Over the last few years, the Government of British Columbia (BC), Canada has initiated a variety of practices and policies aimed at providing more legitimate and effective governance. Leveraging advances in technology, the BC Government has focused on changing how it engages with its citizens with the goal of optimizing the way it seeks input and develops and implements policy. The efforts are part of a broader trend among a wide variety of democratic governments to re-imagine public service and governance.
At the beginning of 2013, BC’s Ministry of Citizens’ Services and Open Government, now the Ministry of Technology, Innovation and Citizens’ Services, partnered with the GovLab to produce “Reimagining Governance in Practice: Benchmarking British Columbia’s Citizen Engagement Efforts.” The GovLab’s May 2013 report, made public today, makes clear that BC’s current practices to create a more open government, leverage citizen engagement to inform policy decisions, create new innovations, and provide improved public monitoring—though in many cases relatively new—are consistently among the strongest examples at either the provincial or national level.
According to Stefaan Verhulst, Chief of Research at the GovLab: “Our benchmarking study found that British Columbia’s various initiatives and experiments to create a more open and participatory governance culture has made it a leader in how to re-imagine governance. Leadership, along with the elimination of imperatives that may limit further experimentation, will be critical moving forward. And perhaps even more important, as with all initiatives to re-imaging governance worldwide, much more evaluation of what works, and why, will be needed to keep strengthening the value proposition behind the new practices and polices and provide proof-of-concept.”
See also our TheGovLab Blog.
The Best American Infographics 2013
New book by Gareth Cook: “The rise of infographics across virtually all print and electronic media—from a striking breakdown of classic cocktails to a graphic tracking 200 influential moments that changed the world to visually arresting depictions of Twitter traffic—reveals patterns in our lives and our world in fresh and surprising ways. In the era of big data, where information moves faster than ever, infographics provide us with quick, often influential bursts of art and knowledge—on the environment, politics, social issues, health, sports, arts and culture, and more—to digest, to tweet, to share, to go viral.
The Best American Infographics captures the finest examples from the past year, including the ten best interactive infographics, of this mesmerizing new way of seeing and understanding our world.”
See also selection of some in Wired.
More Top-Down Participation, Please! Institutionalized empowerment through open participation
Michelle Ruesch and Oliver Märker in DDD: “…this is not another article on the empowering potential of bottom-up digital political participation. Quite the contrary: It instead seeks to stress the empowering potential of top-down digital political participation. Strikingly, the democratic institutionalization of (digital) political participation is rarely considered when we speak about power in the context of political participation. Wouldn’t it be true empowerment though if the right of citizens to speak their minds were directly integrated into political and administrative decision-making processes?
Institutionalized political participation
Political participation, defined as any act that aims to influence politics in some way, can be initiated either by citizens, referred to as “bottom-up” participation, or by government, often referred to as “top-down” participation. For many, the word “top-down” instantly evokes negative connotations, even though top-down participatory spaces are actually the foundation of democracy. These are the spaces of participation offered by the state and guaranteed by democratic constitutions. For a long time, top-down participation could be equated with formal democratic participation such as elections, referenda or party politics. Today, however, in states like Germany we can observe a new form of top-down political participation, namely government-initiated participation that goes beyond what is legally required and usually makes extensive use of digital media.
Like many other Western states, Germany has to cope with decreasing voter turnout and a lack of trust in political parties. At the same time, according to a recent study from 2012, two-thirds of eligible voters would like to be more involved in political decisions. The case of “Stuttgart 21” served as a late wake-up call for many German municipalities. Plans to construct a new train station in the center of the city of Stuttgart resulted in a petition for a local referendum, which was rejected. Protests against the train station culminated in widespread demonstrations in 2010, forcing construction to be halted. Even though a referendum was finally held in 2011 and a slight majority voted in favor of the train station, the Stuttgart 21 case has since been cited by Chancellor Angela Merkel and others as an example of the negative consequences of taking decisions without consulting with citizens early on. More and more municipalities and federal ministries in Germany have therefore started acknowledging that the conventional democratic model of participation in elections every few years is no longer sufficient. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, for example, published a manual for “good participation” in urban development projects….
