Paper by Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar at Electronic Commerce Research: “The growing participation in social networking sites is altering the nature of social relations and changing the nature of political and public dialogue. This paper contributes to the current debate on Web 2.0 technologies and their implications for local governance, identifying the perceptions of policy makers on the use of Web 2.0 in providing public services and on the changing roles that could arise from the resulting interaction between local governments and their stakeholders. The results obtained suggest that policy makers are willing to implement Web 2.0 technologies in providing public services, but preferably under the Bureaucratic model framework, thus retaining a leading role in this implementation. The learning curve of local governments in the use of Web 2.0 technologies is a factor that could influence policy makers’ perceptions. In this respect, many research gaps are identified and further study of the question is recommended….(More)”
What We’ve Learned About Sharing Our Data Analysis
Jeremy Singer-Vine at Source: “Last Friday morning, Jessica Garrison, Ken Bensinger, and I published a BuzzFeed News investigation highlighting the ease with which American employers have exploited and abused a particular type of foreign worker—those on seasonal H–2 visas. The article drew on seven months’ worth of reporting, scores of interviews, hundreds of documents—and two large datasets maintained by the Department of Labor.
That same morning, we published the corresponding data, methodologies, and analytic code on GitHub. This isn’t the first time we’ve open-sourced our data and analysis; far from it. But the H–2 project represents our most ambitious effort yet. In this post, I’ll describe our current thinking on “reproducible data analyses,” and how the H–2 project reflects those thoughts.
What Is “Reproducible Data Analysis”?
It’s helpful to break down a couple of slightly oversimplified definitions. Let’s call “open-sourcing” the act of publishing the raw code behind a software project. And let’s call “reproducible data analysis” the act of open-sourcing the code and data required to reproduce a set of calculations.
Journalism has seen a mini-boom of reproducible data analysis in the past year or two. (It’s far froma novel concept, of course.) FiveThirtyEight publishes data and re-runnable computer code for many of their stories. You can download the brains and brawn behind Leo, the New York Times’ statistical model for forecasting the outcome of the 2014 midterm Senate elections. And if you want to re-runBarron’s magazine’s analysis of SEC Rule 605 reports, you can do that, too. The list goes on.
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Why Reproducible Data Analysis?
At BuzzFeed News, our main motivation is simple: transparency. If an article includes our own calculations (and are beyond a grade-schooler’s pen-and-paper calculations), then you should be able to see—and potentially criticize—how we did it…..
There are reasons, of course, not to publish a fully-reproducible analysis. The most obvious and defensible reason: Your data includes Social Security numbers, state secrets, or other sensitive information. Sometimes, you’ll be able to scrub these bits from your data. Other times, you won’t. (Adetailed methodology is a good alternative.)
How To Publish Reproducible Data Analysis?
At BuzzFeed News, we’re still figuring out the best way to skin this cat. Other news organizations might be arrive at entirely opposite conclusions. That said, here are some tips, based on our experience:
Describe the main data sources, and how you got them. Art appraisers and data-driven reporters agree: Provenance matters. Who collected the data? What universe of things does it quantify? How did you get it?.… (More)”
Unpacking Civic Tech – Inside and Outside of Government
David Moore at Participatory Politics Foundation: “…I’ll argue it’s important to unpack the big-tent term “civic tech” to at least five major component areas, overlapping in practice & flexible of course – in order to more clearly understand what we have and what we need:
- Responsive & efficient city services (e.g., SeeClickFix)
- Open data portals & open government data publishing / visualization (Socrata, OpenGov.com)
- Engagement platforms for government entities (Mindmixer aka Sidewalk)
- Community-focused organizing services (Change, NextDoor, Brigade- these could validly be split, as NextDoor is of course place-based IRL)
- Geo-based services & open mapping data (e.g.. Civic Insight)
More precisely, instead of “civic tech”, the term #GovTech can be productively applied to companies whose primary business model is vending to government entities – some #govtech is #opendata, some is civic #engagement, and that’s healthy & brilliant. But it doesn’t make sense to me to conflate as “civic tech” both government software vendors and the open-data work of good-government watchdogs. Another framework for understanding the inside / outside relationship to government, in company incorporation strategies & priorities, is broadly as follows:
- tech entirely-outside government (such as OpenCongress or OpenStates);
- tech mostly-outside government, where some elected officials volunteer to participate (such as AskThem, Councilmatic, DemocracyOS, or Change Decision Makers);
- tech mostly-inside government, paid-for-by-government (such as Mindmixer or SpeakUp or OpenTownHall) where elected officials or gov’t staff sets the priorities, with the strong expectation of an official response;
- deep legacy tech inside government, the enterprise vendors of closed-off CRM software to Congressional offices (including major defense contractors!).
