Policymakers around the world are embracing behavioural science


The Economist: “In 2013 thousands of school pupils in England received a letter from a student named Ben at the University of Bristol. The recipients had just gained good marks in their GCSEs, exams normally taken at age 16. But they attended schools where few pupils progressed to university at age 18, and those that did were likely to go to their nearest one. That suggested the schools were poor at nurturing aspiration. In his letter Ben explained that employers cared about the reputation of the university a job applicant has attended. He pointed out that top universities can be a cheaper option for poorer pupils, because they give more financial aid. He added that he had not known these facts at the recipient’s age.

The letters had the effect that was hoped for. A study published in March found that after leaving school, the students who received both Ben’s letter and another, similar one some months later were more likely to be at a prestigious university than those who received just one of the letters, and more likely again than those who received none. For each extra student in a better university, the initiative cost just £45 ($58), much less than universities’ own attempts to broaden their intake. And the approach was less heavy-handed than imposing quotas for poorer pupils, an option previous governments had considered. The education department is considering rolling out the scheme….

Some critics feared that nudges would do little good, and that their effects would fade over time. Others warned that governments were straying perilously close to mass manipulation. More recently, some of the findings on which the behavioural sciences rest have been questioned, as researchers in many fields have sought to replicate famous results, and failed.

By and large those doubts have been allayed. Even if specific results turn out to be mistaken, an experimental, iterative, data-driven approach to policymaking is gaining ground in many places, not just in dedicated units, but throughout government.

Nudging is hardly new. “In Genesis, Satan nudged, and Eve did too,” writes Cass Sunstein of Harvard University. From the middle of the 20th century psychologists such as Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo showed how sensitive humans are to social pressure. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described the mental shortcuts and biases that influence decision-making. Dale Carnegie and Robert Cialdini wrote popular books on persuasion. Firms, especially in technology, retail and advertising, used behavioural science to shape brand perception and customer behaviour—and, ultimately, to sell more stuff.

But governments’ use of psychological insights to achieve policy goals was occasional and unsystematic. According to David Halpern, the boss of BIT, as far as policymakers were concerned, psychology was “the sickly sibling to economics”. That began to change after Mr Sunstein and Richard Thaler, an economist, published “Nudge”, in 2008. The book attacked the assumption of rational decision-making inherent in most economic models and showed how “choice architecture”, or context, could be changed to “nudge” people to make better choices…..

Now many governments are turning to nudges to save money and do better. In 2014 the White House opened the Social and Behavioural Sciences Team. A report that year by Mark Whitehead of Aberystwyth University counted 51 countries in which “centrally directed policy initiatives” were influenced by behavioural sciences. Non-profit organisations such as Ideas42, set up in 2008 at Harvard University, help run dozens of nudge-style trials and programmes around the world. In 2015 the World Bank set up a group that is now applying behavioural sciences in 52 poor countries. The UN is turning to nudging to help hit the “sustainable development goals”, a list of targets it has set for 2030….

Among the most effective nudges are “social” ones: those that communicate norms or draw on people’s networks. A scheme tested in Guatemala with help from the World Bank and BIT tweaked the wording of letters sent to people and firms who had failed to submit tax returns the previous year. The letters that framed non-payment as an active choice, or noted that paying up is more common than evasion, cut the number of non-payers in the following year and increased the average sum paid. And a trial involving diabetes shows that it matters to nudge at the right moment. In 2014 Hamad Medical Corporation, a health-care provider in Qatar, raised take-up rates for diabetes screening by offering it during Ramadan. That meant most Qataris were fasting, so the need to do so before the test imposed no extra burden….(More)”.

