Impact of open government: Mapping the research landscape

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Stephen Davenport at OGP Blog: “Government reformers and development practitioners in the open government space are experiencing the heady times associated with a newly-defined agenda. The opportunity for innovation and positive change can at times feel boundless. Yet, working in a nascent field also means a relative lack of “proven” tools and solutions (to such extent as they ever exist in development).

More research on the potential for open government initiatives to improve lives is well underway. However, keeping up with the rapidly evolving landscape of ongoing research, emerging hypotheses, and high-priority knowledge gaps has been a challenge, even as investment in open government activities has accelerated. This becomes increasing important as we gather to talk progress at the OGP Africa Regional Meeting 2016(link is external) and GIFT(link is external) consultations in Cape Town next week (May 4-6) .

Who’s doing what?
To advance the state of play, a new report commissioned by the World Bank, “Open Government Impact and Outcomes: Mapping the Landscape of Ongoing Research”(link is external), categorizes and takes stock of existing research. The report represents the first output of a newly-formed consortium (link is external) that aims to generate practical, evidence-based guidance for open government stakeholders, building on and complementing the work of organizations across the academic-practitioner spectrum.

The mapping exercise led to the creation of an interactive platform (link is external) with detailed information on how to find out more about each of the research projects covered, organized by a new typology for open government interventions. The inventory is limited in scope given practical and other considerations. It includes only projects that are currently underway. It is meant to be a forward-looking overview, rather than a literature review–and are relatively large and international in nature.

Charting a course: How can the World Bank add value?
The scope for increasing the open government knowledge base remains vast. The report suggests that, given its role as a lender, convener, and a policy advisor the World Bank is well positioned to complement and support existing research in a number of ways, such as:

  • Taking a demand-driven approach, focusing on specific areas where it can identify lessons for stakeholders seeking to turn open government enthusiasm into tangible results.
  • Linking researchers with governments and practitioners to study specific areas of interest (in particular, access to information and social accountability interventions).
  • Evaluating the impact of open government reforms against baseline data that may not be public yet, but that are accessible to the World Bank.
  • Contributing to a better understanding of the role and impact of ICTs through work like the recently-published study (link is external)that examines the relationship between digital citizen engagement and government responsiveness.
  • Ensuring that World Bank loans and projects are conceived as opportunities for knowledge generation, while incorporating the most relevant and up-to-date evidence on what works in different contexts.
  • Leveraging its involvement in the Open Government Partnership to help stakeholders make evidence-based reform commitments….(More)

Four Steps to Enhanced Crowdsourcing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Kendra L. Smith and Lindsey Collins at Planetizen: “Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has grown to significance through crowdfunding, crowd collaboration, crowd voting, and crowd labor. The idea behind crowdsourcing is simple: decentralize decision-making by utilizing large groups of people to assist with solving problems, generating ideas, funding, generating data, and making decisions. We have seen crowdsourcing used in both the private and public sectors. In a previous article, “Empowered Design, By ‘the Crowd,'” we discuss the significant role crowdsourcing can play in urban planning through citizen engagement.

Crowdsourcing in the public sector represents a more inclusive form of governance that incorporates a multi-stakeholder approach; it goes beyond regular forms of community engagement and allows citizens to participate in decision-making. When citizens help inform decision-making, new opportunities are created for cities—opportunities that are beginning to unfold for planners. However, despite its obvious utility, planners underutilize crowdsourcing. A key reason for its underuse can be attributed to a lack of credibility and accountability in crowdsourcing endeavors.

Crowdsourcing credibility speaks to the capacity to trust a source and discern whether information is, indeed, true. While it can be difficult to know if any information is definitively true, indicators of fact or truth include where information was collected, how information was collected, and how rigorously it was fact-checking or peer reviewed. However, in the digital universe of today, individuals can make a habit of posting inaccurate, salacious, malicious, and flat-out false information. The realities of contemporary media make it more difficult to trust crowdsourced information for decision-making, especially for the public sector, where the use of inaccurate information can impact the lives of many and the trajectory of a city. As a result, there is a need to establish accountability measures to enhance crowdsourcing in urban planning.

Establishing Accountability Measures

For urban planners considering crowdsourcing, establishing a system of accountability measures might seem like more effort than it is worth. However, that is simply not true. Recent evidence has proven traditional community engagement (e.g., town halls, forums, city council meetings) is lower than ever. Current engagement also tends to focus on problems in the community rather than the development of the community. Crowdsourcing offers new opportunities for ongoing and sustainable engagement with the community. It can be simple as well.

