Index: Designing for Behavior Change

Curated on Posted on by Shruti Sannon

The Living Library Index – inspired by the Harper’s Index – provides important statistics and highlights global trends in governance innovation. This installment focuses on designing for behavior change and was originally published in 2014.

  • Year the Behavioural Insights or “Nudge” Team was established by David Cameron in the U.K.: 2010
  • Amount saved by the U.K. Courts Service a year by sending people owing fines personalized text messages to persuade them to pay promptly since the creation of the Nudge unit: £30m
    • Entire budget for the Behavioural Insights Team: less than £1 million
    • Estimated reduction in bailiff interventions through the use of personalized text reminders: 150,000 fewer interventions annually
  • Percentage increase among British residents who paid their taxes on time when they received a letter saying that most citizens in their neighborhood pay their taxes on time: 15%
  • Estimated increase in organ-donor registrations in the U.K. if people are asked “If you needed an organ transplant, would you take one?”: 96,000
  • Proportion of employees who now have a workplace pension since the U.K. government switched from opt-in to opt-out (illustrating the power of defaults): 83%, 63% before opt-out
  • Increase in 401(k) enrollment rates within the U.S. by changing the default from ‘opt in’ to ‘opt out’: from 13% to 80%
  • Behavioral studies have shown that consumers overestimate savings from credit cards with no annual fees. Reduction in overall borrowing costs to consumers by requiring card issuers to tell consumers how much it would cost them in fees and interest, under the 2009 CARD Act in the U.S.: 1.7% of average daily balances 
  • Many high school students and their families in the U.S. find financial aid forms for college complex and thus delay filling them out. Increase in college enrollment as a result of being helped to complete the FAFSA financial aid form by an H&R tax professional, who then provided immediate estimates of the amount of aid the student was eligible for, and the net tuition cost of four nearby public colleges: 26%
  • How much more likely people are to keep accounting records, calculate monthly revenues, and separate their home and business books if given “rules of thumb”-based training with regards to managing their finances, according to a randomized control trial conducted in a bank in the Dominican Republic: 10%
  • Elderly Americans are asked to choose from over 40 options when enrolling in Medicaid Part D private drug plans. How many switched plans to save money when they received a letter providing information about three plans that would be cheaper for them: almost double 
    • The amount saved on average per person by switching plans due to this intervention: $150 per year
  • Increase in prescriptions to manage cardiac disease when Medicaid enrollees are sent a suite of behavioral nudges such as more salient description of the consequences of remaining untreated and post-it note reminders during an experiment in the U.S.: 78%
  • Reduction in street-litter when a trail of green footprints leading to nearby garbage cans is stenciled on the ground during an experiment in Copenhagen, Denmark: 46%
  • Reduction in missed National Health Service appointments in the U.K. when patients are asked to fill out their own appointment cards: 18%
    • Reduction in missed appointments when patients are also made aware of the number of people who attend their appointments on time: 31%
    • The cost of non-attendance per year for the National Health Service: £700m 
  • How many people in a U.S. experiment chose to ‘downsize’ their meals when asked, regardless of whether they received a discount for the smaller portion: 14-33%
    • Average reduction in calories as a result of downsizing: 200
  • Number of households in the U.K. without properly insulated attics, leading to high energy consumption and bills: 40%
    • Result of offering group discounts to motivate households to insulate their attics: no effect
    • Increase in households that agreed to insulate their attics when offered loft-clearing services even though they had to pay for the service: 4.8 fold increase

Sources

Selected Readings on Behavioral Economics: Nudges

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of behavioral economics was originally published in 2014.

The 2008 publication of Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge ushered in a new era of behavioral economics, and since then, policy makers in the United States and elsewhere have been applying behavioral economics to the field of public policy. Like Smart Disclosure, behavioral economics can be used in the public sector to improve the decisionmaking ability of citizens without relying on regulatory interventions. In the six years since Nudge was published, the United Kingdom has created the Behavioural Insights Team (also known as the Nudge Unit), a cross-ministerial organization that uses behavioral economics to inform public policy, and the White House has recently followed suit by convening a team of behavioral economists to create a behavioral insights-driven team in the United States. Policymakers have been using behavioral insights to design more effective interventions in the fields of long term unemployment; roadway safety; enrollment in retirement plans; and increasing enrollment in organ donation registries, to name some noteworthy examples. The literature of this nascent field provides a look at the growing optimism in the potential of applying behavioral insights in the public sector to improve people’s lives.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

