New report and dataset by the OECD: “Government at a Glance provides readers with a dashboard of key indicators assembled with the goal of contributing to the analysis and international comparison of public sector performance. Indicators on government revenues, expenditures, and employment are provided alongside key output and outcome data in the sectors of education, health and justice. Government at a Glance also includes indicators on key governance and public management issues, such as transparency in governance, regulatory governance, public procurement and the implementation of employment and remuneration reforms since 2008. While measuring government performance has long been recognized as playing an important role in increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of the public administration, following the economic crisis and fiscal tightening in many member countries, good indicators are needed more than ever to help governments make informed decisions regarding tough choices and help restore confidence in government institutions… (More)”
The science prize that’s making waves
Gillian Tett at the Financial Times: “The Ocean Health XPrize reveals a new fashion among philanthropists’…There is another reason why the Ocean Health XPrize fascinates me: what it reveals about the new fashion among philanthropists for handing out big scientific prizes. The idea is not a new one: wealthy people and governments have been giving prizes for centuries. In 1714, for example, the British government passed the Longitude Act, establishing a board to offer reward money for innovation in navigation — the most money was won by John Harrison, a clockmaker who invented the marine chronometer.
But a fascinating shift has taken place in the prize-giving game. In previous decades, governments or philanthropists usually bestowed money to recognise past achievements, often in relation to the arts. In 2012, McKinsey, the management consultants, estimated that before 1991, 97 per cent of prize money was a “recognition” award — for example, the Nobel Prizes. Today, however, four-fifths of all prize money is “incentive” or “inducement” awards. This is because many philanthropists and government agencies have started staging competitions to spur innovation in different fields, particularly science.
The best known of these is the XPrize Foundation, initiated two decades ago by Peter Diamandis, the entrepreneur. The original award, the Ansari XPrize, offered $10m to the first privately financed team to put a vehicle into space. Since then, the XPrize has spread its wings into numerous different fields, including education and life sciences. Indeed, having given $30m in prize money so far, it has another $70m of competitions running, including the Google Lunar XPrize, which is offering $30m to land a privately funded robot on the moon.
McKinsey estimates that if you look across the field of prize-giving around the world, “total funds available from large prizes have more than tripled over the last decade to reach $350m”, while the “total prize sector could already be worth as much as $1bn to $2bn”. The Ocean Health XPrize, in other words, is barely a drop in the prize-giving ocean.
Is this a good thing? Not always, it might seem. As the prizes proliferate, they can sometimes overlap. The money being awarded tends — inevitably — to reflect the pet obsessions of philanthropists, rather than what scientists themselves would like to explore. And even the people running the prizes admit that these only work when there is a clear problem to be solved….(More)”
This App Lets You See The Tough Choices Needed To Balance Your City’s Budget
Balancing Act is a web app that displays a straightforward pie chart of a city’s budget, broken down into categories like pensions, parks & recreations, police, and education. But it doesn’t just display the current budget breakdown. It invites users to tweak it, expressing their own priorities, all while keeping the city in the black. Do you want your libraries to be better funded? Fine—but you’re going to have to raise property taxes to do it.
“Balancing Act provides a way for people to both understand what public entities are doing and then to weight that against the other possible things that government can do,” says Chris Adams, president of Engaged Public, a Colorado-based consulting firm that develops technology for government and non-profits. “Especially in this era of information, all of us have a responsibility to spend a bit of time understanding how our government is spending money on our behalf.”
Hartford, Connecticut is the first city in the country that is using Balancing Act. The city was facing a $49 million budget deficit this spring, and Mayor Pedro Segarra says he took input from citizens using Balancing Act. Meanwhile, in Engaged Public’s home state, residents can input their income to generate an itemized tax receipt and then tweak the Colorado state budget as they see fit.
Engaged Public hopes that by making budgets more interactive and accessible, more people will take an interest in them.
“Budget information almost universally exists, but it’s not in accessible formats—mostly they’re in PDF files,” says Adams. “So citizens are invited to pour through tens of thousands of pages of PDFs. But that really doesn’t give you a high-level understanding of what’s at stake in a reasonable amount of time.”