What’s so great about top-down participation?
Semi-formal top-down participation processes have one major thing in common, regardless of the topic they address: Governmental institutions voluntarily open up a space for dialogue and thereby obligate themselves to take citizens’ concerns and ideas into account.
As a consequence, government-initiated participation offers the potential for institutionalized empowerment beyond elections. It grants the possibility of integrating participation into political and administrative decision-making processes….
Bottom-up participation will surely always be an important mobilizer of democratic change. Nevertheless, the provision of spaces of open participation by governments can aid in the institutionalization of citizens’ involvement in political decision-making. Had Stuttgart offered an open space of participation early in the train station construction process, maybe protests would never have escalated the way they did.
So is top-down participation the next step in the process of democratization? It could be, but only under certain conditions. Most importantly, top-down open participation requires a genuine willingness to abandon the old principle of doing business behind closed doors. This is not an easy undertaking; it requires time and endurance. Serious open participation also requires creating state institutions that ensure the relevance of the results by evaluating them and considering them in political decisions. We have formulated ten conditions that we consider necessary for the genuine institutionalization of open political participation [14]:
- There needs to be some scope for decision-making. Top-down participation only makes sense when the results of the participation can influence decisions.
- The government must genuinely aim to integrate the results into decision-making processes.
- The limits of participation must be communicated clearly. Citizens must be informed if final decision-making power rests with a political body, for example.
- The subject matter, rules and procedures need to be transparent.
- Citizens need to be aware that they have the opportunity to participate.
- Access to participation must be easy, the channels of participation chosen according to the citizens’ media habits. Using the Internet should not be a goal in itself.
- The participatory space should be “neutral ground”. A moderator can help ensure this.
- The set-up must be interactive. Providing information is only a prerequisite for participation.
- Participation must be possible without providing real names or personal data.
- Citizens must receive continuous feedback regarding how results are handled and the implementation process.”
The Art of Making City Code Beautiful
Nancy Scola in Next City: “Some rather pretty legal websites have popped up lately: PhillyCode.org, ChicagoCode.org and, as of last Thursday, SanFranciscoCode.org. This is how municipal code would design itself if it actually wanted to be read.
The network of [city]Code.org sites is the output of The State Decoded, a project of the OpenGov Foundation (See correction below), which has its own fascinating provenance. That D.C.-based non-profit grew out of the fight in Congress over the SOPA and PIPA digital copyright bills a few winters ago. At the time, the office of Rep. Darrell Issa, more recently of Benghazi fame, built a platform called Madison that invited the public to help edit an alternative bill. Madison outlived the SOPA debate, and was spun out last summer as the flagship project of the OpenGov Foundation, helmed by former Issa staffer Seamus Kraft.
“What we discovered,” Kraft says, “is that co-authoring legislation is high up there on what [the public wants to] do with government information, but it’s not at the top.” What heads the list, he says, is simply knowing “what are the laws?” Pre-SanFranciscoCode, the city’s laws on everything from elections to electrical installations to transportation were trapped in an interface, run by publisher American Legal, that would not have looked out of place in “WarGames.” (Here’s the comparable “old” site for Chicago. It’s probably enough to say that Philadelphia’s comes with a “Frames/No Frames” option.) Madison needed a base of clean, structured municipal code upon which to function, and Kraft and company were finding that in cities across the country, that just didn’t exist.
Fixing the code, Kraft says, starts with him “unlawyering the text” that is either supplied to them by the city or scraped from online. This involves reading through the city code and looking for signposts that indicate when sections start, how provisions nest within them, and other structural cues that establish a pattern. That breakdown gets passed to the organization’s developers, who use it to automatically parse the full corpus. The process is time consuming. In San Francisco, 16 different patterns were required to capture each of the code’s sections. Often, the parser needs to be tweaked. “Sometimes it happens in a few minutes or a few hours,” Kraft says, “and sometimes it takes a few days.”
…
Over the long haul, Kraft has in mind adopting the customizability of YouVersion, the online digital Bible that allows users to choose fonts, colors and more. Kraft, a 2007 graduate of Georgetown who will cite the Catholic Church’s distributed structure as a model for networked government, proclaims YouVersion “the most kick-ass Bible you’ve ever seen. It’s stunning.” He’d like to do the same with municipal code, for the benefit of both the average American and those who have more regular engagement with local legal texts. “If you’re spending all day reading law,” he says, “you should at the very least have the most comfortable view possible.”
