Who would deny that we need a society which is able to sensibly regulate against the depredations of the unscrupulous landlord?
Who would deny the need to understand how to better educate and train our youth?
We are engaged in a battle for society, and the fronts are many and difficult. Can we hope to build a society that will look after the stranger in its midst? Is social justice a chimera?
Is there anything to be done?
To this we answer, yes. But we must do more than study, we must find the gears which will ensure what we discover can be absorbed by a society than needs to act with understanding…(More)”
UoP News: “People who give up their time for online volunteering are mainly motivated by a desire to learn, a new study has found.
The research surveyed volunteers on ‘citizen science’ projects and suggests that this type of volunteering could be used to increase general knowledge of science within society.
The study, led by Dr Joe Cox from the Department of Economics and Finance, discovered that an appetite to learn more about the subject was the number one driver for online volunteers, followed by being part of a community. It also revealed that many volunteers are motivated by a desire for escapism.
Online volunteering and crowdsourcing projects typically involve input from large numbers of contributors working individually but towards a common goal. This study surveyed 2000 people who volunteer for ‘citizen science’ projects hosted by Zooniverse, a collection of research projects that rely on volunteers to help scientists with the challenge of interpreting massive amounts of data….“What was interesting was that characteristics such as age, gender and level of education had no correlation with the amount of time people give up and the length of time they stay on a project. These participants were relatively highly educated compared with the rest of the population, but those with the highest levels of education do not appear to contribute the most effort and information towards these projects.”
The study noticed pronounced changes in how people are motivated at different stages of the volunteer process. While a desire to learn is the most important motivation among contributors at the early stages, the opportunities for social interaction and escapism become more important motivations at later stages….
He suggests that online volunteering and citizen science projects could incentivise participation by offering clearly defined opportunities for learning, while representing an effective way of increasing scientific literacy and knowledge within society….(More)”.
Paul Basken at The Chronicle of Higher Education: “As universities have slowly pushed their scientists to embrace open-access journals, publishers will need new profit centers. Elsevier appears well ahead of the pack in creating a network of products that scientists can use to record, share, store, and measure the value to others of the surging amounts of data they produce.
“Maybe all publishers are going, or wish they were” going, in the direction of becoming data companies, said Vincent Larivière, an associate professor of information science at the University of Montreal. “But Elsevier is the only one that is there.”
A Suite of Services
Universities also recognize the future of data. Their scientists are already seeing that widely and efficiently sharing data in fields such as cancer research has enabled accomplishments that have demonstrably saved lives.
In their eagerness to embrace that future, however, universities may not be paying enough attention to what their choices of systems may eventually cost them, warned Roger C. Schonfeld, a program director at Ithaka S+R. With its comprehensive data-services network, Mr. Schonfeld wrote earlier this year, Elsevier appears ready “to lock in scientists to a research workflow no less powerful than the strength of the lock-in libraries have felt to ‘big deal’ bundles.”….
Some open-access advocates say the situation points to an urgent need to create more robust nonprofit alternatives to Elsevier’s product line of data-compiling and sharing tools. But so far financial backing for the developmental work is thin. One of the best known attempts is the Open Science Framework, a web-based data interface built by the Center for Open Science, which has an annual budget of about $6 million, provided largely by foundations and other private donors.
In general, U.S. research universities — a $70 billion scientific enterprise — have not made major contributions to such projects. The Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities have, however, formed a team that’s begun studying the future of data sharing. So far, that effort has been focused on more basic steps such as establishing data-storage facilities, linking them together, and simply persuading scientists to take seriously the need to share data.…(More)”
Jon Fingas at Engadget: “Law enforcement has been trying predictive policing software for a while now, but how well does it work when it’s put to a tough test? Potentially very well, according to Chicago police. The city’s 7th District police reportthat their use of predictive algorithms helped reduce the number of shootings 39 percent year-over-year in the first 7 months of 2017, with murders dropping by 33 percent. Three other districts didn’t witness as dramatic a change, but they still saw 15 to 29 percent reductions in shootings and a corresponding 9 to 18 percent drop in murders.
It mainly comes down to knowing where and when to deploy officers. One of the tools used in the 7th District, HunchLab, blends crime statistics with socioeconomic data, weather info and business locations to determine where crimes are likely to happen. Other tools (such as the Strategic Subject’s List and ShotSpotter) look at gang affiliation, drug arrest history and gunfire detection sensors.
If the performance holds, It’ll suggest that predictive policing can save lives when crime rates are particularly high, as they have been on Chicago’s South Side. However, both the Chicago Police Department and academics are quick to stress that algorithms are just one part of a larger solution. Officers still have be present, and this doesn’t tackle the underlying issues that cause crime, such as limited access to education and a lack of economic opportunity. Still, any successful reduction in violence is bound to be appreciated….(More)”.
Julia M. Puaschunder in the International Robotics & Automation Journal: “Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers.
The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes.
The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges….(More)”
New Book by Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer: “Facing especially wicked problems, social sector organizations are searching for powerful new methods to understand and address them. Design Thinking for the Greater Good goes in depth on both the how of using new tools and the why. As a way to reframe problems, ideate solutions, and iterate toward better answers, design thinking is already well established in the commercial world. Through ten stories of struggles and successes in fields such as health care, education, agriculture, transportation, social services, and security, the authors show how collaborative creativity can shake up even the most entrenched bureaucracies—and provide a practical roadmap for readers to implement these tools.