Blockchain 2.0: How it could overhaul the fabric of democracy and identity


Colm Gorey at SiliconRepublic: “…not all blockchain technologies need to be about making money. A recent report issued by the European Commission discussed the possible ways it could change people’s lives….
While many democratic nations still prefer a traditional paper ballot system to an electronic voting system over fears that digital votes could be tampered with, new technologies are starting to change that opinion.
One suggestion is blockchain enabled e-voting (BEV), which would take control from a central authority and put it back in the hands of the voter.
As a person’s vote would be timestamped with details of their last vote thanks to the encrypted algorithm, an illegitimate one would be spotted more easily by a digital system, or even those within digital-savvy communities.
Despite still being a fledgling technology, BEV has already begun working on the local scale of politics within Europe, such as the internal elections of political parties in Denmark.
But perhaps at this early stage, its actual use in governmental elections at a national level will remain limited, depending on “the extent to which it can reflect the values and structure of society, politics and democracy”, according to the EU….blockchain has also been offered as an answer to sustaining the public service, particularly with transparency of where people’s taxes are going.
One governmental concept could allow blockchain to form the basis for a secure method of distributing social welfare or other state payments, without the need for divisions running expensive and time-consuming fraud investigations.
Irish start-up Aid:Tech is one noticeable example that is working with Serbia to do just that, along with its efforts to use blockchain to create a transparent system for aid to be evenly distributed in countries such as Syria.
Bank of Ireland’s innovation manager, Stephen Moran, is certainly of the opinion that blockchain in the area of identity offers greater revolutionary change than BEV.
“By identity, that can cover everything from educational records, but can also cover the idea of a national identity card,” he said in conversation with Siliconrepublic.com….
But perhaps the wildest idea within blockchain – and one that is somewhat connected to governance – is that, through an amalgamation of smart contracts, it could effectively run itself as an artificially intelligent being.
Known as decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs), these are, in effect, entities that can run a business or any operation autonomously, allocating tasks or distributing micropayments instantly to users….
An example similar to the DAO already exists, in a crowdsourced blockchain online organisation run entirely on the open source platform Ethereum.
Last year, through the sheer will of its users, it was able to crowdfund the largest sum ever – $100m – through smart contracts alone.
If it appears confusing and unyielding, then you are not alone.
However, as was simply summed up by writer Leda Glyptis, blockchain is a force to be reckoned with, but it will be so subtle that you won’t even notice….(More)”.

Minecraft in urban planning: how digital natives are shaking up governments


 in The Guardian: “When we think of governments and technology, the image that springs to mind is more likely to be clunky computers and red tape than it is nimble innovators.

But things are changing. The geeks in jeans are making their way into government and starting to shake things up.

New ideas are changing the way governments use technology – whether that’s the UK’s intelligence organisation GCHQ finding a secure way to use the instant messenger Slack or senior mandarins trumpeting the possibilities of big data.

Governments are also waking up to the idea that the public are not only users, but also a powerful resource – and that engaging them online is easier than ever before. “People get very excited about using technology to make a real impact in the world,” says Chris Lintott, the co-founder of Zooniverse, a platform that organisations can use to develop their own citizen science projects for everything from analysing planets to spotting penguins.

For one of these projects, Old Weather, Zooniverse is working with the UK Met Office to gather historic weather data from ancient ships’ logs. At the same time, people helping to discover the human stories of life at sea. “Volunteers noticed that one admiral kept turning up on ship after ship after ship,” says Lintott. “It turned out he was the guy responsible for awarding medals!”

The National Archives in the US has similarly been harnessing the power of people’s curiosity by asking them to transcribe and digitise, handwritten documents through its Citizen Archivist project….

The idea for the Järviwiki, which asks citizens to log observations about Finland’s tens of thousands of lakes via a wiki service, came to Lindholm one morning on the way into work….

The increase in the number of digital natives in governments not only brings in different skills, it also enthuses the rest of the workforce, and opens their eyes to more unusual ideas.

Take Block by Block, which uses the game Minecraft to help young people show city planners how urban spaces could work better for them.

A decade ago it would have been hard to imagine a UN agency encouraging local governments to use a game to re-design their cities. Now UN-Habitat, which works with governments to promote more sustainable urban environments, is doing just that….

