Strengthening the Connective Links in Government


John M. Kamensky at the IBM Center for The Business of Government: “Over the past five years, the Obama administration has pursued a host of innovation-fostering initiatives that work to strengthen the connective links among and within federal agencies.

Many factors contribute to the rise of such efforts, including presidential support, statutory encouragement, and an ongoing evolution in the way government does its business. The challenge now is how to solidify the best of them so they remain in place beyond the upcoming 2017 presidential transition.

Increased Use of Collaborative Governance

Dr. Rosemary O’Leary, an astute observer of trends in government, describes how government has steadily increased its use of collaborative approaches in lieu of the traditional hierarchical, bureaucratic approach. According to O’Leary, there are several explanations for this shift:

  • First, “most public challenges are larger than one organization, requiring new approaches to addressing public issues” such as housing, pollution, transportation, and healthcare.
  • Second, collaboration helps to improve the effectiveness and performance of programs “by encouraging new ways of providing services.”
  • Third, technology advances in recent years have helped “organizations and their employees to share information in a way that is integrative and interoperable.”
  • Finally, “citizens are seeking additional avenues for engaging in governance, resulting in new and different forms of collaborative problem solving and decision making.”

Early in his administration, President Barack Obama publicly placed a premium on the use of collaboration. One of his first directives to federal agencies set the tone for how he envisioned his administration would govern, directing agencies to be “collaborative” and “use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across levels of government, and with nonprofits, businesses and individuals.” To that end, the Obama administration undertook a series of supporting actions, including establishing crossagency priority goals around issues such as reducing veteran homelessness, data sharing, and streamlining the sharing of social media licenses between agencies. Tackling many of these issues successfully involved the transformative intersection of innovation and technology.

In 2010, when Congress passed a series of amendments to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), it provided the statutory basis for a broader, more consistent use of collaboration as a way of implementing policies and programs. These changes put in place a series of administrative processes:

  • The designation of agency and cross-agency priority goals
  • The naming of goal leaders
  • The convening of a set of regular progress reviews

Taken together, these legislative changes embedded the value of collaboration into the administrative fabric of the governing bureaucracy. In addition, the evolution of technology tools and the advances in the use of social media has dramatically lowered the technical and bureaucratic barriers to working in a more collaborative environment….(More)”

How open company data was used to uncover the powerful elite benefiting from Myanmar’s multi-billion dollar jade industry


OpenCorporates: “Today, we’re pleased to release a white paper on how OpenCorporates data was used to uncover the powerful elite benefiting from Myanmar’s multi-billion dollar jade industry, in a ground-breaking report from Global Witness. This investigation is an important case study on how open company data and identifiers are critical tool to uncover corruption and the links between companies and the real people benefitting from it.

This white paper shows how not only was it critical that OpenCorporates had this information (much of the information was removed from the official register during the investigation), but that the fact that it was machine-readable data, available via an API (data service), and programmatically combinable with other data was essential to discover the hidden connections between the key actors and the jade industry. Global Witness was able to analyse this data with the help of Open Knowledge.

In this white paper, we make recommendations about the collection and publishing of statutory company information as open data to facilitate the creation of a hostile environment for corruption by providing a rigorous framework for public scrutiny and due diligence.

You can find the white paper here or read it on Medium.”

Using data to improve the environment


Sir Philip Dilley at the UK Environment Agency: “We live in a data rich world. As an engineer I know the power of data in the design and implementation of new urban spaces, iconic buildings and the infrastructure on which we all depend.

Data also is a powerful force in helping us to protect the environment and it can be mined from a variety of sources.

Since the Victorian times naturalists have collected data on the natural world. At the Environment Agency we continue to use local enthusiasts to track rainfall, which we use to feed into and support local projections of flood risk. But the advent of computing power and the Government’s move to open data means we can now all use data in a new and exciting way. The result is a more informed approach to improving the environment and protecting people.

For the last 17 years the Environment Agency has used lasers in planes to map and scan the English landscape from above to help us carry out work such as flood modelling (data now available for everyone to use). The same information has been used to track changing coastal habitats and to help us use the power of nature to adapt to a changing climate.

We’ve used our LIDAR height data together with aerial photography to inform the location and design of major coastal realignment sites. The award-winning Medmerry project, which created 183 hectares of new coastal habitat and protects 348 properties from flooding, was based on this data-led approach.

Those who live near rivers or who use them for sport and recreation know the importance of getting up to date information on river flows. We already provide online services to the public so they can see current warnings and river levels information, but opening our data means everyone can get bespoke information through one postcode or location search.

