Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Six nonprofit projects that aim to combine multiple sets of data to help solve social problems have each won $100,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…The winners:
• Pushpa Aman Singh, who founded GuideStar India as an effort of the Civil Society Information Services India. GuideStar India is the most comprehensive database of India’s registered charities. It has profiles of more than 4,000 organizations, and Ms. Singh plans to expand that number and the types of information included.
• Development Initiatives, an international aid organization, to support its partnership with the Ugandan nonprofit Development Research and Training. Together, they are trying to help residents of two districts in Uganda identify a key problem the communities face and use existing data sets to build both online and offline tools to help tackle that challenge…
• H.V. Jagadish, at the University of Michigan, to develop a prototype that will merge sets of incompatible geographic data to make them comparable. Mr. Jagadish, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, points to crime precincts and school districts as an example. “We want to understand the impact of education on crime, but the districts don’t quite overlap with the precincts,” he says. “This tool will address the lack of overlap.”
• Vijay Modi, at Columbia University, to work with government agencies and charities in Nigeria on a tool similar to Foursquare, the social network that allows people to share their location with friends. Mr. Modi, a mechanical-engineering professor and faculty member of the university’s Earth Institute, envisions a tool that will help people find important resources more easily…
• Gisli Olafsson and his team at NetHope, a network of aid organizations. The group is building a tool to help humanitarian charities share their data more widely and in real time—potentially saving more lives during disasters…
• Development Gateway, a nonprofit that assists international development charities with technology, and GroundTruth Initiative, a nonprofit that helps residents of communities learn mapping and media skills. The two groups want to give people living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, more detailed information about local schools…”
OECD: Government at a Glance 2013
OECD: “Government at a Glance 2013 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 and health. Government at a Glance also includes indicators on key governance and public management issues, such as transparency in governance, regulatory governance, new ways in delivering public services and HRM and compensation practices in the public service. 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.”
How social networks can make us smarter
Kurzweil News: The secret to why some cultures thrive and others disappear may lie in our social networks and our ability to imitate, rather than our individual smarts, according to a new University of British Columbia study.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Sciences (open access), shows that when people can observe and learn from a wider range of teachers, groups can better maintain technical skills and even increase the group’s average skill over successive generations.
The findings show that a larger population size and social connectedness are crucial for the development of more sophisticated technologies and cultural knowledge, says lead author Michael Muthukrishna, a PhD student in UBC’s Dept. of Psychology.
“This is the first study to demonstrate in a laboratory setting what archeologists and evolutionary theorists have long suggested: that there is an important link between a society’s sociality and the sophistication of its technology,” says Muthukrishna, who co-authored the research with UBC Prof. Joseph Henrich…
For the study, participants were asked to learn new skills — digital photo editing and knot-tying — and then pass on what they learned to the next “generation” of participants.
The groups with greater access to experts accumulated significantly more skill than those with less access to teachers. Within ten “generations,” each member of the group with multiple mentors had stronger skills than the group limited to a single mentor.
Groups with greater access to experts also retained their skills much longer than groups who began with less access to mentors, sustaining higher levels of “cultural knowledge” over multiple generations.
According to the researchers, the study has important implications for several areas, from skills development and education to protecting endangered languages and cultural practices…. “These results suggest that rather than our individual intelligence, it is our sociality — being embedded in large, well-connected populations — that explains our success. In the modern world, innovations like the Internet and online social networks can support these processes by giving us access to an unprecedented number of people and their ideas.
“An example of an application of this research might be in how we design models of mentorship to facilitate cultural transmission in a company. Although a mentor-protege model is very common, our research suggests that giving people access to multiple mentors might result in better outcomes.”
