international development

Tech is moving beyond cities to focus on civic engagement in every U.S. county

Curated on December 14, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at TechCrunch: “While gridlock has taken hold in a paralyzed Washington, D.C. mayors across the country are taking a pragmatic approach to solving local problems and its time for tech to reach out to them….

The United States has 3,0007 counties. And all of them have an appetite to shift the momentum from the federal government to the communities where people live and work. This can’t just involve coastal cities or urban areas within states. Rather, after Trump’s election, now is the moment to redouble policy efforts in communities across the country from states to rural counties.

Cities from Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, to New York have been leading the way to think about how to provide better services and engagement opportunities. They’ve been exciting places where rich networks of talent from academia to philanthropy have been helping foster ecosystems to catalyze new policy solutions….

There are a host of illustrative experiments occurring across communities that are leveraging policy innovation, data, and technology for more responsive and inclusive governance. The engagements that work focus on process to ensure that diverse stakeholders are a part of decision making….

Wisconsin:

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin a local organization called Clear Vision is teaming up with stakeholders on a poverty summit to reduce the number of people living poverty in income insecurity and build more resilient and inclusive communities. Citizen action groups will work on key issues they identify as part of the engagement process.

A key component of this poverty summit is to bring in traditionally marginalized communities into the process including low-income households, rural poor, youth and black and Hispanic communities. There is even a community-supported, nonprofit journalism site to support the local work in Eau Claire, Chippewa, and Dunn counties….

Oregon:

In Oregon, a “Kitchen Table” is enabling residents from across the state to contribute ideas, resources, and feedback to inform public policy. The Kitchen Table enables public officials to consult with representatives about key policy areas, crowdfund, and micro-lend for local startups and community businesses….

Another practice in Oregon is the Citizens Initiative Review, where a representative sampling of citizens convenes for deliberations over several days to discuss state ballot measures. After being established by the state’s bipartisan legislature in 2009, there have been six random representative samples of citizens for multi-day deliberations to draft voting guides written for the people, by their neighbors….

This requires tapping into existing networks and civic organizations, leveraging data, technology and policy innovations, and re-shifting our focus from federal policy towards building an infrastructure of governance that is durable through collective development and buy-in from people…(More)”

Introducing the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA Version

Curated on December 14, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

PressRelease: “GODAN, Open Data for Development (OD4D) Network, Open Data Charter, and the Open Data Institute are pleased to announce the release of the Agricultural Open Data Package: BETA version. …The Agriculture Open Data Package (http://AgPack.info) has been designed to help governments get to impact with open data in the agriculture sector. This practical resource provides key policy areas, key data categories, examples datasets, relevant interoperability initiatives, and use cases that policymakers and other stakeholders in the agriculture sector or open data should focus on, in order to address food security challenges.

The Package is meant as a source of inspiration and an invitation to start a national open data for agriculture initiative.

In the Package we identify fourteen key categories of data and discuss the effort it will take for a government to make this data available in a meaningful way. …

The Package also highlights more than ten use cases (the number is growing) demonstrating how open data is being harnessed to address sustainable agriculture and food security around the world. Examples include:

mapping water points to optimise scarce resource allocation in Burkina Faso
surfacing daily price information on multiple food commodities across India
benchmarking agricultural productivity in the Netherlands

Where relevant we also highlight applicable interoperability initiatives, such as open contracting, international aid transparency initiative (IATI), and global product classification (GPC) standards.

We recognise that the agriculture sector is diverse, with many contextual differences affecting scope of activities, priorities and capacities. In the full version of the Agricultural Open Data Package we discuss important implementation considerations such as inter-agency coordination and resourcing to develop an appropriate data infrastructure and a healthy data ‘ecosystem’ for agriculture….(More)”

21st Century Enlightenment Revisited

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Taylor at the RSA: “The French historian Tzvetan Todorov describes the three essential ideas of the Enlightenment as ‘autonomy’, ‘universalism’ and ‘humanism’. The ideal of autonomy speaks to every individual’s right to self-determination. Universalism asserts that all human beings equally deserve basic rights and dignity (although, of course, in the 18^th and 19^th century most thinkers restricted this ambition to educated white men). The idea of humanism is that it is up to the people – not Gods or monarchs – through the use of rational inquiry to determine the path to greater human fulfilment….