We are not the only ones seeing the power of environmental data. Data entrepreneurs know how to get accurate and easily accessible information to the public. And that means that we can all make informed choices.FloodAlerts provides a graphical representation of flood warnings and gives localised updates every 15 minutes and Flood Risk Finder app provides flood risk profiles on any property in England, both using data made available for public use by the Environment Agency.

Our bathing waters data directs those who like to swim, surf or paddle with vital information on water quality. The Safer Seas Service app alerts water users when water quality is reduced at beaches and our bathing water data is also used by the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Beach Guide….(More)”

Simpler, smarter and innovative public services


Northern Future Forum: “How can governments deliver services better and more efficiently? This is one of the key questions governments all over the world are constantly dealing with. In recent years countries have had to cut back government spending at the same time as demand from citizens for more high quality service is increasing. Public institutions, just as companies, must adapt and develop over time. Rapid technological advancements and societal changes have forced the public sector to reform the way it operates and delivers services. The public sector needs to innovate to adapt and advance in the 21st century.
There are a number of reasons why public sector innovation matters (Potts and Kastelle 2010):

  • The size of the public sector in terms of percentages of GDP makes public sectors large components of the macro economy in many countries. Public sector innovation can affect productivity growth by reducing costs of inputs, better organisation and increasing the value of outputs.
  • The need for evolving policy to match evolving economies.
  • The public sector sets the rules of the game for private sector innovation.

As pointed out there is clearly an imperative to innovate. However, public sector innovation can be difficult, as public services deal with complex problems that have contradictory and diverse demands, need to respond quickly, whilst being transparent and accountable. Public sector innovation has a part to play to grow future economies, but also to develop the solutions to the biggest challenges facing most western nations today. These problems won’t be solved without strong leadership from the public sector and governments of the future. These issues are (Pollitt 2013):

  • Demographic change. The effects ageing of the general population will have on public services.
  • Climate change.
  • Economic trajectories, especially the effects of the current period of austerity.
  • Technological developments.
  • Public trust in government.
  • The changing nature of politics, with declining party loyalty, personalisation of politics, new parties, more media coverage etc.

According to the publications of national governments, the OECD, World Bank and the big international management consultancies, these issues will have major long-term impacts and implications (Pollitt 2013).
The essence of this background paper is to look at how governments can use innovation to help grow the economies and solve some of the biggest challenges of this generation and determine what the essentials to make it happen are. Firstly, a difficult economic environment in many countries tends to constrain the capacity of governments to deliver quality public services. Fiscal pressures, demographic changes, and diverse public and private demands all challenge traditional approaches and call for a rethinking of the way governments operate. There is a growing recognition that the complexity of the challenges facing the public sector cannot be solved by public sector institutions working alone, and that innovative solutions to public challenges require improved internal collaboration, as well as the involvement of external stakeholders partnering with public sector organisations (OECD 2015 a).
Willingness to solve some of these problems is not enough. The system that most western countries have created is in many ways a barrier to innovation. For instance, the public sector can lack innovative leaders and champions (Bason 2010, European Commission 2013), the way money is allocated, and reward and incentive systems can often hinder innovative performance (Kohli and Mulgan 2010), there may be limited knowledge of how to apply innovation processes and methods (European Commission 2013), and departmental silos can create significant challenges to ‘joined up’ problem solving (Carstensen and Bason 2012, Queensland Public Service Commission 2009).
There is not an established definition of innovation in the public sector. However some common elements have emerged from national and international research projects. The OECD has identified the following characteristics of public sector innovation:

  • Novelty: Innovations introduce new approaches, relative to the context where they are introduced.
  • Implementation: Innovations must be implemented, not just an idea.
  • Impact: Innovations aim to result in better public results including efficiency, effectiveness, and user or employee satisfaction.

Public sector innovation does not happen in a vacuum: problems need to be identified; ideas translated into projects which can be tested and then scaled up. For this to happen public sector organisations need to identify the processes and structures which can support and accelerate the innovation activity.
 Figure 1. Key components for successful public sector innovation.
Figure 1. Key components for successful public sector innovation.
The barriers to public sector innovation are in many ways the key to its success. In this background paper four key components for public sector innovation success will be discussed and ways to change them from barriers to supporters of innovation. The framework and the policy levers can play a key role in enabling and sustaining the innovation process:
These levers are:

  • Institutions. Innovation is likely to emerge from the interactions between different bodies.
  • Human Resources. Create ability, motivate and give the right opportunities.
  • Funding. Increase flexibility in allocating and managing financial resources.
  • Regulations. Processes need to be shortened and made more efficient.