AskThem
“AskThem is a project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. AskThem is supported by a charitable grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative.
AskThem is a free & open-source website for questions-and-answers with public figures. It’s a not-for-profit tool for a stronger democracy, with open data for informed and engaged communities.
AskThem allows you to:
- Find and ask questions to over 142,000 elected officials nationwide: federal, state and city levels of government.
- Get signatures for your question or petition, have it delivered over email or Twitter, and push for a public response.
- See questions from people near you, sign-on to questions you care about, and review answers from public figures.
It’s like a version of “We The People” for every elected official, from local city council members all the way up to U.S. senators. Enter your email above to be the first to ask a question when we launch and see previews of the site this Fall.
Elected officials: enter your email above and we’ll send you more information about signing up to answer questions on AskThem. It’s a free and non-partisan service to respond to your constituents in an open public forum and update them over email about your work. Or, be a leader in open-government and sign up now.
Issue-based organizations and media: sign up to help promote questions to government from people in your area. We’re working to launch with partnerships that build greater public accountability.
Previously known as the OpenGovernment.org project, AskThem is open-source and uses open government data – our code is available on GitHub – contributions welcome. For more development updates & discussion, join our low-traffic Google Group.
We’re a small non-profit organization actively seeking charitable funding support – help us launch this powerful new tool for public dialogue! Email us for a copy of our non-profit funding prospectus. If you can make a tax-exempt gift to support our work, please donate to PPF via OpenCongress. More background on the project is available on our Knight NewsChallenge proposal from March 2013.
Questions, feedback, ideas? Email David Moore, Executive Director of PPF – david at ppolitics.org, Twitter: @ppolitics; like our page on Facebook & follow @AskThemPPF on Twitter. Stay tuned!”
Using Big Data to Ask Big Questions
Chase Davis in the SOURCE: “First, let’s dispense with the buzzwords. Big Data isn’t what you think it is: Every federal campaign contribution over the last 30-plus years amounts to several tens of millions of records. That’s not Big. Neither is a dataset of 50 million Medicare records. Or even 260 gigabytes of files related to offshore tax havens—at least not when Google counts its data in exabytes. No, the stuff we analyze in pursuit of journalism and app-building is downright tiny by comparison.
But you know what? That’s ok. Because while super-smart Silicon Valley PhDs are busy helping Facebook crunch through petabytes of user data, they’re also throwing off intellectual exhaust that we can benefit from in the journalism and civic data communities. Most notably: the ability to ask Big Questions.
Most of us who analyze public data for fun and profit are familiar with small questions. They’re focused, incisive, and often have the kind of black-and-white, definitive answers that end up in news stories: How much money did Barack Obama raise in 2012? Is the murder rate in my town going up or down?
Big Questions, on the other hand, are speculative, exploratory, and systemic. As the name implies, they are also answered at scale: Rather than distilling a small slice of a dataset into a concrete answer, Big Questions look at entire datasets and reveal small questions you wouldn’t have thought to ask.
Can we track individual campaign donor behavior over decades, and what does that tell us about their influence in politics? Which neighborhoods in my city are experiencing spikes in crime this week, and are police changing patrols accordingly?
Or, by way of example, how often do interest groups propose cookie-cutter bills in state legislatures?
Looking at Legislation
Even if you don’t follow politics, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that lawmakers don’t always write their own bills. In fact, interest groups sometimes write them word-for-word.
Sometimes those groups even try to push their bills in multiple states. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council has gotten some press, but liberal groups, social and business interests, and even sororities and fraternities have done it too.
On its face, something about elected officials signing their names to cookie-cutter bills runs head-first against people’s ideal of deliberative Democracy—hence, it tends to make news. Those can be great stories, but they’re often limited in scope to a particular bill, politician, or interest group. They’re based on small questions.