  • John Beshears, James Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian – The Importance of Default Options for Retirement Savings Outcomes: Evidence from the United States – a paper examining the role default options play in encouraging intelligent retirement savings decisionmaking.
  • Cabinet Office and Behavioural Insights Team, United Kingdom – Applying Behavioural Insights to Health – a paper outlining some examples of behavioral economics being applied to the healthcare landscape using cost-efficient interventions.
  • Matthew Darling, Saugato Datta and Sendhil Mullainathan – The Nature of the BEast: What Behavioral Economics Is Not – a paper discussing why control and behavioral economics are not as closely aligned as some think, reiterating the fact that the field is politically agnostic.
  • Antoinette Schoar and Saugato Datta – The Power of Heuristics – a paper exploring the concept of “heuristics,” or rules of thumb, which can provide helpful guidelines for pushing people toward making “reasonably good” decisions without a full understanding of the complexity of a situation.
  • Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein – Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness – an influential book describing the many ways in which the principles of behavioral economics can be and have been used to influence choices and behavior through the development of new “choice architectures.” 
  • U.K. Parliament Science and Technology Committee – Behaviour Change – an exploration of the government’s attempts to influence the behaviour of its citizens through nudges, with a focus on comparing the effectiveness of nudges to that of regulatory interventions.

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Beshears, John, James Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian. “The Importance of Default Options for Retirement Savings Outcomes: Evidence from the United States.” In Jeffrey R. Brown, Jeffrey B. Liebman and David A. Wise, editors, Social Security Policy in a Changing Environment, Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2009. http://bit.ly/LFmC5s.

  • This paper examines the role default options play in pushing people toward making intelligent decisions regarding long-term savings and retirement planning.
  • Importantly, the authors provide evidence that a strategically oriented default setting from the outset is likely not enough to fully nudge people toward the best possible decisions in retirement savings. They find that the default settings in every major dimension of the savings process (from deciding whether to participate in a 401(k) to how to withdraw money at retirement) have real and distinct effects on behavior.

Cabinet Office and Behavioural Insights Team, United Kingdom. “Applying Behavioural Insights to Health.” December 2010. http://bit.ly/1eFP16J.

  • In this report, the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team does not attempt to “suggest that behaviour change techniques are the silver bullet that can solve every problem.” Rather, they explore a variety of examples where local authorities, charities, government and the private-sector are using behavioural interventions to encourage healthier behaviors.  
  • The report features case studies regarding behavioral insights ability to affect the following public health issues:
    • Smoking
    • Organ donation
    • Teenage pregnancy
    • Alcohol
    • Diet and weight
    • Diabetes
    • Food hygiene
    • Physical activity
    • Social care
  • The report concludes with a call for more experimentation and knowledge gathering to determine when, where and how behavioural interventions can be most effective in helping the public become healthier.

Darling, Matthew, Saugato Datta and Sendhil Mullainathan. “The Nature of the BEast: What Behavioral Economics Is Not.” The Center for Global Development. October 2013. https://bit.ly/2QytRmf.

  • In this paper, Darling, Datta and Mullainathan outline the three most pervasive myths that abound within the literature about behavioral economics:
    • First, they dispel the relationship between control and behavioral economics.  Although tools used within behavioral economics can convince people to make certain choices, the goal is to nudge people to make the choices they want to make. For example, studies find that when retirement savings plans change the default to opt-in rather than opt-out, more workers set up 401K plans. This is an example of a nudge that guides people to make a choice that they already intend to make.
    • Second, they reiterate that the field is politically agnostic. Both liberals and conservatives have adopted behavioral economics and its approach is neither liberal nor conservative. President Obama embraces behavioral economics but the United Kingdom’s conservative party does, too.
    • And thirdly, the article highlights that irrationality actually has little to do with behavioral economics. Context is an important consideration when one considers what behavior is rational and what behavior is not. Rather than use the term “irrational” to describe human beings, the authors assert that humans are “infinitely complex” and behavior that is often considered irrational is entirely situational.