Realising the potential of innovation means understanding which factors are most effective in creating the conditions for innovation to flourish, and assessing their relative impact on the capacity and performance of public sector organisations….(More). PDF: Simpler, smarter and innovative public services

A new model to explore non-profit social media use for advocacy and civic engagement


David Chapman, Katrina Miller-Stevens, John C Morris, and Brendan O’Hallarn in First Monday: “In an age when electronic communication is ubiquitous, non-profit organizations are actively using social media platforms as a way to deliver information to end users. In spite of the broad use of these platforms, little scholarship has focused on the internal processes these organizations employ to implement these tools. A limited number of studies offer models to help explain an organization’s use of social media from initiation to outcomes, yet few studies address a non-profit organization’s mission as the driver to employ social media strategies and tactics. Furthermore, the effectiveness of social media use is difficult for non-profit organizations to measure. Studies that attempt to address this question have done so by viewing social media platform analytics (e.g., Facebook analytics) or analyzing written content by users of social media (Nah and Saxton, 2013; Auger, 2013; Uzunoğlu and Misci Kip, 2014; or Guo and Saxton, 2014). The value added of this study is to present a model for practice (Weil, 1997) that explores social media use and its challenges from a non-profit organization’s mission through its desired outcome, in this case an outcome of advocacy and civic engagement.

We focus on one non-profit organization, Blue Star Families, that actively engages in advocacy and civic engagement. Blue Star Families was formed in 2009 to “raise the awareness of the challenges of military family life with our civilian communities and leaders” (Blue Star Families, 2010). Blue Star Families is a virtual organization with no physical office location. Thus, the organization relies on its Web presence and social media tools to advocate for military families and engage service members and their families, communities, and citizens in civic engagement activities (Blue Star Families, 2010).

The study aims to provide organizational-level insights of the successes and challenges of working in the social media environment. Specifically, the study asks: What are the processes non-profit organizations follow to link organizational mission to outcomes when using social media platforms? What are the successes and challenges of using social media platforms for advocacy and civic engagement purposes? In our effort to answer these questions, we present a new model to explore non-profit organizations’ use of social media platforms by building on previous models and frameworks developed to explore the use of social media in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

This research is important for three reasons. First, most previous studies of social media tend to employ models that focus on the satisfaction of the social media tools for organizational members, rather than the utility of social media as a tool to meet organizational goals. Our research offers a means to explore the utility of social media from an organization perspective. Second, the exemplar case for our research, Blue Star Families, Inc., is a non-profit organization whose mission is to create and nurture a virtual community spread over a large geographical — if not global — area. Because Blue Star Families was founded as an online organization that could not exist without social media, it provides a case for which social media is a critical component of the organization’s activity. Finally, we offer some “lessons learned” from our case to identify issues for other organizations seeking to create a significant social media presence.

This paper is organized as follows: first, the growth of social media is briefly addressed to provide background context. Second, previous models and frameworks exploring social media are discussed. This is followed by a presentation of a new model exploring the use of social media from an organizational perspective, starting with the driver of a non-profit organization’s mission, to its desired outcomes of advocacy and civic engagement. Third, the case study methodology is explained. Next, we present an analysis and discussion applying the new model to Blue Star Families’ use of social media platforms. We conclude by discussing the challenges of social media revealed in the case study analysis, and we offer recommendations to address these challenges….(More)”

Web design plays a role in how much we reveal online


European Commission: “A JRC study, “Nudges to Privacy Behaviour: Exploring an Alternative Approach to Privacy Notices“, used behavioural sciences to look at how individuals react to different types of privacy notices. Specifically, the authors analysed users’ reactions to modified choice architecture (i.e. the environment in which decisions take place) of web interfaces.

Two types of privacy behaviour were measured: passive disclosure, when people unwittingly disclose personal information, and direct disclosure, when people make an active choice to reveal personal information. After testing different designs with over 3 000 users from the UK, Italy, Germany and Poland, results show web interface affects decisions on disclosing personal information. The study also explored differences related to country of origin, gender, education level and age.

A depiction of a person’s face on the website led people to reveal more personal information. Also, this design choice and the visualisation of the user’s IP or browsing history had an impact on people’s awareness of a privacy notice. If confirmed, these features are particularly relevant for habitual and instinctive online behaviour.

With regard to education, users who had attended (though not necessarily graduated from) college felt significantly less observed or monitored and more comfortable answering questions than those who never went to college. This result challenges the assumption that the better educated are more aware of information tracking practices. Further investigation, perhaps of a qualitative nature, could help dig deeper into this issue. On the other hand, people with a lower level of education were more likely to reveal personal information unwittingly. This behaviour appeared to be due to the fact that non-college attendees were simply less aware that some online behaviour revealed personal information about themselves.