These are the websites up and running today in the civic tech ecosystem – surveying them, I see there’s a lot of work still to do on developing advanced metrics towards thicker civic engagement. Towards evaluating whether the existing tools are having the impact we hope and expect them to at their level of capitalization, and to better contextualize the role of very-small non-profit alternatives….
One question to study is whether the highest-capitalized U.S. civic tech companies (Change, NextDoor, Mindmixer, Socrata, possibly Brigade) – which also generally have most users – are meeting ROI on continual engagement within communities.
- If it’s a priority metric for users of a service to attend a community meeting, for example, are NextDoor or Mindmixer having expected impact?
- How about metrics on return participation, joining an advocacy group, attending a district meeting with their U.S. reps, organizing peer-to-peer with neighbors?
- How about writing or annotating their own legislation at the city level, introducing it for an official hearing, and moving it up the chain of government to state and even federal levels for consideration? What actual new popular public policies or systemic reforms are being carefully, collaboratively passed?
- Do less-capitalized, community-based non-profits (AskThem, 596 Acres, OpenPlans’ much-missed Shareabouts, CKAN data portals, LittleSis, BeNeighbors, PBNYC tools) – with less scale, but with more open-source, open-data tools that can be remixed – improve on the tough metric of ROI on continual engagement or research-impact in the news?…(More)
Harnessing Mistrust for Civic Action
Ethan Zuckerman: “…One predictable consequence of mistrust in institutions is a decrease in participation. Fewer than 37% of eligible US voters participated in the 2014 Congressional election. Participation in European parliamentary and national elections across Europe is higher than the US’s dismal rates, but has steadily declined since 1979, with turnout for the 2014 European parliamentary elections dropping below 43%. It’s a mistake to blame low turnout on distracted or disinterested voters, when a better explanation exists: why vote if you don’t believe the US congress or European Parliament is capable of making meaningful change in the world?
In his 2012 book, “Twilight of the Elites”, Christopher Hayes suggests that the political tension of our time is not between left and right, but between institutionalists and insurrectionists. Institutionalists believe we can fix the world’s problems by strengthening and revitalizing the institutions we have. Insurrectionists believe we need to abandon these broken institutions we have and replace them with new, less corrupted ones, or with nothing at all. The institutionalists show up to vote in elections, but they’re being crowded out by the insurrectionists, who take to the streets to protest, or more worryingly, disengage entirely from civic life.
Conventional wisdom suggests that insurrectionists will grow up, stop protesting and start voting. But we may have reached a tipping point where the cultural zeitgeist favors insurrection. My students at MIT don’t want to work for banks, for Google or for universities – they want to build startups that disrupt banks, Google and universities.
The future of democracy depends on finding effective ways for people who mistrust institutions to make change in their communities, their nations and the world as a whole. The real danger is not that our broken institutions are toppled by a wave of digital disruption, but that a generation disengages from politics and civics as a whole.
It’s time to stop criticizing youth for their failure to vote and time to start celebrating the ways insurrectionists are actually trying to change the world. Those who mistrust institutions aren’t just ignoring them. Some are building new systems designed to make existing institutions obsolete. Others are becoming the fiercest and most engaged critics of of our institutions, while the most radical are building new systems that resist centralization and concentration of power.