Schoar, Antoinette and Saugato Datta. “The Power of Heuristics.” Ideas42. January 2014. https://bit.ly/2UDC5YK.

  • This paper explores the notion that being presented with a bevy of options can be desirable in many situations, but when making an intelligent decision requires a high-level understanding of the nuances of vastly different financial aid packages, for example, options can overwhelm. Heuristics (rules of thumb) provide helpful guidelines that “enable people to make ‘reasonably good’ decisions without needing to understand all the complex nuances of the situation.”
  • The underlying goal heuristics in the policy space involves giving people the type of “rules of thumb” that enable make good decisionmaking regarding complex topics such as finance, healthcare and education. The authors point to the benefit of asking individuals to remember smaller pieces of knowledge by referencing a series of studies conducted by psychologists Beatty and Kahneman that showed people were better able to remember long strings of numbers when they were broken into smaller segments.
  • Schoar and Datta recommend these four rules when implementing heuristics:
    • Use heuristics where possible, particularly in complex situation;
    • Leverage new technology (such as text messages and Internet-based tools) to implement heuristics.
    • Determine where heuristics can be used in adult training programs and replace in-depth training programs with heuristics where possible; and
    • Consider how to apply heuristics in situations where the exception is the rule. The authors point to the example of savings and credit card debt. In most instances, saving a portion of one’s income is a good rule of thumb. However, when one has high credit card debt, paying off debt could be preferable to building one’s savings.

Thaler, Richard H. and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press, 2008. https://bit.ly/2kNXroe.

  • This book, likely the single piece of scholarship most responsible for bringing the concept of nudges into the public consciousness, explores how a strategic “choice architecture” can help people make the best decisions.
  • Thaler and Sunstein, while advocating for the wider and more targeted use of nudges to help improve people’s lives without resorting to overly paternal regulation, look to five common nudges for lessons and inspiration:
    • The design of menus gets you to eat (and spend) more;
    • “Flies” in urinals improve, well, aim;
    • Credit card minimum payments affect repayment schedules;
    • Automatic savings programs increase savings rate; and
    • “Defaults” can improve rates of organ donation.
  • In the simplest terms, the authors propose the wider deployment of choice architectures that follow “the golden rule of libertarian paternalism: offer nudges that are most likely to help and least likely to inflict harm.”

U.K. Parliament Science and Technology Committee. “Behaviour Change.” July 2011. http://bit.ly/1cbYv5j.

  • This report from the U.K.’s Science and Technology Committee explores the government’s attempts to influence the behavior of its citizens through nudges, with a focus on comparing the effectiveness of nudges to that of regulatory interventions.
  • The author’s central conclusion is that, “non-regulatory measures used in isolation, including ‘nudges,’ are less likely to be effective. Effective policies often use a range of interventions.”
  • The report’s other major findings and recommendations are:
    • Government must invest in gathering more evidence about what measures work to influence population behaviour change;
    • They should appoint an independent Chief Social Scientist to provide them with robust and independent scientific advice;
    • The Government should take steps to implement a traffic light system of nutritional labelling on all food packaging; and
    • Current voluntary agreements with businesses in relation to public health have major failings. They are not a proportionate response to the scale of the problem of obesity and do not reflect the evidence about what will work to reduce obesity. If effective agreements cannot be reached, or if they show minimal benefit, the Government should pursue regulation.”