In Singapore, meanwhile – a country with densely populated cities and high volumes of traffic – the government is using tech to do more than manage information. It has created an app, MyResponder, that alerts a network of more than 10,000 medically trained volunteers to anyone who has a heart attack nearby, sometimes getting someone to the scene faster than the ambulance can get through the traffic.

The government is now piloting an expansion of the project by kitting out taxis with defibrillators and giving drivers first aid training, then linking them up to the app.

It’s examples like these, where governments use technology to bring communities together, that demonstrates the benefit of embracing innovation. The people making it happen are not only improving services for citizens – their quirky ideas are breathing new life into archaic systems…(More)

NYC’s New Tech to Track Every Homeless Person in the City


Wired: “New York is facing a crisis. The city that never sleeps has become the city with the most people who have no home to sleep in. As rising rents outpace income growth across the five boroughs, some 62,000 people, nearly 40 percent of them children, live in homeless shelters—rates the city hasn’t seen since the Great Depression.

As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio faces reelection in November, his reputation and electoral prospects depend in part on his ability to reverse this troubling trend. In the mayor’s estimation, combatting homelessness effectively will require opening 90 new shelters across the city and expanding the number of outreach workers who canvass the streets every day offering aid and housing. The effort will also require having the technology in place to ensure that work happens as efficiently as possible. To that end, the city is rolling out a new tool, StreetSmart, aims to give city agencies and non-profit groups a comprehensive view of all of the data being collected on New York’s homeless on a daily basis.

Think of StreetSmart as a customer relationship management system for the homeless. Every day in New York, some 400 outreach workers walk the streets checking in on homeless people and collecting information about their health, income, demographics, and history in the shelter system, among other data points. The workers get to know this vulnerable population and build trust in the hope of one day placing them in some type of housing.

StreetSmart-Dashboard.jpg

Traditionally, outreach workers have entered information about every encounter into a database, keeping running case files. But those databases never talked to each other. One outreach worker in the Bronx might never know she was talking to the same person who’d checked into a Brooklyn shelter a week prior. More importantly, the worker might never know why that person left. What’s more, systems used by city agencies and non-profits seldom overlapped, complicating efforts to keep track of individuals….

The big promise of StreetSmart extends beyond its ability to help outreach workers in the moment. The aggregation of all this information could also help the city proactively design fixes to problems it wouldn’t have otherwise seen. The tool has a map feature that shows where encampments are popping up and where outreach workers are having the most interactions. It can also be used to assess how effective different housing facilities are at keeping people off the streets….(More)”.

Can blockchain technology help poor people around the world?


 at The Conversation: “…Most simply, a blockchain is an inexpensive and transparent way to record transactions….A blockchain system, though, inherently enforces rules about authentication and transaction security. That makes it safe and affordable for a person to store any amount of money securely and confidently. While that’s still in the future, blockchain-based systems are already helping people in the developing world in very real ways.

Sending money internationally

In 2016, emigrants working abroad sent an estimated US$442 billion to their families in their home countries. This global flow of cash is a significant factor in the financial well-being of families and societies in developing nations. But the process of sending money can be extremely expensive….Hong Kong’s blockchain-enabled Bitspark has transaction costs so low it charges a flat HK$15 for remittances of less than HK$1,200 (about $2 in U.S. currency for transactions less than $150) and 1 percent for larger amounts. Using the secure digital connections of a blockchain system lets the company bypass existing banking networks and traditional remittance systems.

Similar services helping people send money to the Philippines, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Rwanda also charge a fraction of the current banking rates.

