international development

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on December 5, 2013December 13, 2018 by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of smart disclosure was originally published in 2013.

While much attention is paid to open data, data transparency need not be managed by a simple On/Off switch: It’s often desirable to make specific data available to the public or individuals in targeted ways. A prime example is the use of government data in Smart Disclosure, which provides consumers with data they need to make difficult marketplace choices in health care, financial services, and other important areas. Governments collect two kinds of data that can be used for Smart Disclosure: First, governments collect information on services of high interest to consumers, and are increasingly releasing this kind of data to the public. In the United States, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services collects and releases online data on health insurance options, while the Department of Education helps consumers understand the true cost (after financial aid) of different colleges. Second, state, local, or national governments hold information on consumers themselves that can be useful to them. In the U.S., for example, the Blue Button program was launched to help veterans easily access their own medical records.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Mark L. Braunstein — Empowering the Patient — a book exploring how computing and patients’ access to information can improve healthcare.
Elisa Brodi — “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection — a paper exploring smart disclosure in Italy, with a particular focus on compelling private companies to release useful information to the public.
Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — Policies in Practice: The Download Capability — a set of guidelines and strategies for releasing health information to the public from the originators of the Blue Button initiative.
National Science and Technology Council — Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure — a comprehensive, inter-agency report on the use of smart disclosure in the United States Federal Government.
Djoko Sigit Sayogo and Theresa A. Pardo — Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button — a paper exploring the implementation and impact of the Green Button initiative.
Richard H. Thaler and Will Tucker — Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers — an article describing many aspects of targeted information release for consumers, with a particular focus on challenges to success.
United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills — Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy — a report detailing the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy.

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy. Progress Report. Consumer Empowerment Strategy. United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills, December 2012. http://bit.ly/17MqnL3.

The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.

The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.

Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.

This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.

Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

Brodi, Elisa. “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2012. http://bit.ly/17hssEK.

This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.

The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”

National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.

- This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.

In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

“Policies in Practice: The Download Capability.” Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement, August 2010. http://bit.ly/HhMJyc.

This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”

To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
- Make the download capability a common practice
- Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
- Collaborate on sample data sets
- Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
- Include the download capability in procurement requirements.

The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
- Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
- Patients need and want the information
- The download capability would encourage innovation
- A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
- A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.

Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.

This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.

Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

Thaler, Richard H., and Will Tucker. “Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.” Harvard Business Review January – February 2013. The Big Idea. http://bit.ly/18gimxw.

In this article, Thaler and Tucker make three key observations regarding the challenges related to smart disclosure:
- “We are constantly confronted with information that is highly important but extremely hard to navigate or understand.”
- “Repeated attempts to improve disclosure, including efforts to translate complex contracts into “plain English,” have met with only modest success.”
- “There is a fundamental difficulty of explaining anything complex in simple terms. Most people find it difficult to write instructions explaining how to tie a pair of shoelaces.

