international development

USAID establishes its first open data policy

Curated on October 25, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Billy Mitchell at FedScoop: “The U.S. Agency for International Development jumped on the open data wave last week, announcing its first-ever policy to share its data sets and tools with the public on a central repository.

Referred to as Automated Directives System 579, the open data policy is a hat tip to President Barack Obama’s directive on transparency and open government five years ago and comes after the agency’s Frontiers in Development Forum in September addressing pathways for innovation for its mission to provide support to impoverished countries. With the new policy, USAID will provide a framework to open its agency-funded data to the public and publish it in a central location, making it easy to consume and use.
“USAID has long been a data-driven and evidence-based Agency, but never has the need been greater to share our data with a diverse set of partners—including the general public—to improve development outcomes,” wrote Angelique Crumbly, USAID’s performance improvement officer, and Brandon Pustejovsky, chief data officer for USAID, in a blog post. “For the first time in history, we have the tools, technologies and approaches to end extreme poverty within two decades. And while many of these new innovations were featured at our recent Frontiers in Development Forum, we also recognize that they largely rely on an ongoing stream of data (and new insights generated by that data) to ensure their appropriate application.”…

USAID’s DDL and open data will be hosted on the USAID website, where there’s already a long list of databases hosted. USAID also started a GitHub page for any feedback on the data”

Can Bottom-Up Institutional Reform Improve Service Delivery?

Curated on October 25, 2014July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Working paper by Molina, Ezequiel: “This article makes three contributions to the literature. First, it provides new evidence of the impact of community monitoring interventions using a unique dataset from the Citizen Visible Audit (CVA) program in Colombia. In particular, this article studies the effect of social audits on citizens’ assessment of service delivery performance. The second contribution is the introduction a theoretical framework to understand the pathway of change, the necessary building blocks that are needed for social audits to be effective. Using this framework, the third contribution of this article is answering the following questions: i) under what conditions do citizens decide to monitor government activity and ii) under what conditions do governments facilitate citizen engagement and become more accountable.”

Smarter, Better, Faster: The Potential for Predictive Analytics and Rapid-Cycle Evaluation to Improve Program Development and Outcomes

Curated on October 25, 2014July 19, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Scott Cody and Andrew Asher for The Hamilton Project: “Public administrators have always been interested in identifying cost-effective strategies for managing their programs. As government agencies invest in data warehouses and business intelligence capabilities, it becomes feasible to employ analytic techniques used more-commonly in the private sector. Predictive analytics and rapid-cycle evaluation are analytical approaches that are used to do more than describe the current status of programs: in both the public and private sectors, these approaches provide decision makers with guidance on what to do next. Predictive analytics refers to a broad range of methods used to anticipate an outcome. For many types of government programs, predictive analytics can be used to anticipate how individuals will respond to interventions, including new services, targeted prompts to participants, and even automated actions by transactional systems. With information from predictive analytics, administrators can identify who is likely to benefit from an intervention and find ways to formulate better interventions. Predictive analytics can also be embedded in agency operational systems to guide real-time decision making. For instance, predictive analytics could be embedded in intake and eligibility determination systems, prompting frontline workers to review suspect client applications more-closely to determine whether income or assets may be understated or deductions underclaimed…”