Data science lets us expand our scope. Rather than focusing on one bill, or one interest group, or one state, why not ask: How many model bills were introduced in all 50 states, period, by anyone, during the last legislative session? No matter what they’re about. No matter who introduced them. No matter where they were introduced.
Now that’s a Big Question. And with some basic data science, it’s not particularly hard to answer—at least at a superficial level.
Analyze All the Things!
Just for kicks, I tried building a system to answer this question earlier this year. It was intended as an example, so I tried to choose methods that would make intuitive sense. But it also makes liberal use of techniques applied often to Big Data analysis: k-means clustering, matrices, graphs, and the like.
If you want to follow along, the code is here….
To make exploration a little easier, my code represents similar bills in graph space, shown at the top of this article. Each dot (known as a node) represents a bill. And a line connecting two bills (known as an edge) means they were sufficiently similar, according to my criteria (a cosine similarity of 0.75 or above). Thrown into a visualization software like Gephi, it’s easy to click around the clusters and see what pops out. So what do we find?
There are 375 clusters in total. Because of the limitations of our data, many of them represent vague, subject-specific bills that just happen to have similar titles even though the legislation itself is probably very different (think things like “Budget Bill” and “Campaign Finance Reform”). This is where having full bill text would come handy.
But mixed in with those bills are a handful of interesting nuggets. Several bills that appear to be modeled after legislation by the National Conference of Insurance Legislators appear in multiple states, among them: a bill related to limited lines travel insurance; another related to unclaimed insurance benefits; and one related to certificates of insurance.”
The Shutdown’s Data Blackout
Opinion piece by Katherine G. Abraham and John Haltiwanger in The New York Times: “Today, for the first time since 1996 and only the second time in modern memory, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not issue its monthly jobs report, as a result of the shutdown of nonessential government services. This raises an important question: Are the B.L.S. report and other economic data that the government provides “nonessential”?
If we’re trying to understand how much damage the shutdown or sequestration cuts are doing to jobs or the fragile economic recovery, they are definitely essential. Without robust economic data from the federal government, we can speculate, but we won’t really know.
In the last two shutdowns, in 1995 and 1996, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the economic damage at around 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product. This time, Moody’s estimates that a three-to-four-week shutdown might subtract 1.4 percent (annualized) from gross domestic product growth this quarter and take $55 billion out of the economy. Democrats tend to play up such projections; Republicans tend to play them down. If the shutdown continues, though, we’ll all be less able to tell what impact it is having, because more reports like the B.L.S. jobs report will be delayed, while others may never be issued.
In fact, sequestration cuts that affected 2013 budgets are already leading federal statistics agencies to defer or discontinue dozens of reports on everything from income to overseas labor costs. The economic data these agencies produce are key to tracking G.D.P., earnings and jobs, and to informing the Federal Reserve, the executive branch and Congress on the state of the economy and the impact of economic policies. The data are also critical for decisions made by state and local policy makers, businesses and households.
The combined budget for all the federal statistics agencies totals less than 0.1 percent of the federal budget. Yet the same across-the-board-cut mentality that led to sequester and shutdown has shortsightedly cut statistics agencies, too, as if there were something “nonessential” about spending money on accurately assessing the economic effects of government actions and inactions. As a result, as we move through the shutdown, the debt-ceiling fight and beyond, reliable, essential data on the impact of policy decisions will be harder to come by.
Unless the sequester cuts are reversed, funding for economic data will shrink further in 2014, on top of a string of lean budget years. More data reports will be eliminated at the B.L.S., the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and other agencies. Even more insidious damage will come from compromising the methods for producing the reports that still are paid for and from failing to prepare for the future.
To save money, survey sample sizes will be cut, reducing the reliability of national data and undermining local statistics. Fewer resources will be devoted to maintaining the listings used to draw business survey samples, running the risk that surveys based on those listings won’t do as good a job of capturing actual economic conditions. Hiring and training will be curtailed. Over time, the availability and quality of economic indicators will diminish.
That would be especially paradoxical and backward at a time when economic statistics can and should be advancing through technological innovation instead of marched backward by politics. Integrating survey data, administrative data and commercial data collected with scanners and other digital technologies could produce richer, more useful information with less of a burden on businesses and households.