DataViva: a Big Data Engine for the Brazilian Economy

Curated on December 4, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Piece by André Victor dos Santos Barrence and Cesar A. Hidalgo: “The current Internet paradigm in which one can search about anything and retrieve information is absolutely empowering. We can browse files, websites and indexes and effortlessly reach good amount of information. Google, for instance, was explicitly built on a library analogy available to everyone. However, it is a world where information that should be easily accessible is still hidden in unfriendly databases, and that the best-case scenario is finding few snippets of information embedded within the paragraphs of a report. But is this the way it should be? Or is this just the world we are presently stuck with?
The last decade has been particularly marked by an increasing hype on big data and analytics, mainly fueled by those who are interested in writing narratives on the topic but not necessarily coding about it, even when data itself is not the problem.
Let’s take the case of governments. Governments have plenty of data and in many cases it is actually public (at least in principle). Governments “know” how many people work in every occupation, in every industry and in every location; they know their salaries, previous employers and education history. From a pure data perspective all that is embedded in tax, social security records or annual registrations. From a more pragmatic perspective, it is still inaccessible and hidden even when it is legally open the public. We live in a world where the data is there, but where the statistics and information are not.
The state government of Minas Gerais in Brazil (3^rd economy the country, territory larger than France and 20 millions inhabitants) made an important step in that direction by releasing DataViva.info, a platform that opens data for exports and occupations for the entire formal sector of the Brazilian economy through more than 700 million interactive visualizations. Instead of poorly designed tables and interfaces, it guides users to answer questions or freely discover locations, industries and occupations in Brazil that are of interest to them. DataViva allows users to explore simple questions such as the evolution of exports in the last decade for each of the 5,567 municipalities in the country, or highly specific queries, for instance, the average salaries paid to computer scientists working in the software development industry in Belo Horizonte, the state capital of Minas.
DataViva’s visualizations are built on the idea that the industrial and economic activity development of locations is highly path dependent. This means that locations are more likely to be successful at developing industries and activities that are related to the ones already existing, since it indicates the existence of labor inputs, and other capabilities, that are specific and that can often be redeployed to a few related industries and activities. Thus, it informs the processes by which opportunities can be explored and prospective pathways for greater prosperity.
The idea that information is key for the functioning of economies is at least as old as Friedrich Hayek’s seminal paper The Use of Knowledge in Society from 1945. According to Hayek, prices help coordinate economic activities by providing information about the wants and needs of goods and services. Yet, the price information can only serve as a signal as long as people know those prices. Maybe the salaries for engineers in the municipality of Betim (Minas Gerais) are excellent and indicate a strong need for them? But who would have known how many engineers are there in Betim and what are their average salaries?
But the remaining question is: why is Minas Gerais making all of this public data easily available? More than resorting to the contemporary argument of open government Minas understands this is extremely valuable information for investors searching for business opportunities, entrepreneurs pursuing new ventures or workers looking for better career prospects. Lastly, the ultimate goal of DataViva is to provide a common ground for open discussions, moving away from the information deprived idea of central planning and into a future where collaborative planning might become the norm. It is a highly creative attempt to renew public governance for the 21^st century.
Despite being a relatively unknown state outside of Brazil, by releasing a platform as DataViva, Minas is providing a strong signal about where in world governments are really pushing forward innovation rather than simply admiring and copying solutions that used to come from trendsetters in the developed world. It seems like real innovation isn’t necessarily taking place in Washington, Paris or London anymore.”

Power to the people: how open data is improving health service delivery

Curated on December 3, 2013July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

The Guardian: “…What’s really interesting is how this data can be utilised by citizens to enable them to make more informed choices and demand improved services in sectors such as health. A growing community of technologists and social activists is emerging across Africa, supported by a burgeoning network of technology innovation hubs. They’re beginning to explore the ways in which data can be utilised to improve health outcomes.
In Northern Uganda, the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army conflict displaced two million people, leaving the social infrastructure in tatters. In 2008, the government launched a Peace, Recovery and Development Plan, but progress has been limited. There are insufficient health centres to serve the population, a severe shortage of staff, drugs and equipment, and corruption is widespread.
Cipesa – an organisation that uses communication technologies to support poverty reduction and development – and Numec, a local media organisation, have launched the iParticipate project. A multimedia platform is being populated with baseline data outlining the current status of the health service across three districts….
In the same region, Wougnet is training women to use information technologies to tackle social challenges. Local officials and community members have formed voluntary social accountability committees and been trained in the use of an online platform to capture and store information relating to poor governance and corruption in the health sector, often via mobile phones.
The platform strengthened campaign efforts which resulted in the construction of a health centre in Aloni Parish. In Amuru district, five health workers were arrested following reports highlighting negligence.
In the village of Bagega in Nigeria, 400 children died and thousands suffered significant health problems as the result of lead poisoning caused by poor mining practices. The government pledged $5.3m (£3.23m) for remediation, but the funds never reached the affected region.
A local organisation, Follow the Money, created an infographic highlighting the government’s commitments and combined this with real life testimonies and photographs showing the actual situation on the ground. Within 48 hours of a targeted Twitter campaign, the president committed to releasing funds to the village and, in February this year, children started receiving long overdue medical attention.
All these initiatives depend on access to critical government data and an active citizens who feel empowered to effect change in their own lives and communities. At present, it’s often hard to access data which is sufficiently granular, particularly at district or local level. For citizens to be engaged with information from government, it also needs to be accessible in ways that are simple to understand and linked to campaigns that impact their daily lives.
Tracking expenditure can also operate across borders. Donors are beginning to open up aid data by publishing to the IATI registry. This transparency by donor governments should improve the effectiveness of aid spending and contribute towards improved health outcomes.
It’s hard to draw general conclusions about how technology can contribute towards improving health outcomes, particularly when context is so critical and the field is so new. Nonetheless, some themes are emerging which can maximise the chances of an intervention’s success.
It can at times be challenging to encourage citizens to report for an array of reasons, including a lack of belief in their ability to effect change, cultural norms, a lack of time and both perceived and real risks. Still, participation seems to increase when citizens receive feedback from reports submitted and when mechanisms are in place that enable citizens to take collective action. On-the-ground testimonies and evidence can also help shift public opinion and amplify critical messages.
Interventions are dramatically strengthened when integrated into wider programmes, implemented by organisations that have established a strong relationship with the communities in which they work. They need to be backed by at least one strong civil society organisation that can follow up on any reports, queries or challenges which may arise. Where possible, engagement from government and local leaders can make a real difference. Identifying champions within government can also significantly improve responsiveness.”

