Book by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute: “…outlines opportunities and challenges for the strategic use of data to reduce poverty, improve health, expand access to quality education, and build stronger communities. It is a response to both the explosive interest in using data to guide community initiatives, investment strategies, and policy choices, and the vexing questions that accompany data-driven approaches. The volume brings together authors from community development, public health, education, finance, and law to offer ideas for using data more meaningfully and effectively across sectors and institutions. What Counts is not focused on finding one right answer; rather, it is meant to serve as the basis for smarter conversations about data going forward.
What Counts builds on key themes of a 2012 book—Investing in What Works for America’s Communities—that was published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Low Income Investment Fund. What Works calls on leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors to recognize that they can achieve more by working together and by using data to gauge the context and reach of their efforts. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the Urban Institute partnered to publish What Counts to address questions raised by What Works readers about how to best gather, analyze, and use data to understand what actually works for communities. Funding for What Counts was provided to the Urban Institute by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation…(More).”
Read all of the articles from the book in the The Book section.
Can Business And Tech Transform The Way Our Government Works By 2020?
Ben Schiller at Co.Exist: “The rise of open data, crowd-sourcing, predictive analytics, and other big tech trends, aren’t just for companies to contend with. They’re also a challenge for government. New technology gives public agencies the opportunity to develop and deliver services in new ways, track results more accurately, and open up decision-making.
Deloitte’s big new Government 2020 report looks at the trends impacting government and lays out a bunch of ideas for how they can innovate. We picked out a few below. There are more infographics in the slide show.
Consumerization of public services
Deloitte expects entrepreneurs to “develop innovative and radically user-friendly approaches to satisfy unmet consumer demand for better public services.” Startups like Uber or Lyft “reinvigorated transportation.” Now it expects a similar “focus on seamless customer experiences” in education and health care.
Open workforce
Deloitte expects governments to become looser: collections of people doing a job, rather than large hierarchical structures. “Governments [will] expand their talent networks to include ‘partnership talent’ (employees who are parts of joint ventures), ‘borrowed talent’ (employees of contractors), ‘freelance talent’ (independent, individual contractors) and ‘open-source talent,'” the report says.
Outcome based legislation
Just as big data analytics allows companies to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, so it allows governments to measure how well legislation and regulation is working. They can “shift from a concentration on processes to the achievement of specific targets.” And, if the law isn’t working, someone has the data to throw it out….”
Data is Law
Mark Headd at Civic Innovations: The Future is Open: “In his famous essay on the importance of the technological underpinnings of the Internet, Lawrence Lessig described the potential threat if the architecture of cyberspace was built on values that diverged from those we believe are important to the proper functioning of our democracy. The central point of this seminal work seems to grow in importance each day as technology and the Internet become more deeply embedded into our daily lives.
But increasingly, another kind of architecture is becoming central to the way we live and interact with each other – and to the way in which we are governed and how we interact with those that govern us. This architecture is used by governments at the federal, state and local level to share data with the public.
This data – everything from weather data, economic data, education data, crime data, environmental data – is becoming increasingly important for how we view the world around us and our perception of how we are governed. It is quite easy for us to catalog the wide range of personal decisions – some rote, everyday decisions like what to wear based on the weather forecast, and some much more substantial like where to live or where to send our children to school – that are influenced by data collected, maintained or curated by government.
It seems to me that Lessig’s observations from a decade and a half ago about the way in which the underlying architecture of the Internet may affect our democracy can now be applied to data. Ours is the age of data – it pervades every aspect of our lives and influences how we raise our children, how we spend our time and money and who we elect to public office.
But even more fundamental to our democracy, how well our government leaders are performing the job we empower them to do depends on data. How effective is policing in reducing the number of violent crimes? How effective are environmental regulations in reducing dangerous emissions? How well are programs performing to lift people out of poverty and place them in gainful employment? How well are schools educating our children?
These are all questions that we answer – in whole or in part – by looking at data. Data that governments themselves are largely responsible for compiling and publishing….
Having access to open data is no longer an option for participating effectively in our modern democracy, it’s a requirement. Data – to borrow Lessig’s argument – has become law.”
Mastering ’Metrics: The Path from Cause to Effect
Book by Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke : “Applied econometrics, known to aficionados as ‘metrics, is the original data science. ‘Metrics encompasses the statistical methods economists use to untangle cause and effect in human affairs. Through accessible discussion and with a dose of kung fu–themed humor, Mastering ‘Metrics presents the essential tools of econometric research and demonstrates why econometrics is exciting and useful.