21^st Century Enlightenment

Take autonomy; too often today we think of freedom either as a shrill demand to be able to turn our backs on wider society or in the narrow possessive terms of consumerism. Yet, brain and behavioural science have confirmed the intuition of philosophers through the ages genuine autonomy is something we only attain when we become aware of our human frailties and understand our truly social nature. Of course, freedom from oppression is the base line, but true autonomy is not a right to be granted but a goal to be pursued through self-awareness and engagement in society.

What of universalism, or social justice as we now tend to think of it? In most parts of the world and certainly in the West there have been incredible advances in equal rights. Discrimination and injustice still exist, but through struggle and reform huge strides have been made in widening the Enlightenment brotherhood of rich white men to women, people of different ethnicity, homosexuals and people with disabilities. Indeed the progress in legal equality over recent decades stands in contrast to the stubborn persistence, and even worsening, of social inequality, particularly based on class.

But the rationalist universalism of human rights needs an emotional corollary. People may be careful not to use the wrong words, but they still harbour resentment and suspicion towards other groups. …

Finally, humanism or the call of progress. The utilitarian philosophy that arose from the Enlightenment spoke to the idea that, free from the religious or autocratic dogma, the best routes to human fulfilment could be identified and should be pursued. The great motors of human progress – markets, science and technology, the modern state – shifted into gear and started to accelerate. Aspects of all these phenomena, indeed of Enlightenment ideas themselves, could be found at earlier stages of human history – what was different was the way they fed off each other and became dominant. Yet, in the process, the idea that these forces could deliver progress often became elided with the assumption that their development was the same as human progress.

Today this danger of letting the engines of progress determine the direction of the human journey feels particularly acute in relation to markets and technology. There is, for example, more discussion of how humans should best adapt to AI and robots than about how technological inquiry might be aligned with human fulfilment. The hollowing out of democratic institutions has diminished the space for public debate about what progress should comprise at just the time when the pace and scale of change makes those debates particularly vital.

A twenty first century enlightenment reinstates true autonomy over narrow ideas of freedom, it asserts a universalism based not just on legal status but on empathy and social connection and reminds us that humanism should lie at the heart of progress.

Think like a system act like an entrepreneur

There is one new strand I want to add to the 2010 account. In the face of many defeats, we must care as much about how we achieve change as about the goals we pursue. At the RSA we talk about ‘thinking like a system and acting like an entrepreneur’, a method which seeks to avoid the narrowness and path dependency of so many unsuccessful models of change. To alter the course our society is now on we need more fully to understand the high barriers to change but then to act more creatively and adaptively when we spot opportunities to take a different path….(More)”

Solving some of the world’s toughest problems with the Global Open Policy Report

Curated on December 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kelsey Wiens at Creative Commons: “Open Policy is when governments, institutions, and non-profits enact policies and legislation that makes content, knowledge, or data they produce or fund available under a permissive license to allow reuse, revision, remix, retention, and redistribution. This promotes innovation, access, and equity in areas of education, data, software, heritage, cultural content, science, and academia.

For several years, Creative Commons has been tracking the spread of open policies around the world. And now, with the new Global Open Policy Report (PDF) by the Open Policy Network, we’re able to provide a systematic overview of open policy development.

The first-of-its-kind report gives an overview of open policies in 38 countries, across four sectors: education, science, data and heritage. The report includes an Open Policy Index and regional impact and local case studies from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, Latin America, Europe, and North America. The index measures open policy strength on two scales: policy strength and scope, and level of policy implementation. The index was developed by researchers from CommonSphere, a partner organization of CC Japan.

