Improving public services through open government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tim Hughes at Involve: “As citizens, we rely on public services being accessible and high quality – to give us an education, keep us healthy, make our communities a safe place to be, and ensure our basic needs are met. Public services are critical to our wellbeing and life chances, and building stronger and more prosperous societies. Open government reforms have the potential to improve existing services, and unlock the ideas, knowledge and capacity for new solutions to societal challenges. The idea is simple – public services that are more responsive and accountable to us as citizens – and benefit from our insights, ideas, energy and scrutiny – will work better for us.

This is why, in partnership with the Open Government Partnership, we have written a new guidance paper on how to develop robust and ambitious open public service reforms.  The guidance is particularly targeted at governments and civil society developing open governments commitments through the Open Government Partnership, but should be useful to anyone interested in how transparency, citizen participation and accountability can improve public services.

The paper sets out a framework of open public service reforms, as well as guidance, recommendations, resources and case studies. We will be updating the guide over time, so please do get in touch to let us know what you think….Download the report.“

The cloud, the crowd, and the city: How new data practices reconfigure urban governance?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Issue of Big Data & Society by Philip Ashton, Rachel Weber and Matthew Zook: “The urban archetype of the flâneur, so central to the concept of modernity, can now experience the city in ways unimaginable one hundred years ago. Strolling around Paris, the contemporary flâneur might stop to post pictures of her discoveries on Instagram, simultaneously identifying points of interest to the rest of her social network and broadcasting her location (perhaps unknowingly). The café she visits might be in the middle of a fundraising campaign through a crowdfunding site such as Kickstarter, and she might be invited to tweet to her followers in exchange for a discount on her pain au chocolate. As she ambles about Paris, the route of her stroll is captured by movement sensors positioned on top of street lights, and this data—aggregated with that of thousands of other pedestrians—could be used by the City of Paris to sync up transit schedules. And if those schedules were not convenient, she might tap Uber to whisk her home to her threadbare pension booked on AirBnB.

This vignette attests to the transformation of the urban experience through technology-enabled platforms that allow for the quick mobilization and exchange of information, public services, surplus capacity, entrepreneurial energy, and money. However, these changes have implicated more than just consumers, as multiple technologies have been taken up in urban governance processes through platforms variously labeled as Big Data, crowd sourcing, or the sharing economy. These systems combine inexpensive data collection and cloud-based storage, distributed social networks, geotagged locational sensing, mobile access (often through “app” platforms), and new collaborative entrepreneurship models to radically alter how the needs of urban residents are identified and how services are delivered and consumed in so-called “smart cities” (Townsend, 2013). Backed by Big Data, smart city initiatives have made inroads into urban service provision and policy in areas such as e-government and transparency, new forms of public-private partnerships through “urban lab” arrangements, or models such as impact investing, civic hacking, or tactical urbanism (cf. Karvonen and van Heur, 2014; Kitchin, 2014; Swyngedouw, 2005).

In the rhetoric used by their boosters, the vision and practice of these technologies “disrupts” existing markets by harnessing the power of “the crowd”—a process fully evident in sectors such as taxi (Uber/Lyft), hoteling (AirBnB), and finance (peer-to-peer lending). However, the notion of disruption has also targeted government bureaucracies and public services, with new initiatives seeking to insert crowd mechanisms or characteristics—at once self-organizing and collectively rational (Brabham, 2008)—into public policy. These mechanisms envision reconfiguring the traditional relationship of public powers with planning and governance by vesting data collection and problem-solving in crowd-like institutional arrangements that are partially or wholly outside the purview of government agencies. While scholars are used to talking about “governance beyond-the-state” (Swyngedouw, 2005) in terms of privatization and a growing scope for civil society organizations, technological intermediation potentially changes the scale and techniques of governance as well as its relationship to sovereign authority.

For instance, civic crowdfunding models have emerged as new means of organizing public service provision and funding community economic development by embracing both market-like bidding mechanisms and social-network technologies to distribute responsibility for planning and financing socially desirable investments to laypeople (Brickstarter, 2012; Correia de Freitas and Amado, 2013; Langley and Leyshon, 2016). Other practices are even more radical in their scope. Toronto’s Urban Repair Squad—an offshoot of the aptly named Critical Mass bike happenings—urges residents to take transportation planning into their own hands and paint their own bike lanes. Their motto: “They say city is broke. We fix. No charge.” (All that is missing is the snarky “you’re welcome” at the end.)

