Chapter by Gernot Rieder and Judith Simon in by Berechenbarkeit der Welt? Philosophie und Wissenschaft im Zeitalter von Big Data: “…paper investigates the rise of Big Data in contemporary society. It examines the most prominent epistemological claims made by Big Data proponents, calls attention to the potential socio-political consequences of blind data trust, and proposes a possible way forward. The paper’s main focus is on the interplay between an emerging new empiricism and an increasingly opaque algorithmic environment that challenges democratic demands for transparency and accountability. It concludes that a responsible culture of quantification requires epistemic vigilance as well as a greater awareness of the potential dangers and pitfalls of an ever more data-driven society….(More)”.
Advocacy and Policy Change Evaluation: Theory and Practice
Book by Annette Gardner and Claire Brindis: “This is the first book-length treatment of the concepts, designs, methods, and tools needed to conduct effective advocacy and policy change evaluations. By integrating insights from different disciplines, Part I provides a conceptual foundation for navigating advocacy tactics within today’s turbulent policy landscape. Part II offers recommendations for developing appropriate evaluation designs and working with unique advocacy and policy change–oriented instruments. Part III turns toward opportunities and challenges in this growing field. In addition to describing actual designs and measures, the chapters includes suggestions for addressing the specific challenges of working in a policy setting, such as a long time horizon for achieving meaningful change.
To illuminate and advance this area of evaluation practice, the authors draw on over 30 years of evaluation experience; collective wisdom based on a new, large-scale survey of evaluators in the field; and in-depth case studies on diverse issues—from the environment, to public health, to human rights. Ideal for evaluators, change makers, and funders, this book is the definitive guide to advocacy and policy change evaluation….(More)”.
Conducting Mobile Surveys Responsibly
A Field Book for World Food Program Staff: “The field book outlines the main risks for staff engaged in mobile data collection and helps promote responsible data collection/storage/sharing in the very complex environment in which WFP operates…(Conducting Mobile Surveys Responsibly: A Field Book for WFP Staff, May 2017)
Civic Tech Cities
Paper by Rebecca Rumbul and Emily Shaw: “‘Civic technology’ is mostly used to refer to NGO led digital initiatives designed to bridge the gap between citizen and institution. However, since the rise of Code for America and similar organisations around the world, civic citizen-focused tech has increasingly been developed and implemented by and with public bodies themselves in an attempt to reach out to citizens and increase engagement and participation. Whilst early civic tech tended to focus on country-level issues, these initiatives are now proliferating at sub-national levels, particularly in cities. These emerging sub-national and municipal level civic technologies form the focus of this research, which explores five case studies of municipal civic tech operating in the US. It examines not only the impacts of this tech upon citizen users, but the effects it has upon the implementing institutions.
Whilst many governments in the world are still working with centralised forms of digital governance, the US has over the last 10 years experienced a plurality of growth in sub-state civic tech usage by city and municipal governments. This nascent government civic tech environment provided a most fertile opportunity for research into the operations and impacts of civic tech employed by official institutions.
This project was designed to examine how civic tech implemented by government is currently operating, who is using it, and what impacts it is having upon service delivery. The aim of this research is therefore to provide a comprehensive picture of civic technology implementation by municipal level public bodies and the challenges and benefits that arise in the process. It is hoped that this report will be of practical use to both public bodies and civic technologists working with them.
The primary deliverable of this project was five case studies of civic tech projects that have been deployed by US cities since 2013:
- SpeakUpAustin (www.speakupaustin.org), in Austin, Texas
- LargeLots (www.largelots.org), in Chicago, Illinois
- RecordTrac (records.oaklandnet.com), in Oakland, California
- DC311 (311.dc.gov), in Washington, DC
- Office of Professional Accountability (OPA) Police Complaint Tracker (www.seattle.gov/opa/file-acomplaint-about-the-seattle-police), in Seattle, Washington
In the study, the users of the civic tech tools and the implementers of the tools within government were interviewed about the impact of the tool’s introduction on the delivery of the relevant public service, how these additional sources of public input affected the departments where they had been introduced, whether the department had noted increased efficiency, and whether internal or external stakeholders perceived increased effectiveness.
The civic technology tools examined in this study were generally well-appreciated both internally and externally, receiving good reviews both from the government and non-government sides of their use. People inside and outside of government appreciated the benefits of using them, and expressed interest in maintaining and improving them….(More)”
What next for digital social innovation? Realising the potential of people and technology to tackle social challenges
Matt Stokes et al at nesta: “This report, and accompanying guide, produced as part of the DSI4EU project, maps the projects and organisations using technology to tackle social challenges across Europe, and explores the barriers to the growth of digital social innovation.
Key findings
- There are almost 2,000 organisations and over 1,000 projects involved in digital social innovation (DSI) across Europe, with the highest concentration of activity in Western and Southern Europe.
- Despite this activity, there are relatively few examples of DSI initiatives delivering impact at scale. The growth of DSI is being held back by barriers at the system level and at the level of individual projects.