The following four methods can be used separately or together (we hope they are used together) to help establish accountability and credibility in the crowdsourcing process:

  1. Agenda setting
  2. Growing a crowdsourcing community
  3. Facilitators/subject matter experts (SME)
  4. Microtasking

In addition to boosting credibility, building a framework of accountability measures can help planners and crowdsourcing communities clearly define their work, engage the community, sustain community engagement, acquire help with tasks, obtain diverse opinions, and become more inclusive….(More)”

Supply and demand of open data in Mexico: A diagnostic report on the government’s new open data portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Juan Ortiz Freuler: “Following a promising and already well-established trend, in February 2014 the Office of the President of Mexico launched its open data portal (datos.gob.mx). This diagnostic –carried out between July and September of 2015- is designed to brief international donors and stakeholders such as members of the Open Government Partnership Steering Committee, provides the reader with contextual information to understand the state of supply and demand for open data from the portal, and the specific challenges the mexican government is facing in its quest to implement the policy. The insights offered through data processing and interviews with key stakeholders indicate the need to promote: i) A sense of ownership of datos.gob.mx by the user community, but particularly by the officials in charge of implementing the policy within each government unit; ii) The development of tools and mechanisms to increase the quality of the data provided through the portal; and iii) Civic hacking of the portal to promote innovation, and a sense of appropriation that would increase the policy’s long-term resilience to partisan and leadership change….(More)”

See also Underlying data: http://bit.ly/dataMXEng1; Spanish here: http://bit.ly/DataMxCastell; Underlying data:http://bit.ly/dataMX2

A Political Economy Framework for the Urban Data Revolution

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Research Report by Ben Edwards, Solomon Greene and G. Thomas Kingsley: “With cities growing rapidly throughout much of the developing world, the global development community increasingly recognizes the need to build the capacities of local leaders to analyze and apply data to improve urban policymaking and service delivery. Civil society leaders, development advocates, and local governments are calling for an “urban data revolution” to accompany the new UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a revolution that would provide city leaders new tools and resources for data-driven governance. The need for improved data and analytic capacity in rapidly growing cities is clear, as is the exponential increase in the volume and types of data available for policymaking. However, the institutional arrangements that will allow city leaders to use data effectively remain incompletely theorized and poorly articulated.

This paper begins to fill that gap with a political economy framework that introduces three new concepts: permission, incentive, and institutionalization. We argue that without addressing the permission constraints and competing incentives that local government officials face in using data, investments in improved data collection at the local level will fail to achieve smarter urban policies. Granting permission and aligning incentives are also necessary to institutionalize data-driven governance at the local level and create a culture of evidence-based decisionmaking that outlives individual political administrations. Lastly, we suggest how the SDGs could support a truly transformative urban data revolution in which city leaders are empowered and incentivized to use data to drive decisionmaking for sustainable development…(More)”

Crowdsourcing global governance: sustainable development goals, civil society, and the pursuit of democratic legitimacy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Joshua C. Gellers in International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics: “To what extent can crowdsourcing help members of civil society overcome the democratic deficit in global environmental governance? In this paper, I evaluate the utility of crowdsourcing as a tool for participatory agenda-setting in the realm of post-2015 sustainable development policy. In particular, I analyze the descriptive representativeness (e.g., the degree to which participation mirrors the demographic attributes of non-state actors comprising global civil society) of participants in two United Nations orchestrated crowdsourcing processes—the MY World survey and e-discussions regarding environmental sustainability. I find that there exists a perceptible demographic imbalance among contributors to the MY World survey and considerable dissonance between the characteristics of participants in the e-discussions and those whose voices were included in the resulting summary report. The results suggest that although crowdsourcing may present an attractive technological approach to expand participation in global governance, ultimately the representativeness of that participation and the legitimacy of policy outputs depend on the manner in which contributions are solicited and filtered by international institutions….(More)”

UN-Habitat Urban Data Portal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Data Driven Journalism: “UN-Habitat has launched a new web portal featuring a wealth of city data based on its repository of research on urban trends.

Launched during the 25th Governing Council, the Urban Data Portal allows users to explore data from 741 cities in 220 countries, and compare these for 103 indicators such as slum prevalence and city prosperity.

compare.PNG
Image: A comparison of share in national urban population and average annual rate of urban population change for San Salvador, El Salvador, and Asuncion, Paraguay.

The urban indicators data available are analyzed, compiled and published by UN-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory, which supports governments, local authorities and civil society organizations to develop urban indicators, data and statistics.