Strong differences between countries were noticed, indicating a relation between cultures and information disclosure. Even though participants in Italy revealed the most personal information in passive disclosure, in direct disclosure they revealed less than in other countries. Approximately 75% of participants in Italy chose to answer positively to at least one stigmatised question, compared to 81% in Poland, 83% in Germany and 92% in the UK.

Approximately 73% of women answered ‘never’ to the questions asking whether they had ever engaged in socially stigmatised behaviour, compared to 27% of males. This large difference could be due to the nature of the questions (e.g. about alcohol consumption, which might be more acceptable for males). It could also suggest women feel under greater social scrutiny or are simply more cautious when disclosing personal information.

These results could offer valuable insights to inform European policy decisions, despite the fact that the study has targeted a sample of users in four countries in an experimental setting. Major web service providers are likely to have extensive amounts of data on how slight changes to their services’ privacy controls affect users’ privacy behaviour. The authors of the study suggest that collaboration between web providers and policy-makers can lead to recommendations for web interface design that allow for conscientious disclosure of privacy information….(More)”

The Quantified Community and Neighborhood Labs: A Framework for Computational Urban Planning and Civic Technology Innovation


Constantine E. Kontokosta: “This paper presents the conceptual framework and justification for a “Quantified Community” (QC) and a networked experimental environment of neighborhood labs. The QC is a fully instrumented urban neighborhood that uses an integrated, expandable, and participatory sensor network to support the measurement, integration, and analysis of neighborhood conditions, social interactions and behavior, and sustainability metrics to support public decision-making. Through a diverse range of sensor and automation technologies — combined with existing data generated through administrative records, surveys, social media, and mobile sensors — information on human, physical, and environmental elements can be processed in real-time to better understand the interaction and effects of the built environment on human well-being and outcomes. The goal is to create an “informatics overlay” that can be incorporated into future urban development and planning that supports the benchmarking and evaluation of neighborhood conditions, provides a test-bed for measuring the impact of new technologies and policies, and responds to the changing needs and preferences of the local community….(More)”

Data-Driven Innovation: Big Data for Growth and Well-Being


“A new OECD report on data-driven innovation finds that countries could be getting much more out of data analytics in terms of economic and social gains if governments did more to encourage investment in “Big Data” and promote data sharing and reuse.

The migration of economic and social activities to the Internet and the advent of The Internet of Things – along with dramatically lower costs of data collection, storage and processing and rising computing power – means that data-analytics is increasingly driving innovation and is potentially an important new source of growth.

The report suggest countries act to seize these benefits, by training more and better data scientists, reducing barriers to cross-border data flows, and encouraging investment in business processes to incorporate data analytics.

Few companies outside of the ICT sector are changing internal procedures to take advantage of data. For example, data gathered by companies’ marketing departments is not always used by other departments to drive decisions and innovation. And in particular, small and medium-sized companies face barriers to the adoption of data-related technologies such as cloud computing, partly because they have difficulty implementing organisational change due to limited resources, including the shortage of skilled personnel.

At the same time, governments will need to anticipate and address the disruptive effects of big data on the economy and overall well-being, as issues as broad as privacy, jobs, intellectual property rights, competition and taxation will be impacted. Read the Policy Brief

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Foreword
Executive summary
The phenomenon of data-driven innovation
Mapping the global data ecosystem and its points of control
How data now drive innovation
Drawing value from data as an infrastructure
Building trust for data-driven innovation
Skills and employment in a data-driven economy
Promoting data-driven scientific research
The evolution of health care in a data-rich environment
Cities as hubs for data-driven innovation
Governments leading by example with public sector data

 

Digital Research Confidential


New book edited by Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig: “The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidentialoffers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers’ mistakes—and their successes.

The book—a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai’s widely read Research Confidential—presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field….(More)”

Open collaboration in the public sector: The case of social coding on GitHub


Paper by Ines Mergel at Government Information Quarterly: “Open collaboration has evolved as a new form of innovation creation in the public sector. Government organizations are using online platforms to collaborative create or contribute to public sector innovations with the help of external and internal problem solvers. Most recently the U.S. federal government has encouraged agencies to collaboratively create and share open source code on the social coding platform GitHub and allow third parties to share their changes to the code. A community of government employees is using the social coding site GitHub to share open source code for software and website development, distribution of data sets and research results, or to seek input to draft policy documents. Quantitative data extracted from GitHub’s application programming interface is used to analyze the collaboration ties between contributors to government repositories and their reuse of digital products developed on GitHub by other government entities in the U.S. federal government. In addition, qualitative interviews with government contributors in this social coding environment provide insights into new forms of co-development of open source digital products in the public sector….(More)”