Unbundling the nation state

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Economist on Government-to-government trade: “NIGERIAN pineapple for breakfast, Peruvian quinoa for lunch and Japanese sushi for dinner. Two centuries ago, when David Ricardo advocated specialisation and free trade, the notion that international exchange in goods and services could make such a cosmopolitan diet commonplace would have seemed fanciful.
Today another scenario may appear equally unlikely: a Norwegian government agency managing Algeria’s sovereign-wealth fund; German police overseeing security in the streets of Mumbai; and Dubai playing the role of the courthouse of the Middle East. Yet such outlandish possibilities are more than likely if a new development fulfils its promise. Ever more governments are trading with each other, from advising lawmakers to managing entire services. They are following businesses, which have long outsourced much of what they do. Is this the dawn of the government-to-government era?
Such “G2G” trade is not new, though the name may be. After the Ottoman empire defaulted on its debt in 1875 foreign lenders set up an “Ottoman Public Debt Administration”, its governing council packed with European government officials. At its peak it had 9,000 employees, more than the empire’s finance ministry. And the legacy of enforced G2G trade—colonialism, as it was known—is still visible even today. Britain’s Privy Council is the highest court of appeal for many Commonwealth countries. France provides a monetary-policy service to several west African nations by managing their currency, the CFA franc.
One reason G2G trade is growing is that it is a natural extension of the trend for governments to pinch policies from each other. “Policymaking now routinely occurs in comparative terms,” says Jamie Peck of the University of British Columbia, who refers to G2G advice as “fast policy”. Since the late 1990s Mexico’s pioneering policy to make cash benefits for poor families conditional on things like getting children vaccinated and sending them to school has been copied by almost 50 other countries….Budget cuts can provide another impetus for G2G trade. The Dutch army recently sold its Leopard II tanks and now sends tank crews to train with German forces. That way it will be able to reform its tank squadrons quickly if they are needed. Britain, with a ten-year gap between scrapping old aircraft-carriers and buying new ones, has sent pilots to train with the American marines on the F-35B, which will fly from both American and British carriers.
…
No one knows the size of the G2G market. Governments rarely publicise deals, not least because they fear looking weak. And there are formidable barriers to trade. The biggest is the “Westphalian” view of sovereignty, says Stephen Krasner of Stanford University: that states should run their own affairs without foreign interference. In 2004 Papua New Guinea’s parliament passed a RAMSI-like delegation agreement, but local elites opposed it and courts eventually declared it unconstitutional. Honduras attempted to create independent “charter cities”, a concept developed by Paul Romer of New York University (NYU), whose citizens would have had the right of appeal to the supreme court of Mauritius. But in 2012 this scheme, too, was deemed unconstitutional.
Critics fret about accountability and democratic legitimacy. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, endorsed by governments and aid agencies, made much of the need for developing countries to design their own development strategies. And providers open themselves to reputational risk. British police, for instance, have trained Bahraini ones. A heavy-handed crackdown by local forces during the Arab spring reflected badly on their foreign teachers…
When San Francisco decided to install wireless control systems for its streetlights, it posted a “call for solutions” on Citymart, an online marketplace for municipal projects. In 2012 it found a Swiss firm, Paradox Engineering, which had built such systems for local cities. But though members often share ideas, says Sascha Haselmayer, Citymart’s founder, most still decide to implement their chosen policies themselves.
Weak government services are the main reason poor countries fail to catch up with rich ones, says Mr Romer. One response is for people in poorly run places to move to well governed ones. Better would be to bring efficient government services to them. In a recent paper with Brandon Fuller, also of NYU, Mr Romer argues that either response would bring more benefits than further lowering the barriers to trade in privately provided goods and services. Firms have long outsourced activities, even core ones, to others that do them better. It is time governments followed suit.”

Shedding Light on Projects Through Contract Transparency

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OpenAidMap: “In all countries, whether rich or poor, contracts are at the nexus of revenue generation, budget planning, resource management and the delivery of public goods. Open contracting refers to norms and practices for increased disclosure and participation in public contracting at all stages of the contracting process.
There are very good reasons for making procurement processes transparent. Public posting of tender notices and “requests for proposals” helps support free and fair competitive bidding – increasing citizen trust while also improving the likelihood of securing the best possible supplier. Once procurement is finished, public posting of contract awards gives important assurance for citizens, development partners, and competing companies that procurement processes are open and fair. Increasingly, open contracting in procurement transparency through portals like this one is becoming the norm for governments around the world. There is also a global initiative at work to establish a common standard for contracting data….
With so much momentum behind procurement transparency, there is an untapped opportunity to leverage data from public procurement processes to provide operational insight into activities. Procurement data can help answer two of the most important questions in project-level aid transparency: (1) Where are projects taking place? (2) How much money is being invested at each location?
Take an example from Nepal. Consulting the government’s aid management system yields some basic, but already useful, information about a particular transportation project. This type of information can be useful for anyone trying to assess patterns of transportation investment in the country or, for that matter, patterns of development partner financing….
Open contracting data have intrinsic value for transparency and accountability. However, they also have significant value for planners – even those who only care about getting greater insight into project activities. At the moment though, contracting data are too difficult to access. While contracting data are increasingly becoming available, they are often posted on stand-alone websites, in diverse data formats and without structured access. By standardizing around a core contracting data format and accessibility approach, we can unlock the potential to use contracting data at scale not only for transparency, but also as an effort-free addition to the arsenal of available data for project-level planning, coordination, and accountability. The utility could be even higher if combined with performance and results data.
When developing any public data standard, there are opportunities and risks. For open contracting data, there is a huge opportunity to make those data equally relevant for project planners as for those more purely interested in transparency and accountability. The pilot conducted by the Open Aid Partnership and AidData has explored this potential for overlap, yielding key insights that we hope can be used in the future development of an open and broadly relevant open contracting data standard.”