The five most valuable econometric methods, or what the authors call the Furious Five–random assignment, regression, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity designs, and differences in differences–are illustrated through well-crafted real-world examples (vetted for awesomeness by Kung Fu Panda’s Jade Palace). Does health insurance make you healthier? Randomized experiments provide answers. Are expensive private colleges and selective public high schools better than more pedestrian institutions? Regression analysis and a regression discontinuity design reveal the surprising truth. When private banks teeter, and depositors take their money and run, should central banks step in to save them? Differences-in-differences analysis of a Depression-era banking crisis offers a response. Could arresting O. J. Simpson have saved his ex-wife’s life? Instrumental variables methods instruct law enforcement authorities in how best to respond to domestic abuse….(More).”
Senate moves to open-data format
Adam Mazmanian in FCW: “The U.S. Senate will begin making bills and other legislative information available for bulk XML download, following on efforts made by the House of Representatives in 2013. The Senate will include all summary and bill information from the 113th Congress, which just gaveled out, and legislation from the upcoming 114th
This is a very big deal for watchdog groups and private firms that use legislative data to make products for tracking Congress. Before the Senate decision was announced Dec. 18 at a meeting of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force, users of Senate data had to scrape information from multiple sources. That can be expensive and yield inaccurate data, said Hudson Hollister, executive director of the Data Transparency Coalition and a former Capitol Hill staffer.
“This change by the Senate means a crucial link in the chain will become more reliable. It’s great news for the ecosystem that wants to use government information to deliver transparency and deliver efficiency,” Hollister told FCW.
Having the House and Senate legislation available for bulk download means it’s possible to build services that track legislative language by keyword or topic as bills move through Congress, and follow the process as bills get marked up in committee, combined with other bills, or amended on the floor. Already a few firms are building services along these lines, such as (Leg)Cyte and Fiscal Note.
Despite the recent move by the Senate, all of Congress isn’t exactly speaking with one voice regarding data standards. In the summer of 2013, the Office of Law Revision Council, which maintains the U.S. Code as new legislation is signed into law, developed an XML information model called U.S. Legislative Markup (USLM) as a way of publishing laws and associated metadata in XML. This model could potentially be adapted for use across Congress for bills, summaries, reports and other information….(More)”
4 Tech Trends Changing How Cities Operate
at Governing: “Louis Brandeis famously characterized states as laboratories for democracy, but cities could be called labs for innovation or new practices….When Government Technology magazine (produced by Governing’s parent company, e.Republic, Inc.) published its annual Digital Cities Survey, the results provided an interesting look at how local governments are using technology to improve how they deliver services, increase production and streamline operations…the survey also showed four technology trends changing how local government operates and serves its citizens:
1. Open Data
…Big cities were the first to open up their data and gained national attention for their transparency. New York City, which passed an open data law in 2012, leads all cities with more than 1,300 data sets open to the public; Chicago started opening up data to the public in 2010 following an executive order and is second among cities with more than 600; and San Francisco, which was the first major city to open the doors to transparency in 2009, had the highest score from the U.S. Open Data Census for the quality of its open data.
But the survey shows that a growing number of mid-sized jurisdictions are now getting involved, too. Tacoma, Wash., has a portal with 40 data sets that show how the city is spending tax dollars on public works, economic development, transportation and public safety. Ann Arbor, Mich., has a financial transparency tool that reveals what the city is spending on a daily basis, in some cases….
2. ‘Stat’ Programs and Data Analytics
…First, the so-called “stat” programs are proliferating. Started by the New York Police Department in the 1980s, CompStat was a management technique that merged data with staff feedback to drive better performance by police officers and precinct captains. Its success led to many imitations over the years and, as the digital survey shows, stat programs continue to grow in importance. For example, Louisville has used its “LouieStat” program to cut the city’s bill for unscheduled employee overtime by $23 million as well as to spot weaknesses in performance.
Second, cities are increasing their use of data analytics to measure and improve performance. Denver, Jacksonville, Fla., and Phoenix have launched programs that sift through data sets to find patterns that can lead to better governance decisions. Los Angeles has combined transparency with analytics to create an online system that tracks performance for the city’s economy, service delivery, public safety and government operations that the public can view. Robert J. O’Neill Jr., executive director of the International City/County Management Association, said that both of these tech-driven performance trends “enable real-time decision-making.” He argued that public leaders who grasp the significance of these new tools can deliver government services that today’s constituents expect.