Leveraging GIS technology, the Observatory collects data by taking aerial photographs, zooming into particular areas, and then sending in survey teams to answer any remaining questions about the area’s urban development.

The Portal also contains data collected by national statistics authorities, via household surveys and censuses, with analysis conducted by leading urbanists in UN-HABITAT’s State of the World’s Cities and the Global Report on Human Settlements report series.

For the first time, these datasets are available for use under an open licence agreement, and can be downloaded in straightforward database formats like CSV and JSON….(More)

The Wisdom of the Many in Global Governance: An Epistemic-Democratic Defence of Diversity and Inclusion

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Stevenson, H. : “Over the past two decades, a growing body of literature has highlighted moral reasons for taking global democracy seriously. This literature justifies democracy on the grounds of its intrinsic value. But democracy also has instrumental value: the rule of the many is epistemically superior to the rule of one or the rule of the few. This paper draws on the tradition of epistemic democracy to develop an instrumentalist justification for democratizing global governance. The tradition of epistemic democracy is enjoying a renaissance within political theory and popular non-fiction, yet its relevance for international relations remains unexplored. I develop an epistemic-democratic framework for evaluating political institutions, which is constituted by three principles. The likelihood of making correct decisions within institutions of global governance will be greater when (1) human development and capacity for participation is maximised; (2) the internal cognitive diversity of global institutions is maximised; and (3) public opportunities for sharing objective and subjective knowledge are maximised. Applying this framework to global governance produces a better understanding of the nature and extent of the ‘democratic deficit’ of global governance, as well as the actions required to address this deficit….(More)”

Mexico City is crowdsourcing its new constitution using Change.org in a democracy experiment

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ana Campoy at Quartz: “Mexico City just launched a massive experiment in digital democracy. It is asking its nearly 9 million residents to help draft a new constitution through social media. The crowdsourcing exercise is unprecedented in Mexico—and pretty much everywhere else.

as locals are known, can petition for issues to be included in the constitution through Change.org (link inSpanish), and make their case in person if they gather more than 10,000 signatures. They can also annotate proposals by the constitution drafters via PubPub, an editing platform (Spanish) similar to GoogleDocs.

The idea, in the words of the mayor, Miguel Angel Mancera, is to“bestow the constitution project (Spanish) with a democratic,progressive, inclusive, civic and plural character.”

There’s a big catch, however. The constitutional assembly—the body that has the final word on the new city’s basic law—is under no obligation to consider any of the citizen input. And then there are the practical difficulties of collecting and summarizing the myriad of views dispersed throughout one of the world’s largest cities.

That makes Mexico City’s public-consultation experiment a big test for the people’s digital power, one being watched around the world.Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.

Fittingly, the idea of crowdsourcing a constitution came about in response to an attempt to limit people power.
For decades, city officials had fought to get out from under the thumb of the federal government, which had the final word on decisions such as who should be the city’s chief of police. This year, finally, they won a legal change that turns the Distrito Federal (federal district), similar to the US’s District of Columbia, into Ciudad de México (Mexico City), a more autonomous entity, more akin to a state. (Confusingly, it’s just part of the larger urban area also colloquially known as Mexico City, which spills into neighboring states.)

However, trying to retain some control, the Mexican congress decided that only 60% of the delegates to the city’s constitutional assembly would be elected by popular vote. The rest will be assigned by the president, congress, and Mancera, the mayor. Mancera is also the only one who can submit a draft constitution to the assembly.

Mancera’s response was to create a committee of some 30 citizens(Spanish), including politicians, human-rights advocates, journalists,and even a Paralympic gold medalist, to write his draft. He also calledfor the development of mechanisms to gather citizens’ “aspirations,values, and longing for freedom and justice” so they can beincorporated into the final document.

 The mechanisms, embedded in an online platform (Spanish) that offersvarious ways to weigh in, were launched at the end of March and willcollect inputs until September 1. The drafting group has until themiddle of that month to file its text with the assembly, which has toapprove the new constitution by the end of January.
 An experiment with few precedents

Mexico City didn’t have a lot of examples to draw on, since not a lot ofplaces have experience with crowdsourcing laws. In the US, a few locallawmakers have used Wiki pages and GitHub to draft bills, says MarilynBautista, a lecturer at Stanford Law School who has researched thepractice. Iceland—with a population some 27 times smaller than MexicoCity’s—famously had its citizens contribute to its constitution withinput from social media. The effort failed after the new constitution gotstuck in parliament.

