U.S. Public Participation Playbook


“The U.S. Public Participation Playbook is a resource for government managers to effectively evaluate and build better services through public participation using best practices and performance metrics.
Public participation—where citizens help shape and implement government programs—is a foundation of open, transparent, and engaging government services. From emergency management, town hall discussions and regulatory development to science and education, better engagement with those who use public services can measurably improve those services for everyone.
Developing a U.S. Public Participation Playbook is an open government priority included in both the first and second U.S. Open Government National Action Plans as part of the United States effort to increase public integrity in government programs. This resource reflects the commitment of the government and civic partners to measurably improve participation programs, and is designed using the same inclusive principles that it champions.
How is the playbook structured?

We needed to create a resource that combines best practices and suggested performance metrics for public servants to use to evaluate and build better services — to meet this need, based on discussions with federal managers and stakeholders, we identified five main categories that should be addressed in all programs, whether digital or offline. Within each category we identified 12 unifying plays to start with, each including a checklist to consider, resources and training. We then provide suggested performance metrics for each main category.
This is only the beginning, however, and we hope the plays will quickly expand and enrich. The U.S. Public Participation Playbook was not just designed for a more open government — it was designed collaboratively through a more open government…(More)”

With a Few Bits of Data, Researchers Identify ‘Anonymous’ People


in the New York Times: “Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from big data sets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of the information to identify a specific person, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.

In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction, amount charged and name of the store.

Although the information had been “anonymized” by removing personal details like names and account numbers, the uniqueness of people’s behavior made it easy to single them out.

In fact, knowing just four random pieces of information was enough to reidentify 90 percent of the shoppers as unique individuals and to uncover their records, researchers calculated. And that uniqueness of behavior — or “unicity,” as the researchers termed it — combined with publicly available information, like Instagram or Twitter posts, could make it possible to reidentify people’s records by name.

“The message is that we ought to rethink and reformulate the way we think about data protection,” said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, a graduate student in computational privacy at the M.I.T. Media Lab who was the lead author of the study. “The old model of anonymity doesn’t seem to be the right model when we are talking about large-scale metadata.”

The analysis of large data sets containing details on people’s behavior holds great potential to improve public health, city planning and education.

But the study calls into question the standard methods many companies, hospitals and government agencies currently use to anonymize their records. It may also give ammunition to some technologists and privacy advocates who have challenged the consumer-tracking processes used by advertising software and analytics companies to tailor ads to so-called anonymous users online….(More).”

Study: Complaining on Twitter correlates with heart disease risks


at ArsTechnica: “Tweets prove better regional heart disease predictor than many classic factors. This week, a study was released by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania that found a surprising correlation when studying two kinds of maps: those that mapped the county-level frequency of cardiac disease, and those that mapped the emotional state of an area’s Twitter posts.
In all, researchers sifted through over 826 million tweets, made available by Twitter’s research-friendly “garden hose” server access, then narrowed those down to roughly 146 million tweets that had been posted with geolocation data from over 1,300 counties (each county needed to have at least 50,000 tweets to sift through to qualify). The team then measured an individual county’s expected “health” level based on frequency of certain phrases, using dictionaries that had been put through scrutiny over their application to emotional states. Negative statements about health, jobs, and attractiveness—along with a bump in curse words—would put a county in the “risk” camp, while words like “opportunities,” “overcome,” and “weekend” added more points to a county’s “protective” rating.
Not only did this measure correlate strongly with age-adjusted heart disease rate data, it turned out to be a more efficient predictor of higher or lower disease likelihood than “ten classical predictors” combined, including education, obesity, and smoking. Twitter beat that data by a rate of 42 percent to 36 percent….Psychological Science, 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614557867  (About DOIs)….(More)”

At Universities, a Push for Data-Driven Career Services


at The New York Times: “Officials at the University of California, San Diego, had sparse information on the career success of their graduates until they set up a branded page for the university on LinkedIn a couple of years ago.

“Back then, we had records on 125,000 alumni, but we had good employment information on less than 10,000 of them,” recalled Armin Afsahi, who oversees alumni relations as the university’s associate vice chancellor for advancement. “Aside from Qualcomm, which is in our back yard, we didn’t know who employed our alumni.”

Within three months of setting up the university page, LinkedIn connections surfaced information on 92,000 alumni, Mr. Afsahi said.

The LinkedIn page of University of California, San Diego.
The LinkedIn page of University of California, San Diego.Credit

….

“The old models of alumni relations don’t work,” Mr. Afsahi said. “We have to be a data-driven, intelligence-oriented organization to create the engagement and value” that students and alumni expect.