Open data: Strategies for impact

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Havey Lewis at Open Government Partnership Blog: “When someone used to talk about “data for good”, chances are they were wondering whether the open data stream they relied on was still going to be available in the future. Similarly, “good with data” meant that experienced data scientists were being sought for a deeply technical project. Both interpretations reflect a state of being rather than of doing: data being around for good; people being good with data.
Important though these considerations are, they miss what should be an obvious and more profound alternative.
Right now, organisations like DataKind™  and Periscopic, and many other entrepreneurs, innovators and established social enterprises that use open data, see things differently. They are using these straplines to shake up the status quo, to demonstrate that data-driven businesses can do well by doing good.
And it’s the confluence of the many national and international open data initiatives, and the growing number of technically able, socially responsible organisations that provide the opportunity for social as well as economic growth. The World Wide Web Foundation now estimates that there are over 370 open data initiatives around the world. Collectively, and through portals such as Quandl and and datacatalogs.org, these initiatives have made a staggering quantity of data available – in excess of eight million data sets. In addition, several successful and data-rich companies are entering into a new spirit of philanthropy – by donating their data for the public good. There’s no doubt that opening up data signals a new willingness by governments and businesses all over the world to engage with their citizens and customers in a new and more transparent way.
The challenge, though, is ensuring that these popular national and international open data initiatives are cohesive and impactful. And that the plans drawn up by public sector bodies to release specific data sets are based on the potential the data has to achieve a beneficial outcome, not – or, at least, not solely – based on the cost or ease of publication. Despite the best of intentions, only a relatively small proportion of open data sets now available has the latent potential to create significant economic or social impact. In our push to open up data and government, it seems that we may have fallen into the trap of believing the ends are the same as the means; that effect is the same as cause…”

The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Ken Banks: “Despite the tens of billions spent each year in international aid, some of the most promising and exciting social innovations and businesses have come about by chance. Many of the people behind them didn’t consciously set out to solve anything, but they did. Welcome to the world of the ‘reluctant innovator’…

This book provides a welcome challenge to conventional wisdom in social entrepreneurship. It highlights the personal stories of ten social innovators from around the world. Ten social innovators – ordinary people – who randomly stumbled across problems, injustices and wrongs and, armed with little more than determination and belief, decided not to turn their backs but to dedicate their lives to solving them. Here are their stories….