If widely used, Balancing Act could be a useful tool for politicians to check the pulse of their constituents. For example, decreasing funding to parks draws a negative public reaction. But if enough people on Balancing Act experimented with the budget, saw the necessity of it, and submitted their recommendations, then an elected might be willing to make a decision that would otherwise seem politically risky….(More)”
When Guarding Student Data Endangers Valuable Research
Susan M. Dynarski in the New York Times: “There is widespread concern over threats to privacy posed by the extensive personal data collected by private companies and public agencies.
Some of the potential danger comes from the government: The National Security Agency has swept up the telephone records of millions of people, in what it describes as a search for terrorists. Other threats are posed by hackers, who have exploited security gaps to steal data from retail giantslike Target and from the federal Office of Personnel Management.
Resistance to data collection was inevitable — and it has been particularly intense in education.
Privacy laws have already been strengthened in some states, and multiple bills now pending in state legislatures and in Congress would tighten the security and privacy of student data. Some of this proposed legislation is so broadly written, however, that it could unintentionally choke off the use of student data for its original purpose: assessing and improving education. This data has already exposed inequities, allowing researchers and advocates to pinpoint where poor, nonwhite and non-English-speaking children have been educated inadequately by their schools.
Data gathering in education is indeed extensive: Across the United States, large, comprehensive administrative data sets now track the academic progress of tens of millions of students. Educators parse this data to understand what is working in their schools. Advocates plumb the data to expose unfair disparities in test scores and graduation rates, building cases to target more resources for the poor. Researchers rely on this data when measuring the effectiveness of education interventions.
To my knowledge there has been no large-scale, Target-like theft of private student records — probably because students’ test scores don’t have the market value of consumers’ credit card numbers. Parents’ concerns have mainly centered not on theft, but on the sharing of student data with third parties, including education technology companies. Last year, parentsresisted efforts by the tech start-up InBloom to draw data on millions of students into the cloud and return it to schools as teacher-friendly “data dashboards.” Parents were deeply uncomfortable with a third party receiving and analyzing data about their children.
In response to such concerns, some pending legislation would scale back the authority of schools, districts and states to share student data with third parties, including researchers. Perhaps the most stringent of these proposals, sponsored by Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, would effectively end the analysis of student data by outside social scientists. This legislation would have banned recent prominent research documenting the benefits of smaller classes, the value of excellent teachersand the varied performance of charter schools.
Under current law, education agencies can share data with outside researchers only to benefit students and improve education. Collaborations with researchers allow districts and states to tap specialized expertise that they otherwise couldn’t afford. The Boston public school district, for example, has teamed up with early-childhood experts at Harvard to plan and evaluate its universal prekindergarten program.
In one of the longest-standing research partnerships, the University of Chicago works with the Chicago Public Schools to improve education. Partnerships like Chicago’s exist across the nation, funded by foundations and the United States Department of Education. In one initiative, a Chicago research consortium compiled reports showing high school principals that many of the seniors they had sent off to college swiftly dropped out without earning a degree. This information spurred efforts to improve high school counseling and college placement.
Specific, tailored information in the hands of teachers, principals or superintendents empowers them to do better by their students. No national survey could have told Chicago’s principals how their students were doing in college. Administrative data can provide this information, cheaply and accurately…(More)”
What cybersecurity can learn from citizen science
But as anyone who has observed an online forum thread dissecting the minutiae of geek culture can attest, hobbyists can be remarkably thorough in their exploration of topics they are passionate about. And it is often a point of pride to pick the subject that is the least conventional or popular.
The idea of citizen science is to include amateur science enthusiasts in the collection and processing of data. Thanks to the Internet, we’ve seen a surge in the number of self-taught experts in a variety of subjects. New participation platforms are social and gamified – utilizing people’s desire to compete or collaborate with others who share their passion.