Those outraged by government and corporate complicity in surveillance of the internet have the option of lobbying their governments to forbid these violations of privacy, or building and spreading tools that make it vastly harder for US and European governments to read our mail and track our online behavior. We need both better laws and better tools. But we must recognize that the programmers who build systems like Tor, PGP and Textsecure are engaged in civics as surely as anyone crafting a party’s political platform. The same goes for entrepreneurs building better electric cars, rather than fighting to legislate carbon taxes. As people lose faith in institutions, they seek change less through passing and enforcing laws, and more through building new technologies and businesses whose adoption has the same benefits as wisely crafted and enforced laws….(More)”
Digital government evolution: From transformation to contextualization
Paper by Tomasz Janowski in the Government Information Quarterly: “The Digital Government landscape is continuously changing to reflect how governments are trying to find innovative digital solutions to social, economic, political and other pressures, and how they transform themselves in the process. Understanding and predicting such changes is important for policymakers, government executives, researchers and all those who prepare, make, implement or evaluate Digital Government decisions. This article argues that the concept of Digital Government evolves toward more complexity and greater contextualization and specialization, similar to evolution-like processes that lead to changes in cultures and societies. To this end, the article presents a four-stage Digital Government Evolution Model comprising Digitization (Technology in Government), Transformation (Electronic Government), Engagement (Electronic Governance) and Contextualization (Policy-Driven Electronic Governance) stages; provides some evidence in support of this model drawing upon the study of the Digital Government literature published in Government Information Quarterly between 1992 and 2014; and presents a Digital Government Stage Analysis Framework to explain the evolution. As the article consolidates a representative body of the Digital Government literature, it could be also used for defining and integrating future research in the area….(More)”
We are data: the future of machine intelligence
Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times: “…But what if the rise of Artificial Intuition instead blossoms under the aegis of theology or political ideology? With politics we can see an interesting scenario developing in Europe, where Google is by far the dominant search engine. What is interesting there is that people are perfectly free to use Yahoo or Bing yet they choose to stick with Google and then they get worried about Google having too much power — which is an unusual relationship dynamic, like an old married couple. Maybe Google could be carved up into baby Googles? But no. How do you break apart a search engine? AT&T was broken into seven more or less regional entities in 1982 but you can’t really do that with a search engine. Germany gets gaming? France gets porn? Holland gets commerce? It’s not a pie that can be sliced.
The time to fix this data search inequity isn’t right now, either. The time to fix this problem was 20 years ago, and the only country that got it right was China, which now has its own search engine and social networking systems. But were the British or Spanish governments — or any other government — to say, “OK, we’re making our own proprietary national search engine”, that would somehow be far scarier than having a private company running things. (If you want paranoia, let your government control what you can and can’t access — which is what you basically have in China. Irony!)
The tendency in theocracies would almost invariably be one of intense censorship, extreme limitations of access, as well as machine intelligence endlessly scouring its system in search of apostasy and dissent. The Americans, on the other hand, are desperately trying to implement a two-tiered system to monetise information in the same way they’ve monetised medicine, agriculture, food and criminality. One almost gets misty-eyed looking at North Koreans who, if nothing else, have yet to have their neurons reconfigured, thus turning them into a nation of click junkies. But even if they did have an internet, it would have only one site to visit, and its name would be gloriousleader.nk.
. . .
To summarise. Everyone, basically, wants access to and control over what you will become, both as a physical and metadata entity. We are also on our way to a world of concrete walls surrounding any number of niche beliefs. On our journey, we get to watch machine intelligence become profoundly more intelligent while, as a society, we get to watch one labour category after another be systematically burped out of the labour pool. (Doug’s Law: An app is only successful if it puts a lot of people out of work.)…(More)”
The Art of Changing a City
Antanas Mockus in the New York Times: “Between 1995 and 2003, I served two terms as mayor of Bogotá. Like most cities in the world, Colombia’s capital had a great many problems that needed fixing and few people believed they could be fixed.
As a professor of philosophy, I had little patience with conventional wisdom. When I was threatened by the leftist guerrilla group known as FARC, as hundreds of Colombian mayors were, I decided to wear a bulletproof vest. But mine had a hole cut in the shape of a heart over my chest. I wore that symbol of confidence, or defiance, for nine months.
Here’s what I learned: People respond to humor and playfulness from politicians. It’s the most powerful tool for change we have.
Bogotá’s traffic was chaotic and dangerous when I came to office. We decided the city needed a radical new approach to traffic safety. Among various strategies, we printed and distributed hundreds of thousands of “citizens’ cards,” which had a thumbs-up image on one side to flash at courteous drivers, and a thumbs-down on the other to express disapproval. Within a decade, traffic fatalities fell by more than half.
Another initiative in a small area of the city was to replace corrupt traffic police officers with mime artists. The idea was that instead of cops handing out tickets and pocketing fines, these performers would “police” drivers’ behavior by communicating with mime — for instance, pretending to be hurt or offended when a vehicle ignored the pedestrian right of way in a crosswalk. Could this system, which boiled down to publicly signaled approval or disapproval, really work?
We had plenty of skeptics. At a news conference, a journalist asked, “Can the mimes serve traffic fines?” That is legally impermissible, I answered. “Then it won’t work,” he declared.