The Open Policy Index scores were used to classify countries as either Leading, Mid-Way, or Delayed in open policy development. The ten countries with the highest scores are Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, France, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Poland, South Korea, Tanzania, and Uruguay…(More)

Towards a transparency ontology in the context of open government

Curated on December 12, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Rui Pedro Lourenço, Susana Jorge and Helena Rolas at Electronic Government: “Several open government initiatives have been launched to make available online data enhancing accountability of public officials towards ordinary citizens. However, these initiatives raise several questions, namely: Which data should be disclosed? How to bring together dispersed (fragmented) data? How to improve its understandability by ordinary citizens? Literature shows that, in general, the data selection process does not take into account ordinary citizens’ expectations and information needs. This paper presents the development process of a transparency ontology, which aims to provide an answer to the above questions, in what concerns public sector entities’ use of resources. The process started by creating a list of relevant expressions/terms discussed in national and local newspapers, considering the role of journalists as ‘information brokers’ acting on behalf of ordinary citizens. This list was externally validated for relevance, comprehensiveness and improvements by interviewing journalists, and the resulting transparency ontology was formalised using OWL and Protégé….(More)”.

Saving Science

Curated on December 10, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Sarewitz at the New Atlantis: “Science, pride of modernity, our one source of objective knowledge, is in deep trouble. Stoked by fifty years of growing public investments, scientists are more productive than ever, pouring out millions of articles in thousands of journals covering an ever-expanding array of fields and phenomena. But much of this supposed knowledge is turning out to be contestable, unreliable, unusable, or flat-out wrong. From metastatic cancer to climate change to growth economics to dietary standards, science that is supposed to yield clarity and solutions is in many instances leading instead to contradiction, controversy, and confusion. Along the way it is also undermining the four-hundred-year-old idea that wise human action can be built on a foundation of independently verifiable truths. Science is trapped in a self-destructive vortex; to escape, it will have to abdicate its protected political status and embrace both its limits and its accountability to the rest of society.

The story of how things got to this state is difficult to unravel, in no small part because the scientific enterprise is so well-defended by walls of hype, myth, and denial. But much of the problem can be traced back to a bald-faced but beautiful lie upon which rests the political and cultural power of science. This lie received its most compelling articulation just as America was about to embark on an extended period of extraordinary scientific, technological, and economic growth. It goes like this:

Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.

….The fruits of curiosity-driven scientific exploration into the unknown have often been magnificent. The recent discovery of gravitational waves — an experimental confirmation of Einstein’s theoretical work from a century earlier — provided a high-publicity culmination of billions of dollars of public spending and decades of research by large teams of scientists. Multi-billion dollar investments in space exploration have yielded similarly startling knowledge about our solar system, such as the recent evidence of flowing water on Mars. And, speaking of startling, anthropologists and geneticists have used genome-sequencing technologies to offer evidence that early humans interbred with two other hominin species, Neanderthals and Denisovans. Such discoveries heighten our sense of wonder about the universe and about ourselves.

And somehow, it would seem, even as scientific curiosity stokes ever-deepening insight about the fundamental workings of our world, science managed simultaneously to deliver a cornucopia of miracles on the practical side of the equation, just as Bush predicted: digital computers, jet aircraft, cell phones, the Internet, lasers, satellites, GPS, digital imagery, nuclear and solar power. When Bush wrote his report, nothing made by humans was orbiting the earth; software didn’t exist; smallpox still did.

So one might be forgiven for believing that this amazing effusion of technological change truly was the product of “the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown.” But one would be mostly wrong.

Science has been important for technological development, of course. Scientists have discovered and probed phenomena that turned out to have enormously broad technological applications. But the miracles of modernity in the above list came not from “the free play of free intellects,” but from the leashing of scientific creativity to the technological needs of the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).

The story of how DOD mobilized science to help create our world exposes the lie for what it is and provides three difficult lessons that have to be learned if science is to evade the calamity it now faces.

First, scientific knowledge advances most rapidly, and is of most value to society, not when its course is determined by the “free play of free intellects” but when it is steered to solve problems — especially those related to technological innovation.

Second, when science is not steered to solve such problems, it tends to go off half-cocked in ways that can be highly detrimental to science itself.