Combined, these emerging platforms and practices are challenging the tactics, capabilities, and authorizations employed to define and govern urban problems. This special theme of Big Data & Society picks up these issues, interrogating the emergence of digital platforms and smart city initiatives that rely on both the crowd and the cloud (new on-demand, internet-based technologies that store and process data) to generate and fold Big Data into urban governance. The papers contained herein were presented as part of a one-day symposium held at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in April 2015 and sponsored by UIC’s Department of Urban Planning and Policy. Setting aside the tired narratives of individual genius and unstoppable technological progress, workshop participants sought to understand why these practices and platforms have recently gained popularity and what their implementation might mean for cities. Papers addressed numerous questions: How have institutional supports and political-economic contexts facilitated the ascendance of “crowd” and “cloud” models within different spheres of urban governance? How do their advocates position them relative to imaginaries of state or market failure/dysfunction? What kinds of assumptions and expectations are embedded in the design and operation of these platforms and practices? What kinds of institutional reconfigurations have been spurred by the push to adopt smart city initiatives? How is information collected through these initiatives being used to advance particular policy agendas? Who is likely to benefit from them?…(More)”.

Most City Employees in US Not Engaged

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Bosacker and Justin Bibb at Gallup: “Falling revenues, major demographic shifts and rising citizen demands have become the new normal for city governments across the U.S. If city halls want to deliver on their promises to provide high-quality services, they’ll need to find better ways to make government run more effectively.

One big way to do that is to view every city employee as a key contributor to their success.

Every single one.

Local elected officials who treat their public workforce as anything less than their No. 1 resource are missing the boat. City employees are usually the largest line item in the budget. They know firsthand the public’s concerns because they’re on the front lines, and often they exhibit the exact depth of commitment to the community we’d want and expect from such service providers.

The problem is, only 29% of full-time local — as well as state — government workers are engaged at work, according to Gallup’s 2016 “State of Local and State Government Workers’ Engagement in the U.S.” report. This mirrors engagement for government workers at the federal level. (Among the U.S. workforce overall, 33% of employees are currently engaged in their jobs.) As a result, 71% of full-time state and local government workers are unhappy or disengaged with their jobs, and this creates a missed opportunity for city administrators to drive innovation and move their communities forward.

Gallup also finds that disengaged employees may meet their job expectations but do not expend discretionary energy or feel passion for their work.

Gallup estimates that a lack of engagement among government employees costs U.S. taxpayers an estimated $18 billion per year. That’s a high price tag for losing out on this discretionary energy. On the positive side, big productivity gains are possible when local governments fully and creatively deploy that same discretionary energy.

Many cities attempt to measure and increase their employees’ engagement and commitment to doing good work through regular employee surveys, often juxtaposed with equally important resident surveys to understand key issues of public concern. Gathering such information about what motivates and activates civil servants isn’t just cost-effective — it’s also smart….(More)”.

Open data and the war on hunger – a challenge to be met

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cath Everett in Diginomica: “Although the private sector is seen as the villain of the piece in some quarters, it actually has a substantial role to play in helping solve the problem of world hunger.

This is the view of Andre Laperriere, executive director of the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (Godan) initiative, …

Laperriere himself heads up Godan’s small secretariat of five full-time equivalent employees who are based in Oxfordshire in the UK. The goal of the organisation, which currently has 511 members, is to encourage governmental, non-governmental (NGO) and private sector organisations to share open data about agriculture and nutrition. The idea is to make such information more available, accessible and usable in order to help tackle world food security in the face of mounting threats such as climate change.

But to do so, it is necessary to bring the three key actors originally identified by James Wolfensohn, former president of the World Bank, into play, believes Laperriere. He explains:

You have states, which generate and possess much of the data. There are citizens with lots of specific needs for which the data can be used, and there’s the private sector in between. It’s in the best position to exploit the data and use it to develop products that help meet the needs of the population. So the private sector is the motor of development and has a big role to play.