In Mexico City, where many citizens already feel left out, the first bighurdle is to convince them it’s worth participating….

Then comes the task of making sense of the cacophony that will likelyemerge. Some of the input can be very easily organized—the results ofthe survey, for example, are being graphed in real time. But there could be thousands of documents and comments on the Change.org petitionsand the editing platform.

 Ideas are grouped into 18 topics, such as direct democracy,transparency and economic rights. They are prioritized based on theamount of support they’ve garnered and how relevant they are, saidBernardo Rivera, an adviser for the city. Drafters get a weekly deliveryof summarized citizen petitions….
An essay about human rights on the PubPub platform.(PubPub)

The most elaborate part of the system is PubPub, an open publishing platform similar to Google Docs, which is based on a project originally developed by MIT’s Media Lab. The drafters are supposed to post essays on how to address constitutional issues, and potentially, the constitution draft itself, once there is one. Only they—or whoever they authorize—will be able to reword the original document.

User comments and edits are recorded on a side panel, with links to the portion of text they refer to. Another screen records every change, so everyone can track which suggestions have made it into the text. Members of the public can also vote comments up or down, or post their own essays….(More).

The Open Data Barometer (3rd edition)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Open Data Barometer: “Once the preserve of academics and statisticians, data has become a development cause embraced by everyone from grassroots activists to the UN Secretary-General. There’s now a clear understanding that we need robust data to drive democracy and development — and a lot of it.

Last year, the world agreed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) — seventeen global commitments that set an ambitious agenda to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change by 2030. Recognising that good data is essential to the success of the SDGs, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data and the International Open Data Charter were launched as the SDGs were unveiled. These alliances mean the “data revolution” now has over 100 champions willing to fight for it. Meanwhile, Africa adopted the African Data Consensus — a roadmap to improving data standards and availability in a region that has notoriously struggled to capture even basic information such as birth registration.

But while much has been made of the need for bigger and better data to power the SDGs, this year’s Barometer follows the lead set by the International Open Data Charter by focusing on how much of this data will be openly available to the public.

Open data is essential to building accountable and effective institutions, and to ensuring public access to information — both goals of SDG 16. It is also essential for meaningful monitoring of progress on all 169 SDG targets. Yet the promise and possibilities offered by opening up data to journalists, human rights defenders, parliamentarians, and citizens at large go far beyond even these….

At a glance, here are this year’s key findings on the state of open data around the world:

    • Open data is entering the mainstream.The majority of the countries in the survey (55%) now have an open data initiative in place and a national data catalogue providing access to datasets available for re-use. Moreover, new open data initiatives are getting underway or are promised for the near future in a number of countries, including Ecuador, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Nepal, Thailand, Botswana, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda. Demand is high: civil society and the tech community are using government data in 93% of countries surveyed, even in countries where that data is not yet fully open.
    • Despite this, there’s been little to no progress on the number of truly open datasets around the world.Even with the rapid spread of open government data plans and policies, too much critical data remains locked in government filing cabinets. For example, only two countries publish acceptable detailed open public spending data. Of all 1,380 government datasets surveyed, almost 90% are still closed — roughly the same as in the last edition of the Open Data Barometer (when only 130 out of 1,290 datasets, or 10%, were open). What is more, much of the approximately 10% of data that meets the open definition is of poor quality, making it difficult for potential data users to access, process and work with it effectively.
    • “Open-washing” is jeopardising progress. Many governments have advertised their open data policies as a way to burnish their democratic and transparent credentials. But open data, while extremely important, is just one component of a responsive and accountable government. Open data initiatives cannot be effective if not supported by a culture of openness where citizens are encouraged to ask questions and engage, and supported by a legal framework. Disturbingly, in this edition we saw a backslide on freedom of information, transparency, accountability, and privacy indicators in some countries. Until all these factors are in place, open data cannot be a true SDG accelerator.
    • Implementation and resourcing are the weakest links.Progress on the Barometer’s implementation and impact indicators has stalled or even gone into reverse in some cases. Open data can result in net savings for the public purse, but getting individual ministries to allocate the budget and staff needed to publish their data is often an uphill battle, and investment in building user capacity (both inside and outside of government) is scarce. Open data is not yet entrenched in law or policy, and the legal frameworks supporting most open data initiatives are weak. This is a symptom of the tendency of governments to view open data as a fad or experiment with little to no long-term strategy behind its implementation. This results in haphazard implementation, weak demand and limited impact.
    • The gap between data haves and have-nots needs urgent attention.Twenty-six of the top 30 countries in the ranking are high-income countries. Half of open datasets in our study are found in just the top 10 OECD countries, while almost none are in African countries. As the UN pointed out last year, such gaps could create “a whole new inequality frontier” if allowed to persist. Open data champions in several developing countries have launched fledgling initiatives, but too often those good open data intentions are not adequately resourced, resulting in weak momentum and limited success.
    • Governments at the top of the Barometer are being challenged by a new generation of open data adopters. Traditional open data stalwarts such as the USA and UK have seen their rate of progress on open data slow, signalling that new political will and momentum may be needed as more difficult elements of open data are tackled. Fortunately, a new generation of open data adopters, including France, Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, South Korea and the Philippines, are starting to challenge the ranking leaders and are adopting a leadership attitude in their respective regions. The International Open Data Charter could be an important vehicle to sustain and increase momentum in challenger countries, while also stimulating renewed energy in traditional open data leaders….(More)”