3. Online Citizen Engagement
…Avondale, Ariz., population 78,822, is engaging citizens with a mobile app and an online forum that solicits ideas that other residents can vote up or down.
In Westminster, Colo., population 110,945, a similar forum allows citizens to vote online about community ideas and gives rewards to users who engage with the online forum on a regular basis (free passes to a local driving range or fitness program). Cities are promoting more engagement activities to combat a decline in public trust in government. The days when a public meeting could provide citizen engagement aren’t enough in today’s technology-dominated world. That’s why social media tools, online surveys and even e-commerce rewards programs are popping up in cities around the country to create high-value interaction with its citizens.
4. Geographic Information Systems
… Cities now use them to analyze financial decisions to increase performance, support public safety, improve public transit, run social service activities and, increasingly, engage citizens about their city’s governance.
Augusta, Ga., won an award for its well-designed and easy-to-use transit maps. Sugar Land, Texas, uses GIS to support economic development and, as part of its citizen engagement efforts, to highlight its capital improvement projects. GIS is now used citywide by 92 percent of the survey respondents. That’s significant because GIS has long been considered a specialized (and expensive) technology primarily for city planning and environmental projects….”
How do we improve open data for police accountability?
Emily Shaw at the SunLight Foundation: “This is a challenging time for people who worry about the fairness of American governmental institutions. In quick succession, grand juries declined to indict two police officers accused of killing black men. In the case of Ferguson, Mo. officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury’s decision appeared to center on uncertainty about whether Wilson’s action was legal and whether he killed under threat. In the case of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner, however, a bystander recorded and made public a video of the police officer causing Garner’s death through an illegal chokehold. In Pantaleo’s case, the availability of video data has made the question about institutional fairness even more urgent, as people can see for themselves the context in which the officer exercised power. The data has given us a common set of facts to use in judging police behavior.
We grant law enforcement and corrections departments the right to exercise more physical power over the public than we do to any other part of our government. But do we generally have the data we need to evaluate how they’re using it?….
The time to find good solutions to these problems is now. Responding to widespread frustration, President Obama has just announced a three-part initiative to “strengthen community policing”: an increased focus on transparency and oversight for federal-to-local transfers of military equipment, a proposal to provide matching funding to local police departments to buy body cameras, and a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” that will make recommendations for how to implement community-oriented policing practices.
While each element of Obama’s initiative corresponds to a distinct set of concerns about policing, one element they share in common is the need to increase access to information about police work. Each of the three approaches will rely on mechanisms to increase the flow of public information about what police officers are doing in their official roles and how they are doing it. How are police officers going about fulfilling their responsibility to ensure public safety? Are they working in ways that appropriately respect individual rights? Are they responsive to public concerns, when concerns are raised?
By encouraging the collection and publication of more data about how government is working, Obama’s initiative has the potential to support precisely the kind of increase in data availability that can transform public outcomes. When applied with the intent to improve transparency and accountability and to increase public engagement, open data — and the civic tech that uses this data — can bridge the often too-large gap between the public and government.
However, because Obama’s initiatives depend on the effective collection, publication, and communication of information, open data advocates have a particular contribution to make. It’s important to think about what lessons we can apply from our experiences with open data — and with data collected and used for police accountability — in order to ensure that this initiative has the greatest possible impact. As an open data and open government community, can we make recommendations that can help improve the data we’re collecting for police transparency and accountability?
I’m going to begin a list, but it’s just a beginning – I am certain that you have many more recommendations to make. I’ll categorize them first by Obama’s “Strengthening Community Policing” initiatives and then keep thinking about what additional data is needed. Please think along with me about what kind of datasets we will need, what potential issues with data availability and quality we’re likely to see, what kind of laws may need to be changed to improve access to the data necessary for police accountability, then make your recommendations in the Google Doc embedded at the end of this post. If you’ve seen any great projects you’ve seen which improve police transparency and accountability, be sure to share those as well….”