This is not least because NGOs, cooperatives and civil societies of all kinds often simply do not have the resources or technical knowledge to either find or deal with the massive quantities of open data that is released. Laperriere explains:

It’s a moral dilemma for a lot of research organisations. If, for example, they release 8,000 data sets about every kind of cattle disease, they’re doing so for the benefit of small farmers. But the only ones that can often do anything with it are the big companies as they have the appropriate skills. So the goal is the little guy rather than the big companies, but the alternative is not to release anything at all.

But for private sector businesses to truly get the most out of this open data as it is made available, Laperriere advocates getting together to create so-called pre-competition spaces. These spaces involve competitors collaborating in the early stages of commercial product development to solve common problems. To illustrate how such activity works, Laperriere cites his own past experience when working for a lighting company:

We were pushing fluorescent rather than incandescent lighting, but it contains mercury which pollutes, although it has a lower carbon footprint. It was also a lot more expensive. But we sat down together with the other manufacturers and shared our data to fix the problem together, which meant that everyone benefited by reducing the cost, the mercury pollution and the amount of energy consumed.

Next revolution

While Laperriere understands the fear of many organisations in potentially making themselves vulnerable to competition by disclosing their data, in reality, he attests, “it not the case”. Instead he points out:

If you release data in the right way to stimulate collaboration, it is positive economically and benefits both consumers and companies too as it helps reduce their costs and minimise other problems.

Due to growing amounts of government legislation and policies that require processed food manufacturers around the world to disclose product ingredients, he is, in fact, seeing rising interest in the approach not only among the manufacturers themselves but also among packaging and food preservation companies. The fact that agriculture and nutrition is a vast, complex area does mean there is still a long way to go, however….(More)”

Using a New Roadmap to Democratize Climate Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anne Glusker at Smithsonian: “…Grimsson’s group felt that due to changes in information technology and social transformations, the large organizations and structures that used to be necessary to effect change were now not needed. And thus was born Roadmap, a new crowdsourcing tool for anyone and everyone interested in climate action. Still in its very early stages, Roadmap’s founders envision it as a platform for those working on climate issues—from scientist and policymaker to farmer and fisherman—to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and ideas, methods and techniques.

“A new political model is possible—where everyone can be a doer, where you no longer need big government or big enterprises to bring about success,” Grimsson says.

This new model for social change that skips the usual cumbersome channels and processes has been seen everywhere from public health, where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has redefined the sector, to the hospitality industry, which is working to combat the human trafficking that plagues its businesses, to perhaps most famously the Arab Spring, where the role of social media in bringing about political change is still being debated today.

And this new model is complemented by technological changes. “The innovation in energy technology is such that we no longer have to wait for the big energy breakthrough,” Grimsson says. “We already have the available technologies. Every individual, home, village, community, town and region can execute change. The good news from the climate point of view is that, in addition to the information technology revolution, there has now also taken place an energy revolution. A house can be a power station: If the people who live in that house have extra energy, they can sell their energy through the smart grid. The notion that every house can be a power station is as revolutionary as saying that every mobile phone can be a media company.”

Grimsson admits that it may seem odd for someone in his position to be advocating that ordinary citizens take action apart from the conventional corridors of governmental power.

“For me to say that these traditional political organizations and positions are somewhat outdated is perhaps a strange statement: I was a professor of political science, I’ve been a member of parliament, I’ve been a minister of finance, I was president for 20 years,” he says.

It was during Iceland’s financial meltdown that he first experienced this new kind of social change: “I saw this very strongly through the financial crisis in my own country, which led to a big social economic uprising. All those activities were engineered by unknown people, people who were not part of a big organization, who used Facebook and the information media to bring thousands of people together in one day.”

Right now, Roadmap consists of a website and a lofty manifesto that speaks of raising the value of “moral currency” and creating a “best practices warehouse.” Visitors to the site can fill out a form if they want to become part of its community of “doers.” The practical part of the manifesto speaks of identifying the best methodologies and models; implementing a “real-time system of measurement” and a way to “gauge and understand what is working, what is not, and exactly what is being achieved.” As the platform develops, it will be interesting to see exactly what form these gauges, measurement systems, and warehouses take….(More)”.