The design thinkers Jeanne Liedtka, Randy Salzman, and Daisy Azer explore how major agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services and the Transportation and Security Administration in the United States, as well as organizations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, have instituted principles of design thinking. In each case, these groups have used the tools of design thinking to reduce risk, manage change, use resources more effectively, bridge the communication gap between parties, and manage the competing demands of diverse stakeholders. Along the way, they have improved the quality of their products and enhanced the experiences of those they serve. These strategies are accessible to analytical and creative types alike, and their benefits extend throughout an organization. This book will help today’s leaders and thinkers implement these practices in their own pursuit of creative solutions that are both innovative and achievable….(More)”.
Isabelle Liotard and Valérie Revest in Technological Forecasting and Social Change: “An increase of the innovation contests and their associated prizes have been observed since the 90s especially in the US through the sponsorship of the American Federal Agencies. The purpose of this article is to shed light on some of the direct and indirect effects of US federal agency contests not only on economic dynamics but also on social dynamics. Based on recent case studies, this paper describes the various positive impacts that federal agency contests may have: i) contests may display a strong incentive effect ex-ante and during the contest; ii) they may produce favourable spillovers after the contests, at innovation and economic levels in specified economic/industry sectors and iii) they may also play a beneficial social role, contributing to citizens’ education and awareness. Nevertheless, as a contest remains a sophisticated device, public decision makers must comply with certain requirements if they wish to benefit from this particular policy tool in order to spur innovation….(More)”
Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Young in The Conversation Global: “The modern era is marked by growing faith in the power of data. “Big data”, “open data”, and “evidence-based decision-making” have become buzzwords, touted as solutions to the world’s most complex and persistent problems, from corruption and famine to the refugee crisis.
While perhaps most pronounced in higher income countries, this trend is now emerging globally. In Africa, Latin America, Asia and beyond, hopes are high that access to data can help developing economies by increasing transparency, fostering sustainable development, building climate resiliency and the like.
This is an exciting prospect, but can opening up data actually make a difference in people’s lives?
Our conclusion: the enthusiasm is justified – as long as it’s tempered with a good measure of realism, too. Here are our six major takeaways:
1. We need a framework – Overall, there is still little evidence to substantiate the enthusiastic claims that open data can foment sustainable development and transform governance. That’s not surprising given the early stage of most open data initiatives.
It may be early for impact evaluation, but it’s not too soon to develop a model that will eventually allow us to assess the impact of opening up data over time.
To that end, the GovLab has created an evidence-based framework that aims to better capture the role of open data in developing countries. The Open Data Logic Framework below focuses on various points in the open data value cycle, from data supply to demand, use and impact.
Logic model of open data.The GovLab
2. Open data has real promise – Based on this framework and the underlying evidence that fed into it, we can guardedly conclude that open data does in fact spur development – but only under certain conditions and within the right supporting ecosystem.
One well-known success took place after Nepal’s 2015 earthquake when open data helped NGOs map important landmarks such as health facilities and road networks, among other uses.
And in Colombia, the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture launched Aclímate Colombia, a tool that gives smallholder farmers data-driven insight into planting strategies that makes them more resilient to climate change….
3. Open data can improve people’s lives Examining projects in a number of sectors critical to development, including health, humanitarian aid, agriculture, poverty alleviation, energy and education, we found four main ways that data can have an impact….
4. Data can be an asset in development While these impacts are apparent in both developed and developing countries, we believe that open data can have a particularly powerful role in developing economies.
Where data is scarce, as it often is in poorer countries, open data can lead to an inherently more equitable and democratic distribution of information and knowledge. This, in turn, may activate a wider range of expertise to address complex problems; it’s what we in the field call “open innovation”.
This quality can allow resource-starved developing economies to access and leverage the best minds around.
And because trust in government is quite low in many developing economies, the transparency bred of releasing data can have after-effects that go well beyond the immediate impact of the data itself…
5. The ingredients matter To better understand why some open data projects fail while others succeed, we created a “periodic table” of open data (below), which includes 27 enabling factors divided into five broad categories….
6. We can plan for impact Our report ends by identifying how development organisations can catalyse the release and use of open data to make a difference on the ground.
Recommendations include:
· Define the problem, understand the user, and be aware of local conditions;
· Focus on readiness, responsiveness and change management;
· Nurture an open data ecosystem through collaboration and partnerships;
· Have a risk mitigation strategy;
· Secure resources and focus on sustainability; and
· Build a strong evidence base and support more research.
Next steps
In short, while it may still be too early to fully capture open data’s as-of-yet muted impact on developing economies, there are certainly reasons for optimism.
Much like blockchain, drones and other much-hyped technical advances, it’s time to start substantiating the excitement over open data with real, hard evidence.
The next step is to get systematic, using the kind of analytical framework we present here to gain comparative and actionable insight into if, when and how open data works. Only by getting data-driven about open data can we help it live up to its potential….(More)“