The case against human rights
Eric Posner in the Guardian: “We live in an age in which most of the major human rights treaties – there are nine “core” treaties – have been ratified by the vast majority of countries. Yet it seems that the human rights agenda has fallen on hard times. In much of the Islamic world, women lack equality, religious dissenters are persecuted and political freedoms are curtailed. The Chinese model of development, which combines political repression and economic liberalism, has attracted numerous admirers in the developing world. Political authoritarianism has gained ground in Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Venezuela. Backlashes against LGBT rights have taken place in countries as diverse as Russia and Nigeria. The traditional champions of human rights – Europe and the United States – have floundered. Europe has turned inward as it has struggled with a sovereign debt crisis, xenophobia towards its Muslim communities and disillusionment with Brussels. The United States, which used torture in the years after 9/11 and continues to kill civilians with drone strikes, has lost much of its moral authority. Even age-old scourges such as slavery continue to exist. A recent report estimates that nearly 30 million people are forced against their will to work. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
At a time when human rights violations remain widespread, the discourse of human rights continues to flourish…
And yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that governments continue to violate human rights with impunity. Why, for example, do more than 150 countries (out of 193 countries that belong to the UN) engage in torture? Why has the number of authoritarian countries increased in the last several years? Why do women remain a subordinate class in nearly all countries of the world? Why do children continue to work in mines and factories in so many countries?
The truth is that human rights law has failed to accomplish its objectives. There is little evidence that human rights treaties, on the whole, have improved the wellbeing of people. The reason is that human rights were never as universal as people hoped, and the belief that they could be forced upon countries as a matter of international law was shot through with misguided assumptions from the very beginning. The human rights movement shares something in common with the hubris of development economics, which in previous decades tried (and failed) to alleviate poverty by imposing top-down solutions on developing countries. But where development economists have reformed their approach, the human rights movement has yet to acknowledge its failures. It is time for a reckoning….
It is time to start over with an approach to promoting wellbeing in foreign countries that is empirical rather than ideological. Human rights advocates can learn a lot from the experiences of development economists – not only about the flaws of top-down, coercive styles of forcing people living in other countries to be free, but about how one can actually help those people if one really wants to. Wealthy countries can and should provide foreign aid to developing countries, but with the understanding that helping other countries is not the same as forcing them to adopt western institutions, modes of governance, dispute-resolution systems and rights. Helping other countries means giving them cash, technical assistance and credit where there is reason to believe that these forms of aid will raise the living standards of the poorest people. Resources currently used in fruitless efforts to compel foreign countries to comply with the byzantine, amorphous treaty regime would be better used in this way.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the human rights treaties were not so much an act of idealism as an act of hubris, with more than a passing resemblance to the civilising efforts undertaken by western governments and missionary groups in the 19th century, which did little good for native populations while entangling European powers in the affairs of countries they did not understand. A humbler approach is long overdue.”
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States and democracy
New paper by Francis Fukuyama in the journal Democratization: “The state, rule of law, and democratic accountability are the three basic components of a modern political order. The state concentrates and uses power, while law and democracy constrain the exercise of power, indicating that there is an inherent tension between them. This article looks at ways in which the state and liberal democracy interact in three areas: citizen security, patronage and clientelism, and the formation of national identity. In all three areas, state and democracy act at cross purposes in some domains, and are mutually supportive in others. The reason for this complex relationship is that both state and democracy are themselves complex collections of institutions which interact on a multiplicity of levels. Understanding the relationship between state and democracy is important in policy terms because many recent initiatives to improve the quality of governance assume that state quality and democracy are mutually supportive, something that is not fully supported by the empirical evidence.”
Pricey privacy: Framing the economy of information in the digital age
Paper by Federica Fornaciari in FirstMonday: “As new information technologies become ubiquitous, individuals are often prompted rethinking disclosure. Available media narratives may influence one’s understanding of the benefits and costs related to sharing personal information. This study, guided by frame theory, undertakes a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of media discourse developed to discuss the privacy concerns related to the corporate collection and trade of personal information. The aim is to investigate the frames — the central organizing ideas — used in the media to discuss such an important aspect of the economics of personal data. The CDA explored 130 articles published in the New York Times between 2000 and 2012. Findings reveal that the articles utilized four frames: confusion and lack of transparency, justification and private interests, law and self-regulation, and commodification of information. Articles used episodic framing often discussing specific instances of infringements rather than broader thematic accounts. Media coverage tended to frame personal information as a commodity that may be traded, rather than as a fundamental value.”