 

Can The Internet Strengthen Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Stephen Coleman: “From its inception as a public communication network, the Internet was regarded by many people as a potential means of escaping from the stranglehold of top-down, stage-managed politics. If hundreds of millions of people could be the producers as well as receivers of political messages, could that invigorate democracy? If political elites fail to respond to such energy, where will it leave them?

In this short book, internationally renowned scholar of political communication, Stephen Coleman, argues that the best way to strengthen democracy is to re-invent it for the twenty-first century. Governments and global institutions have failed to seize the opportunity to democratise their ways of operating, but online citizens are ahead of them, developing practices that could revolutionise the exercise of political power…(More)”

Entrepreneurial Administration

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Paper by Phil Weiser: “A core failing of today’s administrative state and modern administrative law scholarship is the lack of imagination as to how agencies should operate. On the conventional telling, public agencies follow specific grants of regulatory authority, use the traditional tools of notice-and-comment rulemaking and adjudication, and are checked by judicial review. In reality, however, effective administration depends on entrepreneurial leadership that spearheads policy experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving, including the development of regulatory programs that use non-traditional tools.

Entrepreneurial administration takes place both at public agencies and private entities, each of which can address regulatory challenges and earn regulatory authority as a result. Consider, for example, that Energy Star, a successful program that has encouraged the manufacture and sale of energy efficient appliances, is developed and overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). After the EPA established the program, Congress later codified it and, eventually, other countries followed suit. By contrast, the successful and complementary program encouraging the construction of energy efficient buildings, the well-respected LEED standard, is developed and overseen by a private organization. After it was developed, a number of governmental authorities endorsed it and have encouraged LEED-certified construction projects with both carrots and sticks. Significantly, while neither the Energy Star nor the LEED program were originally anticipated by any regulatory statute, both have had a tremendous impact.

The Energy Star and LEED case studies exemplify the sort of innovative regulatory strategies that are taking root in the modern administrative state. Despite the importance of entrepreneurial administration in practice, scholars have failed to examine the role of entrepreneurial leadership in spurring policy innovation and earning regulatory authority for an agency (or private entity). In short, administrative law needs a richer and more textured account of agency action, why entrepreneurial leadership matters in government, and how agencies should operate.

This Article explains that the conventional view of agency behavior — either following the specific direction of Congress or the President to use notice-and-comment rulemaking or adjudication processes — does not adequately portray how public agencies and private entities develop innovative regulatory strategies and earn regulatory authority as a result. In particular, this Article explains how governmental agencies like the EPA or private entities like the Green Building Council (which oversees the LEED standard) depend on entrepreneurial leadership to develop experimental regulatory strategies. It also explains how, in the wake of such experiments, legislative bodies have the opportunity to evaluate regulatory innovations in practice before deciding whether to embrace, revise, reject, or merely tolerate them.

This Article highlights the importance of entrepreneurial leadership in government, providing a number of examples of emerging regulatory experiments and suggesting how Congress should evaluate such experiments. This discussion explains how entrepreneurial leadership and a culture of experimentation and trial-and-error learning is necessary to develop innovative strategies and overcome the pressure to manage the status quo. In so doing, the Article underscores how policy entrepreneurship is integral to agency effectiveness, an important corrective to public choice theory, and a missing piece of modern administrative law scholarship….(More)”.

Behavioural Insights and Public Policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report: ““Behavioural insights”, or insights derived from the behavioural and social sciences, including decision making, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, organisational and group behaviour, are being applied by governments with the aim of making public policies work better. As their use has become more widespread, however, questions are being raised about their effectiveness as well as their philosophical underpinnings. This report discusses the use and reach of behavioural insights, drawing on a comprehensive collection of over 100 applications across the world and policy sectors, including consumer protection, education, energy, environment, finance, health and safety, labour market policies, public service delivery, taxes and telecommunications. It suggests ways to ensure that this experimental approach can be successfully and sustainably used as a public policy tool…(More)”.