On policy and delivery

Curated on October 23, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by Mike Bracken (gov.uk): “…most of the work the civil service does goes unseen, or at least unheralded. But whether it’s Ebola screens, student loans, renewing your car tax, or a thousand other things, that work is vital to everyone in the UK.
Often that work is harder than it needs to be.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that the civil service needs reform. It’s the nature of that reform I want to talk about today.
The Internet has changed everything. Digital is the technological enabler of this century. And, in any sector you care to name, it’s been the lifeblood of organisations that have embraced it, and a death sentence for those that haven’t. If you take away one thing today, please make it this: government is not immune to the seismic changes that digital technology has brought to bear.
The Internet is changing the organising principle of every industry it touches, mostly for the better: finance, retail, media, transport, energy. Some industries refuse to change their organising principle. The music industry was dominated by producers – the record labels – now it’s dominated by digital distribution – like Spotify and their ilk.
Others, like airlines, have rapidly changed how they work internally, and are organised radically differently in order to serve users in a digital age. British Airways used to have over 80 ticket types, with departments and hierarchies competing to attract users. Now it has a handful, and the organisation is digital first and much simpler. These changes are invisible to the majority, but that’s doesn’t make the changes any less significant.
Twenty five years into the era of digital transformation, the Internet has a 100% track record of success making industries simpler to users while forcing organisations to fundamentally change how they’re structured. These characteristics are not going away. Yet the effect on the civil service has been, until very recently, marginal.
This is because we deferred our digital development by grouping digital services into enormous, multi-year IT contracts, or what we refer to as ‘Big IT’. Or in short, we gave away our digital future to the IT crowd. While most large organisations reversed these arrangements we have only recently separated our future strategy – digital literacy and digital service provision – from the same contracts that handle commodity technology. By clinging to this model for 15 years, we have created a huge problem for everyone involved in delivery and policy.
Today I want to talk about two things.
The first is delivery, because I believe delivery to users, not policy, should be the organising principle of a reformed civil service.
And the second is skills, and why it’s time for the civil service to put digital skills at the heart of the machine….”

Quantifying the Livable City

Curated on October 22, 2014August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Brian Libby at City Lab: “By the time Constantine Kontokosta got involved with New York City’s Hudson Yards development, it was already on track to be historically big and ambitious.

Over the course of the next decade, developers from New York’s Related Companies and Canada-based Oxford Properties Group are building the largest real-estate development in United States history: a 28-acre neighborhood on Manhattan’s far West Side over a Long Island Rail Road yard, with some 17 million square feet of new commercial, residential, and retail space.
Hudson Yards is also being planned as an innovative model of efficiency. Its waste management systems, for example, will utilize a vast vacuum-tube system to collect garbage from each building into a central terminal, meaning no loud garbage trucks traversing the streets by night. Onsite power generation will prevent blackouts like those during Hurricane Sandy, and buildings will be connected through a micro-grid that allows them to share power with each other.
Yet it was Kontokosta, the deputy director of academics at New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), who conceived of Hudson Yards as what is now being called the nation’s first “quantified community.” This entails an unprecedentedly wide array of data being collected—not just on energy and water consumption, but real-time greenhouse gas emissions and airborne pollutants, measured with tools like hyper-spectral imagery.

New York has led the way in recent years with its urban data collection. In 2009, Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed Local Law 84, which requires privately owned buildings over 50,000 square feet in size to provide annual benchmark reports on their energy and water use. Unlike a LEED rating or similar, which declares a building green when it opens, the city benchmarking is a continuous assessment of its operations…”

Peer Academy

Curated on October 17, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

About: “Peer Academy inspires change through peer-to-peer learning. Our goal is simple, to bring together innovators and collaborators across Corporate, Government and Not For Profits who are passionate about accelerating change in their organisations. Focussed on the skills needed for the 21st century, Peer Academy provides a platform for professionals to increase their capabilities through sharing skills, tools and knowledge…

As we enter into the collaborative economy, people will demand collaborative and flexible ways of learning. As people change jobs more frequently, the need for new skills will change in variety and pace.
Currently, many education delivery models are not keeping up with the pace of job or career changes. Internal options are often compliance-based and lack inspiration for 21st century skills. External options can be expensive or time consuming, making it a difficult pitch where budgets and resources for many organisations are getting tighter. Finally, many of us want to move beyond the expert vs student paradigm and would rather learn from peers who have gone down the tricky path we are venturing on.
We need a new education paradigm for professional development. One where learning happens on-demand, is low-cost, practical and peer-led. This is where Peer Academy comes in…”

The Data Manifesto

Curated on October 17, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Development Initiatives: “Staging a Data Revolution

Accessible, useable, timely and complete data is core to sustainable development and social progress. Access to information provides people with a base to make better choices and have more control over their lives. Too often attempts to deliver sustainable economic, social and environmental results are hindered by the failure to get the right information, in the right format, to the right people, at the right time. Worse still, the most acute data deficits often affect the people and countries facing the most acute problems.