How this process plays out differs from one app to the next, according to their needs: StarDust@Home asks volunteers to help sort through samples captured by the Stardust spacecraft when it flew through the coma of comet Wild 2 in 2004. They do this by viewing movies of the contents of the aerogel tiles that were used as collectors.
The security community is ripe for using the citizen science in similar ways to these. Most antimalware vendors make use of customer samples for adding detection and cleaning to their products. Many security companies use customers’ reports to gather file reputation, telemetry and prevalence data. And bug reports come from researchers of all ages and education levels – not just professional security researchers. “Month of Bug” events are a more controversial way that security is gamified. Could security companies or organizations be doing more to engage enthusiasts to help improve our response to security issues?
It could be argued that the stuff of security research – especially malware research – is potentially harmful in the hands of amateurs and should be handled only by seasoned professionals. Not only that, security is an adversarial system where the criminals would likely try to game the system to improve their profits. These are important concerns that would need to be addressed.
But the citizen science approach provides good lessons…(More)”
Did Performance Measurement Cause America’s Police Problem?
Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene in Governing: “You’ve doubtless heard the maxim “what gets measured, gets managed.” Sometimes it’s attributed to management guru Peter Drucker, though others also get credit for it. But whoever actually coined the phrase, we remember the first time we became aware of it, about a quarter of a century ago.
It seemed like a purely positive sentiment to us back in the days when we naively believed that performance measurement could cure most governmental ills. If gathering data about inputs, outputs and outcomes could solve all management problems, then cities and states had access to a golden key to a more effective and efficient future. Then reality intervened and we recognized that even good measurements don’t necessarily result in the right policy or practice changes.
But, somewhat more ominously, we’ve become aware of a troubling question that lurks in the field of performance measurement: What happens if we’re not measuring the right things in the first place? If Drucker — or whoever — was right, doesn’t that mean that we may manage government programs in a way that leads to more problems? Sometimes, for example, states and localities focus their measurements on the speed with which a service is delivered. Faster always seems better. But often delivering a service quickly means doing so less effectively.
For fire departments, response times are a commonly used measure of service quality. But “the requirement for low response times may incentivize firefighters to drive fast,” said Amy Donahue, professor and vice-provost for academic operations at the University of Connecticut. “And it has been shown that while speeding saves very little in terms of total driving time, it is much more dangerous — both to those in the emergency vehicle and other innocents who might get in their way. The potential for accidents is high, and when they happen, the consequences can be very tragic.”
As the field has become aware of these dangers, many agencies are trying to mitigate them by improving education, prohibiting responders from exceeding speed limits, and requiring responders to participate in emergency vehicle operators programs.
Examples like this one are everywhere. But we just came across something in the March 2015 edition of New Perspectives in Policing that had never occurred to us before and that seems to be widely ignored by public safety organizations around the country. It was written by Malcolm K. Sparrow, professor of practice of public management at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University
As violent incidents in several of America’s cities show the underlying tensions between police and the public they serve, Sparrow argues that some of this dissonance has actually been encouraged by the fact that most police departments are pushed to measure crime clearance and enforcement. These are important factors, but they have little to do with community satisfaction. Meanwhile, he points out that “a few departments now use citizen satisfaction surveys on a regular basis, but most do not.”…(More)”
Nudges Do Not Undermine Human Agency
Cass R. Sunstein in the Journal of Consumer Policy: “Some people believe that nudges undermine human agency, but with appropriate nudges, neither agency nor consumer freedom is at risk. On the contrary, nudges can promote both goals. In some contexts, they are indispensable. There is no opposition between education on the one hand and nudges on the other. Many nudges are educative. Even when they are not, they can complement, and not displace, consumer education….(More)”.
New ODI research shows open data reaching every sector of UK industry
ODI: “New research has been published today (1 June) by the Open Data Institute showing that open data is reaching every sector of UK industry.
In various forms, open data is being adopted by a wide variety of businesses – small and large, new and old, from right across the country. The findings from Open data means business: UK innovation across sectors and regions draw on 270 companies with a combined turnover of £92bn and over 500k employees, identified by the ODI as using, producing or investing in open data as part of their business. The project included desk research, surveys and interviews on the companies’ experiences.