Civic Tech & GovTech: An Overlooked Lucrative Opportunity for Technology Startups

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elena Mesropyan at LTP: “Civic technology, or Civic Tech, is defined as a technology that enables greater participation in government or otherwise assists government in delivering citizen services and strengthening ties with the public. In other words, Civic Tech is where the public lends its talents, usually voluntarily, to help government do a better job. Moreover, Omidyar Network(which invested over $90 million across 35 civic tech organizations over the past decade) emphasizes that like a movement, civic tech is mission-driven, focused on making a change that benefits the public, and in most cases enables better public input into decision making.

As an emerging sector, Civic Tech is defined as incorporating any technology that is used to empower citizens or help make government more accessible, efficient, and effective. Civic tech isn’t just talk, Omidyar notes, it is a community of people coming together to create tangible projects and take action. The civic tech and open data movements have grown with the ubiquity of personal technology.

Civic tech can be defined as a convergence of various fields. An example of such convergence has been given by Knight Foundation, a national foundation with a goal to foster informed and engaged communities to power a healthy democracy:

Civic Tech & GovTech: An Overlooked Lucrative Opportunity for Technology Startups

Source: The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field

In the report called Engines of Change: What Civic Tech Can Learn From Social Movements, Civic Tech is divided into three categories:

  • Citizen to Citizen (C2C): Technology that improves citizen mobilization or improves connections between citizens
  • Citizen to Government (C2G): Technology that improves the frequency or quality of interaction between citizens and government
  • Government Technology (Govtech): Innovative technology solutions that make government more efficient and effective at service delivery

In 2015, Forbes reported that Civic Tech makes up almost a quarter of local and state government spendings on technology….

Civic tech initiatives address a diverse range of industries – from energy and payments to agriculture and telecommunications. Mattermark outlines the following top ten industries associated with government and civic tech:

…There are certainly much more examples of GovTech/civic tech companies, and just tech startups offering solutions across the board that can significantly improve the way governments are run, and services are delivered to citizens and businesses. More importantly, GovTech should no longer be considered a charity and solely non-profit type of venture. Recently reviewed global P2G payments flows only, for example, are estimated to be at $7.7 trillion and represent a significant feature of the global payments landscape. For the low- and lower-middle-income countries alone, the number hits $375 billion (~50% of annual government expenditure)….(More)”

Eight Common Challenges to Scaling Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Jenn Gustetic: “Implementing an innovative approach within the federal government takes relentlessness, stamina, and strategy. It can be incredibly lonely. You are often your own best champion. It can feel impossible– like being the underdog trying to win a sporting match. But after all the frustrations and setbacks, when you win that first match it is also overwhelmingly satisfying.

But for the change agents in government, winning the first match is not enough. To make innovative approaches more routine, winning one match is just the beginning. The scaling challenge begins when you try to win over and over—and when you try to get more people to join your team….

There are eight common critical elements to scaling innovative approaches across the federal government that are not unique.

  1. Legal and policy frameworks: Even without an explicit legal authority, policy guidance on existing available authorities can have a great impact on initial scaling efforts.
  2. Shared infrastructure and common platforms: It is not cost-effective for each agency to have to recreate similar capabilities to support each innovative approach; shared services for some functions can reduce barriers to entry and increase efficiency.
  3. Emergence and sustainability of communities of practice: People are the most important part in developing and sharing the knowledge for innovative approaches—and their individual energy can be channeled for higher impact when intentionally connected with shared purpose.
  4. Knowledge capture and sharing: Toolkits increase the impact of interactions between experts and new learners by making basic knowledge more easily discoverable.
  5. Budget: Finding ways to build flexibility into program annual budget requests to allow for the funding of innovative approaches is critical to unlocking more resources to support these approaches that are owned by the programs themselves.
  6. Agency processes: Spending time modernizing the “un-sexy” protocols owned by procurement, human resources, and other Agency mission support functions might be the single most important door to unlock to scale new approaches.
  7. Reporting requirements: Creating centralized mechanisms (whether required or voluntary) for reporting and being disciplined in collecting quality reports that describe results on a project level builds the evidence base for scaling.
  8. External assessments and impact studies: Federal agencies should also support independent assessments of their use of innovative approaches in order to capture non-biased impact analysis and improve practice, based on evidence.

Here’s a little bit more context about why these are all important elements to scaling innovation…(More)”