The Data Revolution should be about data grounded in real life. Data and information that gets to the people who need it at national and sub-national levels to help with the decisions they face – hospital directors, school managers, city councillors, parliamentarians. Data that goes beyond averages – that is disaggregated to show the different impacts of decisions, policies and investments on gender, social groups and people living in different places and over time.

We need a Data Revolution that sets a new political agenda, that puts existing data to work, that improves the way data is gathered and ensures that information can be used. To deliver this vision, we need the following steps.

12 steps to a Data Revolution

1.     Implement a national ‘Data Pledge’ to citizens that is supported by governments, private and non-governmental sectors
2.     Address real world questions with joined up and disaggregated data
3.      Empower and up-skill data users of the future through education
4.     Examine existing frameworks and publish existing data
5.     Build an information bank of data assets
6.     Allocate funding available for better data according to national and sub-national priorities
7.     Strengthen national statistical systems’ capacity to collect data
8.     Implement a policy that data is ‘open by default’
9.     Improve data quality by subjecting it to public scrutiny
10. Put information users’ needs first
11. Recognise technology cannot solve all barriers to information
12. Invest in infomediaries’ capacity to translate data into information that policymakers, civil society and the media can actually use…”

Atlas of Cities

Curated on October 14, 2014August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Paul Knox: “More than half the world’s population lives in cities, and that proportion is expected to rise to three-quarters by 2050. Urbanization is a global phenomenon, but the way cities are developing, the experience of city life, and the prospects for the future of cities vary widely from region to region. The Atlas of Cities presents a unique taxonomy of cities that looks at different aspects of their physical, economic, social, and political structures; their interactions with each other and with their hinterlands; the challenges and opportunities they present; and where cities might be going in the future.
Each chapter explores a particular type of city—from the foundational cities of Greece and Rome and the networked cities of the Hanseatic League, through the nineteenth-century modernization of Paris and the industrialization of Manchester, to the green and “smart” cities of today. Expert contributors explore how the development of these cities reflects one or more of the common themes of urban development: the mobilizing function (transport, communication, and infrastructure); the generative function (innovation and technology); the decision-making capacity (governance, economics, and institutions); and the transformative capacity (society, lifestyle, and culture)….
Table of Contents; Introduction[PDF] pdf-icon “

The Problem-solving Capacity of the Modern State

Curated on October 14, 2014October 30, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book edited by Martin Lodge and Kai Wegrich: “The early 21st century has presented considerable challenges to the problem-solving capacity of the contemporary state in the industrialised world. Among the many uncertainties, anxieties and tensions, it is, however, the cumulative challenge of fiscal austerity, demographic developments, and climate change that presents the key test for contemporary states. Debates abound regarding the state’s ability to address these and other problems given increasingly dispersed forms of governing and institutional vulnerabilities created by politico-administrative and economic decision-making structures. This volume advances these debates, first, by moving towards a cross-sectoral perspective that takes into account the cumulative nature of the contemporary challenge to governance focusing on the key governance areas of infrastructure, sustainability, social welfare, and social integration; second, by considering innovations that have sought to add problem-solving capacity; and third, by exploring the kind of administrative capacities (delivery, regulatory, coordination, and analytical) required to encourage and sustain innovative problem-solving. This edition introduces a framework for understanding the four administrative capacities that are central to any attempt at problem-solving and how they enable the policy instruments of the state to have their intended effect. It also features chapters that focus on the way in which these capacities have become stretched and how they have been adjusted, given the changing conditions; the way in which different states have addressed particular governance challenges, with particular attention paid to innovation at the level of policy instrument and the required administrative capacities; and, finally, types of governance capacities that lie outside the boundaries of the state.”