Key findings from the research include:
- Companies using open data come from many sectors; over 46% from outside the information and communication sector. These include finance & insurance, science & technology, business administration & support, arts & entertainment, health, retail, transportation, education and energy.
- The most popular datasets for companies aregeospatial/mapping data (57%), transport data (43%) and environment data (42%).
- 39% of companies innovating with open data are over 10 years old, with some more than 25 years old, proving open data isn’t just for new digital startups.
- ‘Micro-enterprises’ (businesses with fewer than 10 employees) represented 70% of survey respondents, demonstrating athriving open data startup scene. These businesses are using it to create services, products and platforms. 8% of respondents were drawn from large companies of 251 or more employees….
- The companies surveyed listed 25 different government sources for the data they use. Notably, Ordnance Survey data was cited most frequently, by 14% of the companies. The non-government source most commonly used was OpenStreetMap, an openly licenced map of the world created by volunteers….(More)
Measuring ‘governance’ to improve lives
Robert Rotberg at the Conversation: “…Citizens everywhere desire “good governance” – to be governed well within their nation-states, their provinces, their states and their cities.
Governance is more useful than “democracy” if we wish to understand how different political rulers and ruling elites satisfy the aspirations of their citizens.
But to make the notion of “governance” useful, we need both a practical definition and a method of measuring the gradations between good and bad governance.
What’s more, if we can measure well, we can diagnose weak areas of governance and, hence, seek ways to make the weak actors strong.
Governance, defined as “the performance of governments and the delivery of services by governments,” tells us if and when governments are in fact meeting the expectations of their constituents and providing for them effectively and responsibly.
Democracy outcomes, by contrast, are much harder to measure because the meaning of the very word itself is contested and impossible to measure accurately.
For the purposes of making policy decisions, if we seek to learn how citizens are faring under regime X or regime Y, we need to compare governance (not democracy) in those respective places.
In other words, governance is a construct that enables us to discern exactly whether citizens are progressing in meeting life’s goals.
Measuring governance: five bundles and 57 subcategories
Are citizens of a given country better off economically, socially and politically than they were in an earlier decade? Are their various human causes, such as being secure or being free, advancing? Are their governments treating them well, and attempting to respond to their various needs and aspirations and relieving them of anxiety?
Just comparing national gross domestic products (GDPs), life expectancies or literacy rates provides helpful distinguishing data, but governance data are more comprehensive, more telling and much more useful.
Assessing governance tells us far more about life in different developing societies than we would learn by weighing the varieties of democracy or “human development” in such places.
Government’s performance, in turn, is according to the scheme advanced in my book On Governance and in my Index of African Governance, the delivery to citizens of five bundles (divided into 57 underlying subcategories) of political goods that citizens within any kind of political jurisdiction demand.
The five major bundles are Security and Safety, Rule of Law and Transparency, Political Participation and Respect for Human Rights, Sustainable Economic Opportunity, and Human Development (education and health)….(More)”
Governing methods: policy innovation labs, design and data science in the digital governance of education
Paper by Ben Williamson in the Journal of Educational Administration and History: “Policy innovation labs are emerging knowledge actors and technical experts in the governing of education. The article offers a historical and conceptual account of the organisational form of the policy innovation lab. Policy innovation labs are characterised by specific methods and techniques of design, data science, and digitisation in public services such as education. The second half of the article details how labs promote the use of digital data analysis, evidence-based evaluation and ‘design-for-policy’ techniques as methods for the governing of education. In particular, they promote the ‘computational thinking’ associated with computer programming as a capacity required by a ‘reluctant state’ that is increasingly concerned to delegate its responsibilities to digitally enabled citizens with the ‘designerly’ capacities and technical expertise to ‘code’ solutions to public and social problems. Policy innovation labs are experimental laboratories trialling new methods within education for administering and governing the future of the state itself….(More)”