What do you know?

Curated on December 2, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Article in the Financial Times by Eric Openshaw John Hagel: “Talent holds the key to company performance. From business units to Finance to IT, getting the right skills to the right place at the right time is a constant challenge. Now consider that workplace technologies are becoming obsolete faster, and the useful life of many skills is shorter. Workers at all levels need to be able to learn and relearn rapidly to adapt to and anticipate changing demands. Recruitment and retention initiatives can’t address the need, nor can standardised training programs and knowledge management.
New technologies offer an opportunity to rethink both talent development and traditional knowledge management and integrate learning directly into the daily work experience. Virtual platforms enable workers to connect with each other to solve problems across distributed work settings and beyond organisational boundaries.
The preponderance of sensors and advanced analytics today make it more possible than ever to collect and share individual’s real-time performance in a variety of settings. Sensors and the integration of social platforms into work allows for knowledge and experiences to be captured automatically, as they occur, rather than depending on compliance and coerced participation to populate reputation profiles and knowledge management databases. These technologies support rich, context-specific learning and participation driven by momentum as users discover and create value.
Training programs and knowledge management have a place, but they may not deliver the skilled workers needed to the right place and time in a rapidly changing environment. Pre-developed content quickly becomes obsolete or lacks the context to make it relevant to the individual. Perhaps more importantly, classroom training and knowledge databases tend to focus on the commonalities between work, the standard processes and practices, when in fact workers spend most of their days dealing with the exceptions that don’t fit into the standard processes and systems, whether it’s a one-off shipping request or a customer who can’t make your software work with their hardware. Workers typically get better at handling the non-standard aspects of their work through on-the-job experience…

In a recent paper, we detailed nine principles that help to create the type of environment that fosters learning and improvement. The following three principles demonstrate how technology can play an important role in enabling this on-the-job learning and in amplifying the learning, especially across a virtual workforce.

Real-time feedback for individuals and teams. For workers to improve performance and learn what works or doesn’t work, they need to have a context-specific understanding of what is expected and how they are doing relative to others, in the moment rather than three- or six-months down the line.
At virtual call-centre LiveOps, the independent agents see customer and program-specific metrics on an online dashboard. These metrics define the level of performance necessary for agents to remain eligible to take calls for a program and are continuously updated, providing real-time feedback after each call so that agents can see how they are doing relative to their peer group and where they can improve. This level of performance data transparency creates a meritocracy, as agents are compared to their peers and rewarded based on their relative performance.
Smart capture and share. In any work setting, a great deal of information is generated and exchanged in meetings, conversations, instant messages, and email. Easy access to that information helps foster collaboration, solve problems, and improve business processes. At SAP Community Network (SCN), intelligent cataloguing of insights from discussion forums, tagged for searchability, helps make the right information available at the right time to those who need it without requiring the burdensome documentation associated with typical knowledge management. Other users can search for solutions in the context of the original problem posed, as well as through related discussions that may have led to an ultimate solution. Instead of days of internal debate or experimentation, the typical time to receive a response is 17 minutes.
Helping workers make relevant connections. In a typical organisation, physical or virtual, it can be difficult to know who everyone is and what their experience, expertise, and interests are, and the typical knowledge and resource management tools that require individuals to maintain profiles rarely see the level of continuing compliance and participation to make them useful. Instead, workers tend to fall back on relationships. They seek help and learn from those already known to them.
Now, virtual platforms, such as the one used by Odesk, a global online workplace, automatically generate detailed, up-to-date profiles. These profiles include the contractor’s cumulative and historical ratings and hourly wages for each completed project as well as the scores for any tests or certifications. The same type of automatic, action-based reputation profiles can be used internally to facilitate assessing and connecting with the right co-workers for the job at hand…”

