Nathaniel Mason, Clare Cummings and Julian Doczi for ODI insights: “To solve sustainable development challenges, such as the provision of universal access to basic services, we need new ideas, as well as old ideas applied in new ways and new places. The pace of global innovation, particularly digital innovation, is generating optimism, positioning the world at the start of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.1 Innovation can make basic services cheaper, more accessible, more relevant and more desirable for poor people. However, we also know few innovations lead to sustainable, systemic change. The barriers the this are often political – including problems related to motivation, power and collective action. Yet, just as political factors can prevent innovations from being widely adopted, politically smart approaches can help in navigating and mitigating these challenges. And, because innovations can alter the balance of power in societies and markets, they can both provoke new and challenging politics themselves and also help unlock systemic political change. When and why does politics affect innovation? What does this mean for donors, foundations and impact investors backing innovations for development?…(More)
Wikidata
Wikidata aims to create a multilingual free knowledge base about the world that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. It provides data in all the languages of the Wikimedia projects, and allows for the central access to data in a similar vein as Wikimedia Commons does for multimedia files, it is also used by many other websites. The data on Wikidata is added by a community of volunteers both manually and by using software, much like other Wikimedia projects including Wikipedia.
Wikidata has millions of items, each representing a human, a place, a painting, a concept, etc. Each item has statements (key-value pairs), each statement in turn consisting of a property such as “birth date”, and the appropriate value for the item. Likewise, there can be statements for external IDs, such as a VIAF identifier.
Wikidata is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of chargeWikidata focuses on a basic level of useful information about the world and links to other resources for specialized data on the subject. Sources for data on Wikidata must be:
There are many reasons to add data to Wikidata including:Why add data to Wikidata[edit]
Help more people to see your information[edit]
Data from Wikidata is used by many high traffic websites including Wikipedia which is one of the most used websites in the world receiving over 15 billion page views per month.
Improve open knowledge[edit]
Wikidata hosts data that can be used on Wikimedia projects and beyond. By adding data to Wikidata you can ensure the data on your subject is well covered and up to date in all Wikimedia project languages.
Increase traffic to your website[edit]
Anyone looking at Wikidata or other sites that use Wikidata including Wikipedia can see the reference link for the source of the data.
Make your data more useful for yourself and others[edit]
By adding data to Wikidata it becomes more useful. You can:
- Combine it with other data
- Use Wikidata tools to explore the data
- Visualise your data along with data from other sources…(More)
Participatory Budgeting
Two new books on Participatory Budgeting:
Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Democracy and public governance by Yves Sintomer, Anja Röcke, and Carsten Herzberg: “Can participatory budgeting help make public services really work for the public? Incorporating a range of experiments in ten different countries, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in Europe and the effect it has had on democracy, the modernization of local government, social justice, gender mainstreaming and sustainable development. By focussing on the first decade of European participatory budgeting and analysing the results and the challenges affecting the agenda today it provides a critical appraisal of the participatory model. Detailed comparisons of European cases expose similarities and differences between political cultures and offer a strong empirical basis to discuss the theories of deliberative and participatory democracy and reveal contradictory tendencies between political systems, public administrations and democratic practices. (More)”
Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., and Daniel Boden : “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government. Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)
From waterfall to agile: How a public-sector agency successfully changed its system-development approach to become digital
Martin Lundqvist and PeterBraad Olesen at McKinsey: “Government agencies around the world are under internal and external pressure to become more efficient by incorporating digital technologies and processes into their day-to-day operations. For a lot of public-sector organizations, however, the digital transformation has been bumpy. In many cases, agencies are trying to streamline and automate workflow and processes using antiquated systems-development approaches. Such methods make direct connections between citizens and governments over the Internet more difficult. They also prevent IT organizations from quickly adapting to ever-changing systems requirements or easily combining information from disparate systems. Despite the emergence, over the past decade, of a number of productivity-enhancing technologies, many government institutions continue to cling to old, familiar ways of developing new processes and systems. Nonetheless, a few have been able to change mind-sets internally, shed outdated approaches to improving processes and developing systems, and build new ones. Critically, they have embraced newer techniques, such as agile development, and succeeded in accelerating the digital transformation in core areas of their operations. The Danish Business Authority is one of those organizations.…(More)”
Responsible Data reflection stories
Responsible Data Forum: “Through the various Responsible Data Forum events over the past couple of years, we’ve heard many anecdotes of responsible data challenges faced by people or organizations. These include potentially harmful data management practices, situations where people have experienced gut feelings that there is potential for harm, or workarounds that people have created to avoid those situations.
But we feel that trading in these “war stories” isn’t the most useful way for us to learn from these experiences as acommunity. Instead, we have worked with our communities to build a set of Reflection Stories: a structured, well-researched knowledge base on the unforeseen challenges and (sometimes) negative consequences of usingtechnology and data for social change.
We hope that this can offer opportunities for reflection and learning, as well as helping to develop innovativestrategies for engaging with technology and data in new and responsible ways….