Watching yet another Spanish movie in his friend’s apartment to avoid writing up his doctoral dissertation, Brij Kothari makes a throwaway comment about subtitles, which plants the seed of an idea and spawns a literacy initiative that has had, in Bill Clinton’s words, “a staggering impact on people’s lives”.
Worried about the political turmoil in Kenya, and concerned at the lack of information that is forthcoming from his adoptive country, Erik Hersman mobilises his own five-strong army to conceive, create and launch a web-based facility that revolutionises how breaking news is disseminated worldwide.
Parachuted into the middle of sub-Saharan Africa with a brief to collect public health data, and confronted with a laborious, environmentally wasteful paper-based system, paediatrician Joel Selanikio finds the perfect outlet for the skills he acquired as a Wall Street computer consultant.
Intending to ground himself in the realities of global health during his internship in rural Malawi, Josh Nesbit discovers that it is hard to sit on the sidelines and soon finds himself proposing a solution to overcome the difficulty of connecting patients, community health workers and hospitals.
After watching local doctors and midwives struggle to treat critically ill pregnant women in near-total darkness on a Nigerian maternity ward, where an untimely power cut can mean the difference between life and death, obstetrician Laura Stachel delivers a solar-based solution that enhances survival prospects.
Observing how well the autistic son of a close friend responds to the therapeutic effects of a Chinese massage technique that she has advocated using, Louisa Silva is convinced that the treatment has the potential to benefit thousands of others, but she needs to prove it.
Haunted by the memory of being separated from her older sister during a childhood spent in foster care, and horrified that other siblings are continuing to suffer the same fate, Lynn Price resolves to devise a way to bring such people back together.
An unexpected conversation over dinner leads Priti Radhakrishnan to build an innovative new organisation with a mission to fight for the rights of people denied access to life saving medicines.
Until a visit to the dermatologist turns her world upside down, Sharon Terry has never heard of pseudanthoma elasticum (PXE), but when she discovers that research into the disease afflicting her children is hidebound by scientific protocol, she sets about changing the system with characteristic zeal.
Encounters and conversations with leftover people occupying leftover spaces and using leftover materials, at home and abroad, led architecture professor Wes Janz to view them as urban pioneers, not victims, and teach him a valuable lesson: think small and listen to those at the sharp end.
See http://www.reluctantinnovation.com/”

Selected Readings on Big Data

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of big data was originally published in 2014.

Big Data refers to the wide-scale collection, aggregation, storage, analysis and use of data. Government is increasingly in control of a massive amount of raw data that, when analyzed and put to use, can lead to new insights on everything from public opinion to environmental concerns. The burgeoning literature on Big Data argues that it generates value by: creating transparency; enabling experimentation to discover needs, expose variability, and improve performance; segmenting populations to customize actions; replacing/supporting human decision making with automated algorithms; and innovating new business models, products and services. The insights drawn from data analysis can also be visualized in a manner that passes along relevant information, even to those without the tech savvy to understand the data on its own terms (see The GovLab Selected Readings on Data Visualization).

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Australian Government Information Management Office. The Australian Public Service Big Data Strategy: Improved Understanding through Enhanced Data-analytics Capability Strategy Report. August 2013. http://bit.ly/17hs2xY.

  • This Big Data Strategy produced for Australian Government senior executives with responsibility for delivering services and developing policy is aimed at ingraining in government officials that the key to increasing the value of big data held by government is the effective use of analytics. Essentially, “the value of big data lies in [our] ability to extract insights and make better decisions.”
  • This positions big data as a national asset that can be used to “streamline service delivery, create opportunities for innovation, identify new service and policy approaches as well as supporting the effective delivery of existing programs across a broad range of government operations.”

Bollier, David. The Promise and Peril of Big Data. The Aspen Institute, Communications and Society Program, 2010. http://bit.ly/1a3hBIA.

  • This report captures insights from the 2009 Roundtable exploring uses of Big Data within a number of important consumer behavior and policy implication contexts.
  • The report concludes that, “Big Data presents many exciting opportunities to improve modern society. There are incalculable opportunities to make scientific research more productive, and to accelerate discovery and innovation. People can use new tools to help improve their health and well-being, and medical care can be made more efficient and effective. Government, too, has a great stake in using large databases to improve the delivery of government services and to monitor for threats to national security.
  • However, “Big Data also presents many formidable challenges to government and citizens precisely because data technologies are becoming so pervasive, intrusive and difficult to understand. How shall society protect itself against those who would misuse or abuse large databases? What new regulatory systems, private-law innovations or social practices will be capable of controlling anti-social behaviors–and how should we even define what is socially and legally acceptable when the practices enabled by Big Data are so novel and often arcane?”

Boyd, Danah and Kate Crawford. “Six Provocations for Big Data.” A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society. September 2011. http://bit.ly/1jJstmz.

  • In this paper, Boyd and Crawford raise challenges to unchecked assumptions and biases regarding big data. The paper makes a number of assertions about the “computational culture” of big data and pushes back against those who consider big data to be a panacea.
  • The authors’ provocations for big data are:
    • Automating Research Changes the Definition of Knowledge
    • Claims to Objectivity and Accuracy are Misleading
    • Big Data is not always Better Data
    • Not all Data is Equivalent
    • Just Because it is accessible doesn’t make it ethical
    • Limited Access to Big Data creates New Digital Divide

The Economist Intelligence Unit. Big Data and the Democratisation of Decisions. October 2012. http://bit.ly/17MpH8L.