The value and challenges of public sector information

Curated on December 1, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

A paper by M. Henninger in Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal: “The aim of this paper is to explore the concept of public sector information (PSI), what it is, its history and evolution, what constitutes its corpus of documents and the issues and challenges it presents to society, its institutions and to those who use and manage it. The paper, by examining the literatures of the law, political science, civil society, economics and information and library science explores the inherent tensions of access to and use of PSI—pragmatism vs. idealism; openness vs. secrecy; commerce vs. altruism; property vs. commons; public good vs. private good. It focusses on open government data (OGD)—a subset of what is popularly referred to as ‘big data’—its background and development since much of the current debate of its use concerns its commercial value for both the private sector and the public sector itself. In particular it looks at the information itself which, driven by technologies of networks, data mining and visualisation gives value in industrial and economic terms, and in its ability to enable new ideas and knowledge.”

Creative Common’s Next Generation Licenses — Version 4.0

Curated on November 28, 2013May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Diane Peters: “We proudly introduce our 4.0 licenses, now available for adoption worldwide. The 4.0 licenses — more than two years in the making — are the most global, legally robust licenses produced by CC to date. We have incorporated dozens of improvements that make sharing and reusing CC-licensed materials easier and more dependable than ever before.
We had ambitious goals in mind when we embarked on the versioning process coming out of the 2011 CC Global Summit in Warsaw. The new licenses achieve all of these goals, and more. The 4.0 licenses are extremely well-suited for use by governments and publishers of public sector information and other data, especially for those in the European Union. This is due to the expansion in license scope, which now covers sui generis database rights that exist there and in a handful of other countries.
Among other exciting new features are improved readability and organization, common-sense attribution, and a new mechanism that allows those who violate the license inadvertently to regain their rights automatically if the violation is corrected in a timely manner.
You can find highlights of the most significant improvements on our website, track the course of the public discussion and evolution of the license drafts on the 4.0 wiki page, and view a recap of the central policy decisions made over the course of the versioning process.
The 4.0 versioning process has been a truly collaborative effort between the brilliant and dedicated network of legal and public licensing experts and the active, vocal open community. The 4.0 licenses, the public license development undertaking, and the Creative Commons organization are stronger because of the steadfast commitment of all participants.
With the 4.0 licenses published, we will be turning our attention to official translations of the legal code in partnership with our affiliate network and larger community. Translations of our new deeds are also underway, with a significant number already completed.”

Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics

Curated on November 28, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stephen Wendel :” A new wave of products is helping people change their behavior and daily routines, whether it’s exercising more (Jawbone Up), taking control of their finances (HelloWallet), or organizing their email (Mailbox). This practical guide shows you how to design these types of products for users seeking to take action and achieve specific goals.
Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes.

Learn the three main strategies to help people change behavior
Identify your target audience and the behaviors they seek to change
Extract user stories and identify obstacles to behavior change
Develop effective interface designs that are enjoyable to use
Measure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve it
Use practical examples from products like Nest, Fitbit, and Opower”

Making Europe's cities smarter

Curated on November 26, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “At a conference today hosted by the European Commission, city leaders, CEOs and civil society leaders discussed the actions outlined in the “Smart Cities Strategic Implementation Plan” and how to put them into practice. The Commission announced that it will launch an ‘Invitation for Smart City and Community Commitments’ in spring 2014 to mobilise work on the action plan’s priorities. The plan is part of Europe’s fifth “Innovation Partnership”.
Commission Vice-President Siim Kallas, in charge of transport, said: “I am very pleased to see transport operators, telecoms companies, vehicle manufacturers, city planners, energy companies and researchers all gathered in one room to discuss the future of our cities. The Smart Cities initiative is a great opportunity to make changes happen for less congestion and better business opportunities in our cities. We need to keep up the momentum and move from plan to action now.”
Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes, responsible for the Digital Agenda, said: “The future of infrastructure and city planning will be based on integrating ICT systems and using big data to make our cities better places to live and work. We need to base those new systems on open standards for hardware, software, data and services which this European Innovation Partnership will develop.”
Günther H. Oettinger, EU Commissioner for energy, said: “The European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities is about making investments in sustainable development in as many cities as possible. Creating equal partnerships between cities and companies based on synergies between ICT, energy and mobility will lead to projects that make a real difference in our everyday lives.”
The Commission intends to make available approximately EUR 200 million for Smart Cities and communities in the 2014-2015 budgets of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, to accelerate progress and enlarge the scale of roll-out of smart cities solutions. There will also be possibilities to access the European Structural and Investment Funds.
For more information: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/”