In an article on Sunday, I profiled two analytics start-ups, EverTrue and Graduway, which aim to help colleges and universities identify their best prospective donors or student mentors by scanning their graduates’ social networking activities. Each start-up taps into LinkedIn profiles of alumni — albeit in different ways — to help institutions of higher education stay up-to-date with their graduates’ contact information and careers.

Since 2013, however, LinkedIn has offered its own proprietary service, called University Pages, where schools can create hubs for alumni outreach and networking. About 25,000 institutions of higher learning around the world now have official university pages on the site…(More).”

Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future


New book from Esri: “The fifth book in Esri’s Mapping the Nation series, Mapping the Nation: Building a More Resilient Future is a collection of geographic information system (GIS) maps that illustrate how federal government agencies rely on GIS analysis to build stronger, more resilient communities and help make the world a better place.
The print version of the book includes 118 full-color maps produced by more than 50 federal government agencies, including the US Forest Service, US Department of Defense, US Department of Education, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The digital version of Mapping the Nation offers enhanced and interactive maps and videos showcasing four start-up companies that are using ArcGIS technology in partnership with Esri and the government.
The maps depict how federal employees and officials use GIS to evaluate, plan, and respond to social, economic, and environmental concerns at local, regional, national, and global levels. Topics such as green government, economic recovery and sustainability, and climate protection show how government agencies use GIS to facilitate initiatives, improve transparency, and deliver strong business models…
Mapping and Apping the Nation 2015, an interactive digital adaptation of the printed map book, is available free of charge from the Esri Books app on Apple iTunes and the Google Play store.”

Would Athenian-style democracy work in the UK today?


Paul Cartledge at the BBC, in the context of BBC Democracy Day: “…The -kratia component of demo-kratia was derived from kratos, which meant unambiguously and unambivalently power or strength. Demos, the other component, meant “people” – but which people, precisely?
At one extreme it could be taken to mean all the people – that is, all the politically empowered people, the adult male citizenry as a whole. At the other ideological pole, it referred to only a section of the citizen people, the largest, namely the majority of poor citizens – those who had to work for a living and might be in greater or less penury.
Against these masses were counterposed the elite citizens – the (more or less) wealthy Few. For them, and it may well have been they who coined the word demokratia, the demos in the class sense meant the great unwashed, the stupid, ignorant, uneducated majority.
So, depending where you stood on the social spectrum, demokratia was either Abe Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. This complicates, at least, any thought-experiment such as the one I’m about to conduct here.
However, what really stands in the way is a more symbolic than pragmatic objection – education, education, education.
For all that we have a formal and universally compulsory educational system, we are not educated either formally or informally to be citizens in the strong, active and participatory senses. The ancient Athenians lacked any sort of formal educational system whatsoever – though somehow or other most of them learned to read and write and count.
On the other hand, what they did possess in spades was an abundance of communal institutions, both formal and informal, both peaceful and warlike, both sacred and secular, whereby ideas of democratic citizenship could be disseminated, inculcated, internalised, and above all practised universally.
Annual, monthly and daily religious festivals. Annual drama festivals that were also themselves religious. Multiple experiences of direct participation in politics at both the local (village, parish, ward) and the “national” levels. And fighting as and for the Athenians both on land and at sea, against enemies both Greek and non-Greek (especially Persian).
Formal Athenian democratic politics, moreover, drew no such modern distinctions between the executive, legislative and judicial branches or functions of government as are enshrined in modern democratic constitutions. One ruled, as a democratic citizen, in all relevant branches equally. A trial for alleged impiety was properly speaking a political trial, as Socrates discovered to his cost.
In short, ancient Athenian democracy was very far from our liberal democracy. I don’t think I need to bang on about its conscientious exclusion of the female half of the citizenry, or its basis in a radical form of dehumanised personal slavery.
So why should we even think of wanting to apply any lesson or precedent drawn from it to our democracy today or in the future? One very good reason is the so-called “democratic deficit”, the attenuation or etiolation of what it means to be, or function fully as, a democratic citizen….(More)”

Helping the Poor in Education: The Power of a Simple Nudge


The New York Times: “There are enormous inequalities in education in the United States. A child born into a poor family has only a 9 percent chance of getting a college degree, but the odds are 54 percent for a child in a high-income family. These gaps open early, with poor children less prepared than their kindergarten classmates.

How can we close these gaps?….

Yet as these debates rage, researchers have been quietly finding small, effective ways to improve education. They have identified behavioral “nudges” that prod students and their families to take small steps that can make big differences in learning. These measures are cheap, so schools or nonprofits could use them immediately.

Let’s start with college. At every step of the way, low-income students are more likely to stumble on the path to higher education. Even the summer after high school is a perilous time, with 20 percent of those who plan to attend college not actually enrolling — a phenomenon known as “summer melt.” Bureaucratic barriers, like the labyrinthine process of applying for financial aid, explain some of the drop-off.