  • This report from the Economist Intelligence Unit focuses on the positive impact of big data adoption in the private sector, but its insights can also be applied to the use of big data in governance.
  • The report argues that innovation can be spurred by democratizing access to data, allowing a diversity of stakeholders to “tap data, draw lessons and make business decisions,” which in turn helps companies and institutions respond to new trends and intelligence at varying levels of decision-making power.

Manyika, James, Michael Chui, Brad Brown, Jacques Bughin, Richard Dobbs, Charles Roxburgh, and Angela Hung Byers. Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity.  McKinsey & Company. May 2011. http://bit.ly/18Q5CSl.

  • This report argues that big data “will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus, and that “leaders in every sector will have to grapple with the implications of big data.” 
  • The report offers five broad ways in which using big data can create value:
    • First, big data can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much higher frequency.
    • Second, as organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore expose variability and boost performance.
    • Third, big data allows ever-narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services.
    • Fourth, big sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making.
    • Finally, big data can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services.

The Partnership for Public Service and the IBM Center for The Business of Government. “From Data to Decisions II: Building an Analytics Culture.” October 17, 2012. https://bit.ly/2EbBTMg.

  • This report discusses strategies for better leveraging data analysis to aid decision-making. The authors argue that, “Organizations that are successful at launching or expanding analytics program…systematically examine their processes and activities to ensure that everything they do clearly connects to what they set out to achieve, and they use that examination to pinpoint weaknesses or areas for improvement.”
  • While the report features many strategies for government decisions-makers, the central recommendation is that, “leaders incorporate analytics as a way of doing business, making data-driven decisions transparent and a fundamental approach to day-to-day management. When an analytics culture is built openly, and the lessons are applied routinely and shared widely, an agency can embed valuable management practices in its DNA, to the mutual benet of the agency and the public it serves.”

TechAmerica Foundation’s Federal Big Data Commission. “Demystifying Big Data: A Practical Guide to Transforming the Business of Government.” 2013. http://bit.ly/1aalUrs.

  • This report presents key big data imperatives that government agencies must address, the challenges and the opportunities posed by the growing volume of data and the value Big Data can provide. The discussion touches on the value of big data to businesses and organizational mission, presents case study examples of big data applications, technical underpinnings and public policy applications.
  • The authors argue that new digital information, “effectively captured, managed and analyzed, has the power to change every industry including cyber security, healthcare, transportation, education, and the sciences.” To ensure that this opportunity is realized, the report proposes a detailed big data strategy framework with the following steps: define, assess, plan, execute and review.

World Economic Forum. “Big Data, Big Impact: New Possibilities for International Development.” 2012. http://bit.ly/17hrTKW.

  • This report examines the potential for channeling the “flood of data created every day by the interactions of billions of people using computers, GPS devices, cell phones, and medical devices” into “actionable information that can be used to identify needs, provide services, and predict and prevent crises for the benefit of low-income populations”
  • The report argues that, “To realise the mutual benefits of creating an environment for sharing mobile-generated data, all ecosystem actors must commit to active and open participation. Governments can take the lead in setting policy and legal frameworks that protect individuals and require contractors to make their data public. Development organisations can continue supporting governments and demonstrating both the public good and the business value that data philanthropy can deliver. And the private sector can move faster to create mechanisms for the sharing data that can benefit the public.”