But change is possible. People began to obey traffic signals and, for the first time, they respected crosswalks. Within months, I was able to dissolve the old, corrupt transit police force of about 1,800 officers, arranging with the national police service to replace them.
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This illustrates another lesson we learned. It helps to develop short, pleasing experiences for people that generate stories of delightful surprise, moments of mutual admiration among citizens and the welcome challenge of understanding something new. But then you need to consolidate those stories with good statistical results obtained through cold, rational measurement. That creates a virtuous cycle, so that congenial new experiences lead to statistically documented improvements, and the documentation raises expectations for more welcome change.
The art of politics is a curious business. It combines, as no other profession or occupation does, rigorous reasoning, sincere emotions and extroverted body language, with what are sometimes painfully cold, slow and planned strategic interactions. It is about leading, but not directing: What people love most is when you write on the blackboard a risky first half of a sentence and then recognize their freedom to write the other half.
My main theoretical and practical concern has been how to use the force of social and moral regulation to obtain the rule of law. This entailed a fundamental respect for human lives, expressed in the dictum “Life is sacred.” My purpose was to create a cosmopolitan culture of citizenship in which expressions like “crimes against humanity” would find a precise operational meaning….(More)”
Local Governments Need Financial Transparency Tools
Cities of the Future: “Comprehensive financial transparency — allowing anyone to look up the allocation of budgets, expenses by department, and even the ledger of each individual expense as it happens — can help local governments restore residents’ confidence, help manage the budget efficiently and make more informed decisions for new projects and money allocation.
A few weeks ago, we had municipal elections in Spain. Many local governments changed hands and the new administrations had to review the current budgets, see where money was being spent and, on occasion, discovered expenses they were not expecting.
As costs rise and cities find it more difficult to provide the same services without raising taxes, citizens among others are demanding full disclosure of income and expenses.
Tools such as OpenGov platform are helping cities accomplish that goal…Earlier this year the city of Beaufort (pop. 13,000), South Carolina’s second oldest city known for its historic charm and moss-laden oak trees, decided to implement OpenGov. It rolled out the platform to the public last February, becoming the first city in the State to provide the public with in-depth, comprehensive financial data (spanning five budget years).
The reception by the city council and residents was extremely positive. Residents can now look up where their tax money goes down to itemized expenses. They can also see up-to-date charts of every part of the budget, how it is being spent, and what remains to be used. City council members can monitor the administration’s performance and ask informed questions at town meetings about the budget use, right down to the smallest expenses….
Many cities are now implementing open data tools to share information on different aspects of city services, such as transit information, energy use, water management, etc. But those tools are difficult to use and do not provide comprehensive financial information about the use of public money. …(More)”
Interactive app lets constituents help balance their city’s budget
Springwise: “In this era of information, political spending and municipal budgets are still often shrouded in confusion and mystery. But a new web app called Balancing Act hopes to change that, by enabling US citizens to see the breakdown of their city’s budget via adjustable, comprehensive pie charts.
Created by Colorado-based consultants Engaged Public, Balancing Act not only shows citizens the current budget breakdown, it also enables them to experiment with hypothetical future budgets, adjusting spending and taxes to suit their own priorities. The project aims to engage and inform citizens about the money that their mayors and governments assign on their behalf and allow them to have more of a say in the future of their city. The resource has already been utilized by Pedro Segarra, Mayor of Hartford, Connecticut, who asked his citizens for their input on how best to balance the USD 49 million.
The system can be used to help governments understand the wants and needs of their constituents, as well as enable citizens to see the bigger picture when it comes to tough or unappealing policies. Eventually it can even be used to create the world’s first crowdsourced budget, giving the public the power to make their preferences heard in a clear, comprehensible way…(More)”
How does collaborative governance scale?
Paper by Ansell, Chris; and Torfing, Jacob in Policy & Politics: “Scale is an overlooked issue in the literature on interactive governance. This special issue investigates the challenges posed by the scale and scaling of network and collaborative forms of governance. Our original motivation arose from a concern about whether collaborative governance can scale up. As we learned more, our inquiry expanded to include the tensions inherent in collaboration across scales or at multiple scales and the issue of dynamically scaling collaboration to adapt to changing problems and demands. The diverse cases in this special issue explore these challenges in a range of concrete empirical domains than span the globe…(More)”