Third — and this is the hardest and scariest lesson — science will be made more reliable and more valuable for society today not by being protected from societal influences but instead by being brought, carefully and appropriately, into a direct, open, and intimate relationship with those influences….(More)”

Future of e-government: learning from the past

Curated on December 9, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Special issue of SOCRATES edited by Manoj Dixit: “We are living in an era of digitization thus moving towards a digital government. The use of ICT in public-administration is beneficial and it is not mere a coincidence that the top 10 countries in e-government implementation (according to UN E-Government Survey 2016) are flourishing democracies. There has been a sharp rise in the number of countries using e-government to provide public services online through one stop-platform. According to the 2016 survey, 90 countries now offer one or more single entry portal on public information or online services, or both and 148 countries provide at-least one form of online transaction services. More and more countries are making efforts through e-government to ensure and increase inclusiveness, effectiveness, accountability and transparency in their public institutions. Across the globe, data for public information and security is being opened up. The 2016 survey shows that 128 countries now provide data-sets on government spending in machine readable formats. E-government and innovation seems to have provided significant opportunities to transform public administration into an instrument of sustainable development. The governments around the globe are rapidly transforming. The use of information and communication technology in public administration – combined with organizational change and new skills- seems to be improving public services and democratic processes and strengthening support to public policies. There has been an increased effort to utilize advanced electronic and mobile services that benefits all. Fixed and wireless broadband subscriptions have increased unevenly across regions, with Europe leading, but Africa still lagging behind. We have to focus on these substantial region disparities and growing divide. All countries agreed, in SDG 9, that a major effort is required to ensure universal access to internet in the least developed countries. The rise of Social media and its easy access seems to have enabled an increasing number of countries moving towards participatory decision making, in which developed European countries are among the top 50 performers. But, the issues of diminishing collective thinking and rising Individual thinking are some rising issues that we will have to deal with in the future. There are more sensitive issues like the new classification of citizens into literate-illiterate, e-literate and e-illiterate, that the governments need to look upon. It is a good sign that many developing countries are making good progress. Enhanced e-participation can support the realization of the SDGs by enabling more participatory decision making, but the success of e-government will ultimately depend upon our ability and capability to solve the contrasting issues raised due to this transition with sensitivity.

In this issue of SOCRATES we have discussed, this new era of Digital Government. We have focused on what we have learned from the past and the future we want. From discussions on the role of e-governance within the local government settings in a modern democratic state to the experience of an academia with online examination, we have tried to include every possible aspect of e-government….(More)”

Open Government: The Global Context and the Way Forward

Curated on December 8, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the OECD: “…provides an in-depth, evidence-based analysis of open government initiatives and the challenges countries face in implementing and co-ordinating them. It also explores new trends in OECD member countries as well as a selection of countries from Latin America, MENA and South East Asia regions. Based on the 2015 Survey on Open Government and Citizen Participation in the Policy Cycle, the report identifies future areas of work, including the effort to mobilise and engage all branches and all levels of government in order to move from open governments to open states; how open government principles and practices can help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals; the role of the Media to create an enabling environment for open government initiatives to thrive; and the growing importance of subnational institutions to implement successful open government reforms….(More)”

A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept

Curated on December 7, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “UNDP and UN Global Pulse today released a comprehensive guide on how to integrate new sources of data into development and humanitarian work.

New and emerging data sources such as mobile phone data, social media, remote sensors and satellites have the potential to improve the work of governments and development organizations across the globe.

Entitled ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept,’ this publication was developed by practitioners for practitioners. It provides step-by-step guidance for working with new sources of data to staff of UN agencies and international Non-Governmental Organizations.

The guide is a result of a collaboration of UNDP and UN Global Pulse with support from UN Volunteers. Led by UNDP innovation teams in Europe and Central Asia and Arab States, six UNDP offices in Armenia, Egypt, Kosovo[1], fYR Macedonia, Sudan and Tunisia each completed data innovation projects applicable to development challenges on the ground.

The publication builds on these successful case trials and on the expertise of data innovators from UNDP and UN Global Pulse who managed the design and development of those projects.

It provides practical guidance for jump-starting a data innovation project, from the design phase through the creation of a proof-of-concept.

The guide is structured into three sections – (I) Explore the Problem & System, (II) Assemble the Team and (III) Create the Workplan. Each of the sections comprises of a series of tools for completing the steps needed to initiate and design a data innovation project, to engage the right partners and to make sure that adequate privacy and protection mechanisms are applied.

…Download ‘A Guide to Data Innovation for Development – From idea to proof-of-concept’ here.”