- Projects and organisations involved in DSI are still relatively poorly connected to each other. There is a pressing need to grow strong networks within and across countries and regions to boost collaboration and knowledge-sharing.
- The growth of DSI is being held back by lack of funding and investment across the continent, especially outside Western Europe, and structural digital skills shortages.
- Civil society organisations and the public sector have been slow to adopt DSI, despite the opportunity it offers them to deliver better services at a lower cost, although there are emerging examples of good practice from across Europe.
- Practitioners struggle to engage citizens and users, understand and measure the impact of their digital social innovations, and plan for growth and sustainability.
Across Europe, thousands of people, projects and organisations are using digital technologies to tackle social challenges in fields like healthcare, education, employment, democratic participation, migration and the environment. We call this phenomenon digital social innovation.
Through crowdmapping DSI across Europe, we find that there are almost 2,000 organisations and over 1,000 projects using open and collaborative technologies to tackle social challenges. We complement this analysis by piloting experimental data methods such as Twitter analysis to understand in further depth the distribution of DSI across Europe. You can explore the data on projects and organisations on digitalsocial.eu.
However, despite widespread activity, few initiatives have grown to deliver impact at scale, to be institutionalised, or to become “the new normal”.
In this research, we find that weak networks between stakeholders, insufficient funding and investment, skills shortages, and slow adoption by public sector and established civil society organisations is holding back the growth of DSI…(More)”.
Handbook of Behavioural Economics and Smart Decision-Making
Handbook edited by Morris Altman: “… a unique and original contribution of over thirty chapters on behavioural economics, examining and addressing an important stream of research where the starting assumption is that decision-makers are for the most part relatively smart or rational. This particular approach is in contrast to a theme running through much contemporary work where individuals’ behaviour is deemed irrational, biased, and error-prone, often due to how people are hardwired. In the smart people approach, where errors or biases occur and when social dilemmas arise, more often than not, improving the decision-making environment can repair these problems without hijacking or manipulating the preferences of decision-makers. This book covers a wide-range of themes from micro to macro, including various sub-disciplines within economics such as economic psychology, heuristics, fast and slow-thinking, neuroeconomics, experiments, the capabilities approach, institutional economics, methodology, nudging, ethics, and public policy….(More)”.
Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society
Book by Alberto Alemanno: “Don’t get mad – get lobbying! From the Austrian student who took on Facebook to the Mexicans who campaigned successfully for a Soda sugar tax to the British scientist who lobbied for transparency in drug trials, citizen lobbyists are pushing through changes even in the darkest of times. Here’s how you can join them.
Many democratic societies are experiencing a crisis of faith. We cast our votes and a few of us even run for office, but our supposedly representative governments seem driven by the interests of big business, powerful individuals and wealthy lobby groups. All the while the world’s problems – like climate change, Big Data, corporate greed, the rise of nationalist movements – seem more pressing than ever. What hope do any of us have of making a difference?…..
We can shape and change policies. How? Not via more referenda and direct democracy, as the populists are arguing, but by becoming ‘citizen lobbyists’ – learning the tools that the big corporate lobbyists use, but to advance causes we really care about, from saving a local library to taking action against fracking. The world of government appears daunting, but this book outlines a ten-step process that anyone can use, bringing their own talent and expertise to make positive change…
10 steps to becoming an expert lobbyist:
- Pick Your Battle
- Do Your Homework
- Map Your Lobbying Environment
- Lobbying Plan
- Pick Your Allies
- You Pays?
- Communication and Media Plan
- Face-to-Face Meeting
- Monitoring and Implementation
- Stick to the (Lobbying) Rules
If you’re looking to improve – or to join – your community, if you’re searching for a sense of purpose or a way to take control of what’s going on around you, switching off is no longer an option. It’s time to make your voice count….(More)”.
Measuring results from open contracting in Ukraine
Kathrin Frauscher, Karolis Granickas and Leigh Manasco at the Open Contracting Partnership: “…Ukraine is one of our Showcase and Learning (S&L) projects, and we’ve already shared several stories about the success of Prozorro. Each S&L project tests specific theories of change and use cases. Through the Prozorro platform, Ukraine is revolutionizing procurement by digitizing the process and unlocking data to make it available to citizens, CSOs, government, and business. The theory of change for this S&L project hypothesizes that transparency and the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, promotion and monitoring of the procurement system, is having an impact on value for money, fairness and integrity.
The reform introduced other innovations, including electronic reverse auctions and a centralized procurement database that integrates with private commercial platforms. We co-created a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plan with our project partners to quantify and measure specific progress and impact indicators, while understanding that it is hard to attribute impacts to distinct aspects of the reform. The indicators featured in this blog are particularly related to our theory of change.
We are at a crucial moment in this S&L project as our first round of comprehensive MEL baseline and progress data are coming in. It’s a good time to reflect on key takeaways and challenges that arose when defining and analyzing these data, and how we are using them to inform the Prozorro reform.
Openness can result in more competition and competition saves money.
One of the benefits of open contracting appears to be improving market opportunity and efficiency. Market opportunity focuses on companies being able to compete for business on a level playing field.