What we learned from the stories
New spaces, new challenges
Moving into new digital spaces is bringing new challenges, and social media is one such space where these challengesare proving very difficult to navigate. This seems to stem from a number of key points:
- organisations with low levels of technical literacy and experience in tech- or data-driven projects, deciding toengage suddenly with a certain tool or technology without realising what this entails. For some, this seems to stemfrom funders being more willing to support ‘innovative’ tech projects.
- organisations wishing to engage more with social media while not being aware of more nuanced understandingsof public/private spaces online, and how different communities engage with social media. (see story #2)
unpredictability and different levels of visibility: due to how privacy settings on Twitter are currently set, visibilityof users can be increased hugely by the actions of others – and once that happens, a user actually has very littleagency to change or reverse that. Sadly, being more visible on, for example, Twitter disproportionately affectswomen and minority groups in a negative way – so while ‘signal boosting’ to raise someone’s profile might be well-meant, the consequences are hard to predict, and almost impossible to reverse manually. (see story #4) - consent: related to the above point, “giving consent” can mean many different things when it comes to digitalspaces, especially if the person in question has little experience or understanding of using the technology inquestion (see stories #4 and #5).
Grey areas of responsible data
In almost all of the cases we looked at, very few decisions were concretely “right” or “wrong”. There are many, manygrey areas here, which need to be addressed on a case by case basis. In some cases, people involved really did thinkthrough their actions, and approached their problems thoughtfully and responsibly – but consequences they had notimagined, happened (see story #8).
Additionally, given the quickly moving nature of the space, challenges can arise that simply would not have beenpossible at the start.
….Despite the very varying settings of the stories collected, the shared mitigation strategies indicate that there areindeed a few key principles that can be kept in mind throughout the development of a new tech- or data-drivenproject.
The most stark of these – and one key aspect that is underlying many of these challenges – is a fundamental lack of technical literacy among advocacy organisations. This affects the way they interact with technical partners, the decisions they make around the project, the level to which they can have meaningful input, and more. Perhaps more crucially, it also affects the ability to know what to ask for help about – ie, to ‘know the unknowns’.
Building an organisation’s technical literacy might not mean being able to answer all technical questions in-house, but rather knowing what to ask and what to expect in an answer, from others. For advocacy organisations who don’t (yet)have this, it becomes all too easy to outsource not just the actual technical work but the contextual decisions too, which should be a collaborative process, benefiting from both sets of expertise.
There seems to be a lot of scope to expand this set of stories both in terms of collecting more from other advocacy organisations, and into other sectors, too. Ultimately, we hope that sharing our collective intelligence around lessonslearned from responsible data challenges faced in projects, will contribute to a greater understanding for all of us….Read all the stories here
UN statistics commission agrees starting point for SDG oversight
Emma Rumney at Public Finance: “The United Nations Statistical Commission agreed on a set of 230 preliminary indicators to measure progress towards the 17 Sustainable Development Goals published last September.
Wu Hongbo, under secretary general of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, of which the UKSC is part, said “completing the indicator framework is not the end of the story – on the contrary, it is the beginning”.
Hongbo said it was necessary to acknowledge that developing a high-quality set of indicators is a technical and necessarily continuous process, “with refinements and improvements” made as “knowledge improves and new data sources become available”.
One challenge will entail the effective disaggregation of data, by income, sex, age, race, ethnicity, migratory status, disability, geographic location and more, to allow coverage of specific sectors of the population.
This will be essential if the SDGs are to be implemented successfully.
Hongbo said this will require “an unprecedented amount of data to be produced and analysed”, posing a significant challenge to national statistics systems in both the developing and developed world.
National and regional authorities will also have to develop their own indicators for regional, national and sub-national monitoring, as the global indicators won’t be able to account for different realities, capacities and levels of development.
The statistical commission will now submit its initial global indicator framework to the UN’s Economic and Social Council and General Assembly for adoption….(More)
See also:
- Metadata for the Proposed Global Indicators (as of 4 March 2016)
- Report of the IAEG-SDGs to the 47th session of the UN Statistical Commission (includes SDGs indicators framework)”
Changing views of how to change the world
World leaders concluded three large agreements last year. Each represents a vision of how to change the world. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda on financing for development agreed to move from “billions to trillions” of cross-border flows to developing countries. The agreement on universal sustainable development goals (SDGs) sets out priorities (albeit a long list) for what needs to change. The Paris Agreement on climate change endorses a shift to low-carbon (and ultimately zero carbon) economic growth trajectories.
There is a common thread to these agreements. They each reflect a new theory of how to change the world that is not made explicit but has evolved as a matter of practice. Understanding this new theory is crucial to successful implementation strategies of the three agreements.
In the past, when governments have wanted to change the world, they negotiated intergovernmentalagreements….
The new theory of how to change the world can be stripped down to three elements.