While they were graduate students at Harvard, two young professors designed and tested a program to help students stick to their college plans. Benjamin L. Castleman, now at the University of Virginia, and Lindsay C. Page, at the University of Pittsburgh, set up a system of automatic, personalized text messages that reminded high school students about their college deadlines. The texts included links to required forms and live counselors.

The result? Students who received the texts were more likely to enroll in college: 70 percent, compared with 63 percent of those who did not get them. Seven percentage points is a big increase in this field, similar to the gains produced by scholarships that cost thousands of dollars. Yet this program cost only $7 per student.

The same researchers also tested a texting program to keep students from dropping out of college….(More)”

inBloom and the Failure of Innovation 1.0


Blog by Steven Hodas at The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE): “Michael Horn’s recent piece on the failure of inBloom captures why it was the very opposite of a disruptive innovation from a markets perspective, as well the fatal blind spots and judgment errors present from its inception.
inBloom was a textbook example of what I call “Innovation 1.0”, which thinks of innovation as a noun, a thing with transformative transitive properties that magically make its recipient “innovative.” It’s the cargo–cult theory of innovation: I give you this innovative thing (a tablet, a data warehouse, an LMS) and you thereby become innovative yourself. This Innovation 1.0 approach to both product and policy has characterized a great deal of foundation and Federal efforts over the past ten years.
But as Michael points out (and as real innovators and entrepreneurs understand viscerally), “innovation” is not a noun but a verb. It is not a thing but a process, a frame of mind, a set of reflexes. He correctly notes the essential iterative approach that characterizes innovation–as–a–verb, its make–something–big–by–making–something–small theory of action (this is fundamentally different from piloting or focus–grouping, but that’s another topic).
But it’s important to go deeper and understand why iteration is important. Simply, it is a means to bake into the process, the product, or the policy a respect for users’ subjectivity and autonomy. In short, functional iteration requires that you listen.
True, durable innovation, “Innovation 2.0” is not some thing I can give to you, do to you, or even do for you: it must be a process I do with you. Lean Startup theory—with its emphasis on iteration, an assumption of the innovator’s fallibility and limited perspective, and the importance of low–cost, low–stakes discovery of product–market fit that Michael describes—is essentially a cookbook for baking empathy into the development of products, services, or policies…..
That doesn’t mean inBloom was a bad idea. But the failure to anticipate its vehement visceral rejection—however misinformed and however cynically exploited by those with larger agendas—was a profound failure of imagination, of empathy, of the respect for user subjectivity that characterizes Innovation 2.0….(More).”

What counts: Harnessing Data for America’s Communities


Book by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute: “…outlines opportunities and challenges for the strategic use of data to reduce poverty, improve health, expand access to quality education, and build stronger communities.  It is a response to both the explosive interest in using data to guide community initiatives, investment strategies, and policy choices, and the vexing questions that accompany data-driven approaches. The volume brings together authors from community development, public health, education, finance, and law to offer ideas for using data more meaningfully and effectively across sectors and institutions. What Counts is not focused on finding one right answer; rather, it is meant to serve as the basis for smarter conversations about data going forward.
What Counts builds on key themes of a 2012 book—Investing in What Works for America’s Communities—that was published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund.  What Works calls on leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to recognize that they can achieve more by working together and by using data to gauge the context and reach of their efforts. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute partnered to publish What Counts to address questions raised by What Works readers about how to best gather, analyze, and use data to understand what actually works for communities. Funding for What Counts was provided to the Urban Institute by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation…(More).”
Read all of the articles from the book in the The Book section.

Download a full digital copy of the book.

Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem


New paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Beth S. Noveck, Jillian Raines, and Antony Declercq as part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series: “The growth and globalization of the Internet over the past 40 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Virtually all sectors, from development to healthcare to education to politics, have been transformed. Yet developments in how the Internet is governed have not kept pace with this rapid technological innovation. Figuring out how to evolve the Internet’s governance in ways that are effective and legitimate is essential to ensure its continued potential. Flexible and innovative decision-making mechanisms are needed in order to enable disparate governance actors to address and respond effectively as changes in the network occur. This paper seeks to address the need to develop an effective and legitimate Internet governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches. It draws on the lessons of open governance, adopting innovative techniques to facilitate coordination, information sharing, and evidence generation by and across increasingly diverse and global groups of Internet actors, and calls for creating practical tools to support such an effective, legitimate and evolving Internet governance ecosystem. Although no right answer or single model for how to manage all issues of relevance to the Internet is suggested within this paper, the proposed framework intends to allow for diverse experiments in distributed governance approaches to learn what works and what does not. (More)