Michael Muthukrishna et al., Sociality influences cultural complexity, Proceedings of the Royal Academy: Biological Sciences, 2013, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2511 (open access)
Innovation in Multi-Stakeholder Engagement
New INSEAD working paper by Mahroum, Sami, Bell, Simon and Yassin, Nasser: “This paper is concerned with the multitude of interleaving issues which emerge when engaging multiple stakeholders in decision making. Whilst recognising the intrinsic values of group work (including shared views, wide option selection, public spirited focus, legitimacy of decisions and improved intellectual content) and keeping in mind the numerous issues which confuse and obscure clear findings from group work (including multiple roles for participants, bias due to domination and distortion emerging from uneven group inputs) this paper uses an innovative methodology – the Triple Task – to propose a new framework for organising multi-stakeholder consultations. The Triple Task methodology was applied to test the new framework on multi-stakeholders in the context of education in Abu Dhabi, where various small groups were tasked and assessed using the methodology. The results indicate that moving participants from heterogeneous to homogenous groups results on these groups becoming more focused in their outcomes with greater clarity in the thinking of group members”
Measuring Internet Activity: a (Selective) Review of Methods and Metrics
Paper by Faris, Robert and Heacock, Rebekah (part of the Internet Monitor series): “Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions.”
NEW: The Open Governance Knowledge Base
In its continued efforts to organize and disseminate learnings in the field of technology-enabled governance innovation, today, The Governance Lab is introducing a collaborative, wiki-style repository of information and research at the nexus of technology, governance and citizenship. Right now we’re calling it the Open Governance Knowledge Base, and it goes live today.
Our goal in creating this collaborative platform is to provide a single source of research and insights related to the broad, interdiscplinary field of open governance for the benefit of: 1) decision-makers in governing institutions seeking information and inspiration to guide their efforts to increase openness; 2) academics seeking to enrich and expand their scholarly pursuits in this field; 3) technology practitioners seeking insights and examples of familiar tools being used to solve public problems; and 4) average citizens simply seeking interesting information on a complex, evolving topic area.
While you can already find some pre-populated information and research on the platform, we need your help! The field of open governance is too vast, complex and interdisciplinary to meaningfully document without broad collaboration.
Here’s how you can help to ensure this shared resource is as useful and engaging as possible:
- What should we call the platform? We want your title suggestions. Leave your ideas in the comments or tweet them to us @TheGovLab.
- And more importantly: Share your knowledge and research. Take a look at what we’ve posted, create an account, refer to this MediaWiki formatting guide as needed and start editing!
Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving – A Handbook and a Call to Action
“This book was started with the intent of changing design and social entrepreneurship education. As these disciplines converge, it becomes evident that existing pedagogy doesn’t support either students or practicioners attempting to design for impact. This text is a reaction to that convergence, and will ideally be used by various students, educators, and practicioners:
One audience is professors and educators of design, who are challenged with reinventing their educational curriculum in the face of a changing world. For them, this book should act as both a starting point for curriculum development and a justification for why this development is necessary—it should answer the question “what should design and social entrepreneurship education look like?”
Another audience is made up of fresh-out-of-school designers, who are bored and uninspired by their jobs. For them, this book should answer the question “how can I redirect my design efforts to something meaningful?”
Finally, a last audience is made up of practicing designers and entrepreneurs, who are looking to achieve social impact in their work. For them, the book should answer the question “what tools and techniques can I use in my work to drive impact through design?”
The entire text of the book is available online for free as HTML, and provided for reuse and adaptation under a creative commons license. We hope you find this a useful resource in your practice, education, and in your day to day life.
Read Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving“
Behavioural Public Policy
New book by Adam Oliver (Cambridge University Press): “How can individuals best be encouraged to take more responsibility for their well-being and their environment or to behave more ethically in their business transactions? Across the world, governments are showing a growing interest in using behavioural economic research to inform the design of nudges which, some suggest, might encourage citizens to adopt beneficial patterns of behaviour. In this fascinating collection, leading academic economists, psychologists and philosophers reflect on how behavioural economic findings can be used to help inform the design of policy initiatives in the areas of health, education, the environment, personal finances and worker remuneration. Each chapter is accompanied by a shorter ‘response’ that provides critical commentary and an alternative perspective. This accessible book will interest academic researchers, graduate students and policy-makers across a range of disciplinary perspectives.”