Open data movement faces fresh hurdles

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

SciDevNet: “The open-data community made great strides in 2013 towards increasing the reliability of and access to information, but more efforts are needed to increase its usability on the ground and the general capacity of those using it, experts say.
An international network of innovation hubs, the first extensive open data certification system and a data for development partnership are three initiatives launched last year by the fledgling Open Data Institute (ODI), a UK-based not-for-profit firm that champions the use of open data to aid social, economic and environmental development.
Before open data can be used effectively the biggest hurdles to be cleared are agreeing common formats for data sets and improving their trustworthiness and searchability, says the ODI’s chief statistician, Ulrich Atz.
“As it is so new, open data is often inconsistent in its format, making it difficult to reuse. We see a great need for standards and tools,” he tells SciDev.Net. Data that is standardised is of “incredible value” he says, because this makes it easier and faster to use and gives it a longer useable lifetime.
The ODI — which celebrated its first anniversary last month — is attempting to achieve this with a first-of-its-kind certification system that gives publishers and users important details about online data sets, including publishers’ names and contact information, the type of sharing licence, the quality of information and how long it will be available.
Certificates encourage businesses and governments to make use of open data by guaranteeing their quality and usability, and making them easier to find online, says Atz.
Finding more and better ways to apply open data will also be supported by a growing network of ODI ‘nodes’: centres that bring together companies, universities and NGOs to support open-data projects and communities….
Because lower-income countries often lack well-established data collection systems, they have greater freedom to rethink how data are collected and how they flow between governments and civil society, he says.
But there is still a long way to go. Open-data projects currently rely on governments and other providers sharing their data on online platforms, whereas in a truly effective system, information would be published in an open format from the start, says Davies.
Furthermore, even where advances are being made at a strategic level, open-data initiatives are still having only a modest impact in the real world, he says.
“Transferring [progress at a policy level] into availability of data on the ground and the capacity to use it is a lot tougher and slower,” Davies says.”

Supporting open government in New Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Google Europe Blog: “The “New Europe” countries that joined the European Union over the past decade are moving ahead fast to use the Internet to improve transparency and open government. We recently partnered with Techsoup Global to support online projects driving forward good governance in Romania, the Czech Republic, and most recently, in Slovakia.
Techsoup Global, in partnership with the Slovak Center for Philanthropy, recently held an exciting social-startups awards ceremony Restart Slovakia 2013 in Bratislava. Slovakia’s Deputy Minister of Finance and Digital Champion Peter Pellegrini delivered keynote promoting Internet and Open Data and announced the winners of this year contest. Ambassadors from U.S., Israel and Romania and several distinguished Slovak NGOs also attended the ceremony.
Winning projects included:

  • Vzdy a vsade – Always and Everywhere – a volunteer portal offering online and anonymous psychological advice to internet users via chat.
  • Nemlcme.sk – a portal providing counsel for victims of sexual assaults.
  • Co robim – an educational online library of job careers advising young people how to choose their career paths and dream jobs.
  • Mapa zlocinu – an online map displaying various rates of criminality in different neighbourhoods.
  • Demagog.sk – a platform focused on analyzing public statements of politicians and releasing information about politicians and truthfulness of their speeches in a user-friendly format.”

Open Data in Action

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Nick Sinai at the White House: “Over the past few years, the Administration has launched a series of Open Data Initiatives, which, have released troves of valuable data in areas such as health, energy, education, public safety, finance, and global development…
Today, in furtherance of this exciting economic dynamic, The Governance Lab (The GovLab) —a research institution at New York University—released the beta version of its Open Data 500 project—an initiative designed to identify, describe, and analyze companies that use open government data in order to study how these data can serve business needs more effectively. As part of this effort, the organization is compiling a list of 500+ companies that use open government data to generate new business and develop new products and services.
This working list of 500+ companies, from sectors ranging from real estate to agriculture to legal services, shines a spotlight on surprising array of innovative and creative ways that open government data is being used to grow the economy – across different company sizes, different geographies, and different industries. The project includes information about  the companies and what government datasets they have identified as critical resources for their business.
Some of examples from the Open Data 500 Project include:
  • Brightscope, a San Diego-based company that leverages data from the Department of Labor, the Security and Exchange Commission, and the Census Bureau to rate consumers’ 401k plans objectively on performance and fees, so companies can choose better plans and employees can make better decisions about their retirement options.
  • AllTuition, a  Chicago-based startup that provides services—powered by data from Department of Education on Federal student financial aid programs and student loans— to help students and parents manage the financial-aid process for college, in part by helping families keep track of deadlines, and walking them through the required forms.
  • Archimedes, a San Francisco healthcare modeling and analytics company, that leverages  Federal open data from the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services, to  provide doctors more effective individualized treatment plans and to enable patients to make informed health decisions.
You can learn more here about the project and view the list of open data companies here.

See also:
Open Government Data: Companies Cash In

NYU project touts 500 top open-data firms”