Insurance

Most people in the developing world lack health and life insurance, primarily because it’s so expensive compared to income. Some of that is because of high administrative costs: For every dollar of insurance premium collected, administrative costs amounted to $0.28 in Brazil, $0.54 in Costa Rica, $0.47 in Mexico and $1.80 in the Philippines. And many people who live on less than a dollar a day have neither the ability to afford any insurance, nor any company offering them services….Consuelo is a blockchain-based microinsurance service backed by Mexican mobile payments company Saldo.mx. Customers can pay small amounts for health and life insurance, with claims verified electronically and paid quickly.

Helping small businesses

Blockchain systems can also help very small businesses, which are often short of cash and also find it expensive – if not impossible – to borrow money. For instance, after delivering medicine to hospitals, small drug retailers in China often wait up to 90 days to get paid. But to stay afloat, these companies need cash. They rely on intermediaries that pay immediately, but don’t pay in full. A $100 invoice to a hospital might be worth $90 right away – and the intermediary would collect the $100 when it was finally paid….

Humanitarian aid

Blockchain technology can also improve humanitarian assistance. Fraud, corruption, discrimination and mismanagement block some money intended to reduce poverty and improve education and health care from actually helping people.In early 2017 the U.N. World Food Program launched the first stage of what it calls “Building Block,” giving food and cash assistance to needy families in Pakistan’s Sindh province. An internet-connected smartphone authenticated and recorded payments from the U.N. agency to food vendors, ensuring the recipients got help, the merchants got paid and the agency didn’t lose track of its money.

…In the future, blockchain-based projects can help people and governments in other ways, too. As many as 1.5 billion people – 20 percent of the world’s population – don’t have any documents that can verify their identity. That limits their ability to use banks, but also can bar their way when trying to access basic human rights like voting, getting health care, going to school and traveling.

Several companies are launching blockchain-powered digital identity programs that can help create and validate individuals’ identities….(More)”

These Refugees Created Their Own Aid Agency Within Their Resettlement Camp


Michael Thomas at FastCompany: “…“In the refugee camps, we have two things: people and time,” Jackl explained. He and his friends decided that they would organize people to improve the camp. The idea was to solve two problems at once: Give refugees purpose, and make life in the camp better for everyone….

It began with repurposing shipping material. The men noticed that every day, dozens of shipments of food, medicine, and other aid came to their camp. But once the supplies were unloaded, aid workers would throw the pallets away. Meanwhile, people were sleeping in tents that would flood when it rained. So Jackl led an effort to break the pallets down and use the wood to create platforms on which the tents could sit.

Shortly afterwards, they used scrap wood and torn pieces of fabric to build a school, and eventually found a refugee who was a teacher to lead classes. The philosophy was simple and powerful: Use resources that would otherwise go to waste to improve life in their camp. As word spread of their work on social media, Jackl began to receive offers from people who wanted to donate money to his then unofficial cause. “All these people began asking me ‘What can I do? Can I give you money?’ And I’d tell them, ‘Give me materials,’” he said.

“People think that refugees are weak. But they survived war, smugglers, and the camps,” Jackl explains. His mission is to change the refugee image from one of weakness to one of resilience and strength. Core to that is the idea that refugees can help one another instead of relying on aid workers and NGOs, a philosophy that he adopted from an NGO called Jafra that he worked for in Syria…(More)”

Crowdmapping as a new data source for journalists


Ana Brandusescu and Renée Sieber in Data Driven Journalism: “Crowdsourced data, especially for mapping, is a boon for data driven journalism. In 2015, Nepal’s earthquake was mapped in an astounding 48 hours. The number of volunteers increased to over 2,400 mappers, most of them international, a number that increased exponentially from the initial range of seven to 100 mapping volunteers present before the earthquake occurred.