Foreign Policy has lost its creativity. Design thinking is the answer.

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Elizabeth Radziszewski at The Wilson Quaterly: “Although the landscape of threats has changed in recent years, U.S. strategies bear striking resemblance to the ways policymakers dealt with crises in the past. Whether it involves diplomatic overtures, sanctions, bombing campaigns, or the use of special ops and covert operations, the range of responses suffers from innovation deficit. Even the use of drones, while a new tool of warfare, is still part of the limited categories of responses that focus mainly on whether or not to kill, cooperate, or do nothing. To meet the evolving nature of threats posed by nonstate actors such as ISIS, the United States needs a strategy makeover — a creative lift, so to speak.

Sanctions, diplomacy, bombing campaigns, special ops, covert operations — the range of our foreign policy responses suffers from an innovation deficit.

Enter the business world. Today’s top companies face an increasingly competitive marketplace where innovative approaches to product and service development are a necessity. Just as the market has changed for companies since the forces of globalization and the digital economy took over, so has the security landscape evolved for the world’s leading hegemon. Yet the responses of top businesses to these changes stand in stark contrast to the United States’ stagnant approaches to current national security threats. Many of today’s thriving businesses have embraced design thinking (DT), an innovative process that identifies consumer needs through immersive ethnographic experiences that are melded with creative brainstorming and quick prototyping.

What would happen if U.S. policymakers took cues from the business world and applied DT in policy development? Could the United States prevent the threats from metastasizing with more proactive rather than reactive strategies — by discovering, for example, how ideas from biology, engineering, and other fields could help analysts inject fresh perspective into tired solutions? Put simply, if U.S. policymakers want to succeed in managing future threats, then they need to start thinking more like business innovators who integrate human needs with technology and economic feasibility.

In his 1969 book The Sciences of the Artificial, Herbert Simon made the first connection between design and a way of thinking. But it was not until the 1980s and 1990s that Stanford scientists began to see the benefits of design practices used by industrial designers as a method for creative thinking. At the core of DT is the idea that solving a challenge requires a deeper understanding of the problem’s true nature and the processes and people involved. This approach contrasts greatly with more standard innovation styles, where a policy solution is developed and then resources are used to fit the solution to the problem. DT reverses the order.

DT encourages divergent thinking, the process of generating many ideas before converging to select the most feasible ones, including making connections between different-yet-related worlds. Finally, the top ideas are quickly prototyped and tested so that early solutions can be modified without investing many resources and risking the biggest obstacle to real innovation: the impulse to try fitting an idea, product, policy to the people, rather of the other way around…

If DT has reenergized the innovative process in the business and nonprofit sector, a systematic application of its methodology could just as well revitalize U.S. national security policies. Innovation in security and foreign policy is often framed around the idea of technological breakthroughs. Thanks toDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Department of Defense has been credited with such groundbreaking inventions as GPS, the Internet, and stealth fighters — all of which have created rich opportunities to explore new military strategies. Reflecting this infatuation with technology, but with a new edge, is Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s unveiling of the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, an initiative to scout for new technologies, improve outreach to startups, and form deeper relationships between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley. The new DIUE effort signals what businesses have already noticed: the need to be more flexible in establishing linkages with people outside of the government in search for new ideas.

Yet because the primary objective of DIUE remains technological prowess, the effort alone is unlikely to drastically improve the management of national security. Technology is not a substitute for an innovative process. When new invention is prized as the sole focus of innovation, it can, paradoxically, paralyze innovation. Once an invention is adopted, it is all too tempting to mold subsequent policy development around emergent technology, even if other solutions could be more appropriate….(More)”