From January 2015 to March 2017, the average number of bids per tender lot rose by 15%, demonstrating an increase in competition. Even more notable, the average number of unique suppliers during that same time grew by 45% for each procuring entity, meaning that agencies are now procuring from more and more diverse suppliers….
High levels of responsiveness can benefit procuring entities.
Those agencies that leverage their opportunities to interact with business and citizens throughout the contracting cycle, by actively responding to questions and complaints via the online platform, tend to conduct procurement more smoothly, without high levels of amendments or cancellations, than those who don’t. Tenders with a 100% response rate to feedback have a 66% success rate, while those with no response, show a 52% success rate. The portal provides procuring entities with the resources needed to address questions and problems, saving time, effort and money throughout the contracting process.
People are beginning to trust the public procurement process and data more.
According to a survey of 300 entrepreneurs conducted by USAID, most respondents believed that Prozorro significantly (27%) or partially (53%) reduces corruption. Additionally, fewer respondents who participated in procurement said they faced corruption when using the new platform (29%) compared to the old system (54%). These numbers only tell a part of the story, as we do not know what those outside of the procurement system think, but they are a necessary first step towards measuring increased levels of trust for the public procurement process. We will continue looking at trust as one of the proxies for health of an open procurement process.
Citizens are actively seeking out procurement information.
Google search hits grew from 680 in the month of January 2015 to more than 191,000 in the month of February 2017 (tracking 43 related keywords). This means the environment is shifting to one where people are recognizing that this data has value; that there is interest and demand for it. Implementing open contracting processes is just one part of what we want to see happen. We also strive to nurture an environment where open contracting data is seen as something that is worthwhile and necessary.
The newly established www.dozorro.org monitoring platform also shows promising results…..
The main one is feedback loops. We see that procuring entities’ responsiveness to general questions results in better quality procurement. We also see that only one out of three claims (request to a procuring entity to amend, cancel or modify a tender in question) is successfully resolved. In addition, there are some good individual examples, such as the ones in Dnypro and Kiev. While we do not know if these numbers and instances are sufficient for an effective institutional response mechanism, we do know that business and citizens have to trust redress mechanisms before using them. We will continue trying to identify the ideal level of institutional response to secure trust and develop better metrics to capture that….(More)”.
Will Computer Science become a Social Science?
Paper by Ingo Scholtes, Markus Strohmaier and Frank Schweitzer: “When Tay – a Twitter chatbot developed by Microsoft – was activated this March, the company was taken by surprise by what Tay had become. Within less than 24 hours of conversation with Twitter users Tay had learned to make racist, anti-semitic and misogynistic statements that have raised eyebrows in the Twitter community and beyond. What had happened? While Microsoft certainly tested the chat bot before release, planning for the reactions and the social environment in which it was deployed proved tremendously difficult. Yet, the Tay Twitter chatbot incident is just one example for the many challenges which arise when embedding algorithms and computing systems into an ever increasing spectrum of social systems. In this viewpoint we argue that, due to the resulting feedback loops by which computing technologies impact social behavior and social behavior feeds back on (learning) computing systems, we face the risk of losing control over the systems that we engineer. The result are unintended consequences that affect both the technical and social dimension of computing systems, and which computer science is currently not well-prepared to address. Highlighting exemplary challenges in core areas like (1) algorithm design, (2) cyber-physical systems, and (3) software engineering, we argue that social aspects must be turned into first-class citizens of our system models. We further highlight that the social sciences, in particular the interdisciplinary field of Computational Social Science [1], provide us with means to quantitatively analyze, model and predict human behavior. As such, a closer integration between computer science and social sciences not only provides social scientists with new ways to understand social phenomena. It also helps us to regain control over the systems that we engineer….(More)”
How Open Data Can Revolutionize a Society in Crisis
Beth Noveck at BrinkNews:”…These myriad open data success stories, however, depend on the political will to be transparent and collaborative. There is a looming risk that governments will only post what is expedient and noncontroversial while seeking recognition for their proactive disclosure—a practice increasingly referred to as “open-washing.” Governments of all political stripes refuse to disclose data when they should. The data to be found on government websites is not always the information most in demand by journalists, activists, and researchers.
Especially as political administrations turnover, there is a risk that change will result in a failure to collect and publish important data. These practices will be subject to the vagaries of politics.
The genie should not, however, be put back in the bottle.
Open data appeals to both right and left politically: the former sees open data as a pathway to smaller, more efficient government and the latter sees open data as a tool to pursue more effective social programs. The bipartisan interest in evidence-based approaches to governing should fuel greater demand for access to administrative information of all kinds—including the data that agencies collect about companies, workplaces, the environment, and the world beyond government.
Government data should be open in part because of the ill-effects of secrecy, but also because taxpayers have paid for the collection of this data by government in its role as regulator and researcher.
It is a pragmatic tool to make government and companies more accountable at solving social problems and to help communities make better informed buying decisions. It helps create jobs and generate entrepreneurship. Perhaps of paramount importance, open data can advance civil rights and help us to govern more legitimately and effectively….(More).