A significant use of crowdsourced data for mapping, or crowdmapping, is to inform crisis responses like the Nepal earthquake by providing a medium for citizens to communicate with one another and with those seeking to help victims. The benefits to affected peoples are immediate information sharing and visualization of dire and urgent events. These apps have the ability to fill information gaps and even provide aid for disaster victims. Volunteers from across the globe also can contribute to crowdsource entire maps of post-disaster road infrastructures and refugee sites. As a platform and medium, crisis mapping has become so popular that it is increasingly replacing traditional mapping methods for humanitarian emergencies. This is also a huge benefit to journalists as they demonstrate connectivity between open source software, humanitarian crises, and crowdsourcing. According to the Tow Center’s Guide to Crowdsourcing, “Crowdsourcing allows newsrooms to build audience entry points at every stage of the journalistic process—from story assigning, to pre-data collection, to data mining, to sharing specialized expertise, to collecting personal experiences and continuing post-story conversations”….

But let’s get real. Crowdsourced apps have a highly nuanced and complex process with many problems. Here’s five points.

1. Some crises are sexier than others…
2. These apps are far from being zero-cost…
3. Participant engagement is opaque…
4. The problem with “disruption” as a transformative tech…
5. The technical literacy of journalists… (More)
This article is based on the authors’ research article “Confronting the hype: The use of crisis mapping for community development”. Read the full article here.

The Routledge Handbook of Global Public Policy and Administration


Book edited by Thomas R. Klassen, Denita Cepiku, T. J. Lah: “…a comprehensive leading-edge guide for students, scholars and practitioners of public policy and administration. Public policy and administration are key aspects of modern societies that affect the daily lives of all citizens. This handbook examines current trends and reforms in public policy and administration, such as financial regulation, risk management, public health, e-government and many others at the local, national and international levels. The two themes of the book are that public policy and administration have acquired an important global aspect, and that a critical role for government is the regulation of capital.

The handbook is organized into three thematic sections – Contemporary Challenges, Policy and Administration Responses and Forging a Resilient Public Administration – to allow readers to quickly access knowledge and improve their understanding of topics. The opening chapter, introductions to sections and extensive glossary aid readers to most effectively learn from the book. Each chapter provides a balanced overview of current knowledge, identifying issues and discussing relevant debates. The book is written by authors from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia….(More)’

Data Quality Tester


: “Publish What You Fund has launched a new online tool that allows aid and development finance publishers to independently check the quality of their data before they publish it to IATI. The aim of the Data Quality Tester – currently in Beta – is to indicate when information falls short of the specific data quality tests used to assess donors in the Aid Transparency Index. We expect it to be most useful for donors who are included in the Index to monitor their own progress both during and outside of the Index cycle.

Who is the Data Quality Tester for?

The Data Quality Tester is also suitable for organisations who want to start publishing in the IATI Standard and for those that do not qualify for inclusion in the Index, or that used to be assessed but are not currently. The open source online tool is useful because:

  • Both the IATI Standard and the Index tests can at times be complex and the tool allows a quick check against them, so donor agency staff can understand any issues
  • It allows publishers to internally and independently check the quality of their information before uploading to the IATI Registry, saving time and making sure that when data is uploaded, it is as good as it can be
  • It provides publishers with an opportunity to assess their data against the updated Index methodology and recognise where they need to improve

The tool is now live and available to use at:  http://dataqualitytester.publishwhatyoufund.org/…..(More)”

Scientific crowdsourcing in wildlife research and conservation: Tigers (Panthera tigris) as a case study


Özgün Emre Can, Neil D’Cruze, Margaret Balaskas, and David W. Macdonald in PLOS Biology: “With around 3,200 tigers (Panthera tigris) left in the wild, the governments of 13 tiger range countries recently declared that there is a need for innovation to aid tiger research and conservation. In response to this call, we created the “Think for Tigers” study to explore whether crowdsourcing has the potential to innovate the way researchers and practitioners monitor tigers in the wild. The study demonstrated that the benefits of crowdsourcing are not restricted only to harnessing the time, labor, and funds from the public but can also be used as a tool to harness creative thinking that can contribute to development of new research tools and approaches. Based on our experience, we make practical recommendations for designing a crowdsourcing initiative as a tool for generating ideas….(More)”