- Use market forces to drive business towards scalable investments that simultaneously generate sustainable solutions to development challenges;
- Create more data from more sources with more disaggregation, and make these more easily transparent and accessible, to drive towards evidence-based reforms and accountability;
- Encourage innovations (technical, organizational, and business-model) to drive the world away from business-as-usual…(More)”
Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation
Book edited by Dietmar Harhoff and Karim R. Lakhani: “The last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary growth of new models of managing and organizing the innovation process that emphasizes users over producers. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on users, communities, and open innovation approaches to solve important technological and organizational problems. This view of innovation, pioneered by the economist Eric von Hippel, counters the dominant paradigm, which cast the profit-seeking incentives of firms as the main driver of technical change. In a series of influential writings, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Since then, the study of user-driven innovation has continued and expanded, with further empirical exploration of a distributed model of innovation that includes communities and platforms in a variety of contexts and with the development of theory to explain the economic underpinnings of this still emerging paradigm. This volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades.
The contributors—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy. The empirical contexts for their studies range from household goods to financial services. After discussing the fundamentals of user innovation, the contributors cover communities and innovation; legal aspects of user and community innovation; new roles for user innovators; user interactions with firms; and user innovation in practice, describing experiments, toolkits, and crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding…(More)”
Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement
Worldbank/DEET: “With growing demand for transparency, accountability and citizen participation in policy making and service provision, engagement between citizens and government, as well as with donors and the private sector that deliver government services, is increasingly important.1 Within this, the rapid proliferation of digital tools is opening up a new era of Digital Citizen Engagement (DCE). Initiatives such as online participatory budgeting, SMS voting and the use of handheld digital devices for beneficiary feedback are growing in use. Increased use of technology brings both opportunities and challenges to citizen engagement processes, including opportunities for collecting, analyzing and evaluating data about these processes.
This guide offers a means of assessing the extent to which digital tools have contributed to citizen engagement2 and to help understand the impacts—positive or negative, intended or unintended—that the introduction of technology has had on the engagement processes. It addresses specific questions: Does adding digital technology to the citizen engagement process really provide quicker, cheaper, easier ways for citizens to engage with the state or other service providers? Can digital technologies lower interaction costs for governments and deliver improved, more targeted development outcomes? What risks come with this new technology—have certain citizens been excluded (intentionally or unintentionally) from the engagement process? Has the way in which people engage and communicate altered, for better or for worse? Has the technology affected the previously existing groups and institutions that were intermediating engagement processes before the technology was introduced? The guide is designed to help people understand when the use of DCE is appropriate and under what circumstances, how to use it more effectively and what to expect from its use. It introduces the key issues relating to Digital Citizen Engagement and offers advice and guidance on how to evaluate it— including methods, indicators, challenges and course corrections that apply to the digital aspect of citizen engagement….(More)”
How tech is forcing firms to be better global citizens
Catherine Lawson at the BBC: “…technology is forcing companies to up their game and interact with communities more directly and effectively….
Platforms such as Kritical Mass have certainly given a fillip to the idea of crowd-supported philanthropy, attracting individuals and corporate sponsors to its projects, whether that’s saving vultures in Kenya or bringing solar power to rural communities in west Africa.
Sponsors can offer funding, volunteers, expertise or marketing. So rather than imposing corporate ideas of “do-gooding” on communities in a patronising manner, firms can simply respond to demand.
HelpfulPeeps has pushed its volunteering platform into more than 40 countries worldwide, connecting people who want to share their time, knowledge and skills with each other for free.
In the UK, online platform Neighbourly connects community projects and charities with companies and people willing to volunteer their resources. For example, Starbucks has pledged 2,500 days of volunteering and has so far backed 70 community projects….
Judging by the strong public appetite for supporting good causes and campaigning against injustice on sites such as Change.org, Avaaz.org, JustGiving andGoFundMe, his assessment appears to be correct.
And LinkedIn says millions of members have signalled on their profiles that they want to serve on a non-profit board or use their skills to volunteer….
Tech companies in particular are offering expertise and skills to good causes as way of making a tangible difference.
For example, in January, Microsoft announced that through its new organisation,Microsoft Philanthropies, it will donate $1bn-worth (£700m) of cloud computing resources to serve non-profits and university researchers over the next three years…
And data analytics specialist Applied Predictive Technologies (APT) has offered its data-crunching skills to help the Capital Area Food Bank charity distribute food more efficiently to hungry people around the Washington DC area.
APT used data to develop a “hunger heat map” to help CAFB target resources and plan for future demand better.
In another project, APT helped The Cara Program – a Chicago-based charity providing training and job placements to people affected by homelessness or poverty – evaluate what made its students more employable….
And Launch, an open platform jointly founded by Nasa, Nike, the US Agency for International Development, and the US Department of State aims to provide support for start-ups and “inspire innovation”.
In the age of internet transparency, it seems corporates no longer have anywhere to hide – a spot of CSR whitewashing is not going to cut it anymore….(More)”.