What future do you want? Commission invites votes on what Europe could look like in 2050 to help steer future policy and research planning
European Commission – MEMO: “Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, is inviting people to join a voting and ranking process on 11 visions of what the world could look like in 20-40 years. The Commission is seeking views on living and learning, leisure and working in Europe in 2050, to steer long-term policy or research planning.
The visions have been gathered over the past year through the Futurium, an online debate platform that allows policymakers to not only consult citizens, but to collaborate and “co-create” with them, and at events throughout Europe. Thousands of thinkers – from high school students, to the Erasmus Students Network; from entrepreneurs and internet pioneers to philosophers and university professors, have engaged in a collective inquiry – a means of crowd-sourcing what our future world could look like.
Eleven over-arching themes have been drawn together from more than 200 ideas for the future. From today, everyone is invited to join the debate and offer their rating and rankings of the various ideas. The results of the feedback will help the European Commission make better decisions about how to fund projects and ideas that both shape the future and get Europe ready for that future….
The Futurium is a foresight project run by DG CONNECT, based on an open source approach. It develops visions of society, technologies, attitudes and trends in 2040-2050 and use these, for example as potential blueprints for future policy choices or EU research and innovation funding priorities.
It is an online platform developed to capture emerging trends and enable interested citizens to co-create compelling visions of the futures that matter to them.
This crowd-sourcing approach provides useful insights on:
- vision: where people want to go, how desirable and likely are the visions posted on the platform;
- policy ideas: what should ideally be done to realise the futures; the possible impacts and plausibility of policy ideas;
- evidence: scientific and other evidence to support the visions and policy ideas.
….
Connecting policy making to people: in an increasingly connected society, online outreach and engagement is an essential response to the growing demand for participation, helping to capture new ideas and to broaden the legitimacy of the policy making process (IP/10/1296). The Futurium is an early prototype of a more general policy-making model described in the paper “The Futurium—a Foresight Platform for Evidence-Based and Participatory Policymaking“.
The Futurium was developed to lay the groundwork for future policy proposals which could be considered by the European Parliament and the European Commission under their new mandates as of 2014. But the Futurium’s open, flexible architecture makes it easily adaptable to any policy-making context, where thinking ahead, stakeholder participation and scientific evidence are needed.”
Open Data Index provides first major assessment of state of open government data
Press Release from the Open Knowledge Foundation: “In the week of a major international summit on government transparency in London, the Open Knowledge Foundation has published its 2013 Open Data Index, showing that governments are still not providing enough information in an accessible form to their citizens and businesses.
The UK and US top the 2013 Index, which is a result of community-based surveys in 70 countries. They are followed by Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Of the countries assessed, Cyprus, St Kitts & Nevis, the British Virgin Islands, Kenya and Burkina Faso ranked lowest. There are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society. This includes 30 countries who are members of the Open Government Partnership.
The Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels, and reveals that whilst some good progress is being made, much remains to be done.
Rufus Pollock, Founder and CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation said:
Opening up government data drives democracy, accountability and innovation. It enables citizens to know and exercise their rights, and it brings benefits across society: from transport, to education and health. There has been a welcome increase in support for open data from governments in the last few years, but this Index reveals that too much valuable information is still unavailable.
The UK and US are leaders on open government data but even they have room for improvement: the US for example does not provide a single consolidated and open register of corporations, while the UK Electoral Commission lets down the UK’s good overall performance by not allowing open reuse of UK election data.
There is a very disappointing degree of openness of company registers across the board: only 5 out of the 20 leading countries have even basic information available via a truly open licence, and only 10 allow any form of bulk download. This information is critical for range of reasons – including tackling tax evasion and other forms of financial crime and corruption.
Less than half of the key datasets in the top 20 countries are available to re-use as open data, showing that even the leading countries do not fully understand the importance of citizens and businesses being able to legally and technically use, reuse and redistribute data. This enables them to build and share commercial and non-commercial services.
To see the full results: https://index.okfn.org. For graphs of the data: https://index.okfn.org/visualisations.”