Now more than ever, framing sound economic policy depends on timely and accurate information about the economy. Bad or ill-targeted data can lead to bad or ill-targeted decisions about taxes and spending. The tighter the budget and the more contentious the political debate around it, the more compelling the argument for investing in federal data that accurately show how government policies are affecting the economy, so we can target the most effective cuts or spending or other policies, and make ourselves accountable for their results. That’s why Congress should restore funding to the federal statistical agencies at a level that allows them to carry out their critical work.”
Technology Can Expose Government Sins, But You Need Humans to Fix Them
Lorelei Kelly: “We can’t bring accountability to the NSA unless we figure out how to give the whole legislative branch modern methods for policy oversight. Those modern methods can include technology, but the primary requirement is figuring out how to supply Congress with unbiased subject matter experts—not just industry lobbyists or partisan think tank analysts. Why? Because trusted and available expertise inside the process of policymaking is what is missing today.
According to calculations by the Sunlight Foundation, today’s Congress is operating with about 40 percent less staff than in 1979. According to the Congressional Management Foundation, it’s also contending with at least 800 percent more incoming communications. Yet, instead of helping Congress gain insight in new ways, instead of helping it sort and filter, curate and authenticate, technology has mostly created disorganized information overload. And the information Congress receives is often sentiment, not substance. Elected leaders should pay attention to both, but need the latter for policymaking.
The result? Congress defaults to what it knows. And that means slapping a “national security” label on policy questions that instead deserve to be treated as broad public conversations about the evolution of American democracy. This is a Congress that categorizes questions about our freedoms on the Internet as “cyber security.”
What can we do? First, recognize that Congress is an obsolete and incapacitated system, and treat it as such. Technology and transparency can help modernize our legislature, but they can’t fix the system of governance.
Activists, even tech-savvy ones, need to talk directly with Congressional members and staff at home. Hackers, you should invite your representatives to wherever you do your hacking. And then offer your skills to help them in any way possible. You may create some great data maps and visualization tools, but the real point is to make friends in Congress. There’s no substitute for repeated conversations, and long-haul engagement. In politics, relationships will leverage the technology. All technology can do is help you find one another.
Without our help and our knowledge, our elected leaders and governing institutions won’t have the bandwidth to cope with our complex world. This will be a steep climb. But, like nearly every good outcome in politics, the climb starts with an outstretched hand, not one that’s poised at a keyboard, ready to tweet.”
How to Change the World by Building a Swarm
Nina Misuraca Ignaczak at Shareable: “In 2005, Rick Falvinge of Sweden launched a new political party, the Swedish Pirate Party, on a platform to reform copyright and patent laws. It’s now the third largest party in Sweden, it won two European Parliament seats in 2009, and it inspired the International Pirate Party movement with representation in over 60 countries. The rise of the party has been remarkably fast. In Swarmwise: The Tactical Manual to Changing the World, Falvinge describes how he did it with a unique, decentralized organizing architecture that leverages the power of technology and the crowd to spread ideas and work across diverse groups of people.
Falvinge defines a swarm as: “a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.”
The key is decentralization. The founder must set the vision and goal and then release control of messaging and branding, delegate as much authority as possible, and embrace the fact that the only way to lead is to inspire.
A swarm has a shared direction, values and method. Informal leadership is strong, and focuses on everyone’s contributions. The main benefits to swarm organization are:
- Speed of operation
- Next-to-nothing operating cost
- Large number of devoted volunteers
- Open and inviting to anyone
- No recruitment process
- Multiple solutions tried in parallel
- Transparent by default
Step One: Find an idea to change the world that people can get excited about.
This is critical. The idea must be a game-changer- so exciting, revolutionary and provocative that it will sell itself. Your idea must have four key attributes to be worthy:
- Tangible: You must have concrete goals with specifics on when this goal should happen, where it will happen, and how it will happen. In the case of the Swedish Pirate Party, the goal was to elect an open-information platform candidate to the European Parliament in the next election. Period.
- Credible: You must present the goals as realistic and doable. The key is to strike a balance between a change-the-world idea and pure fantasy.
- Inclusive: There must be a role and room for participation for everyone, and everyone must see not only how they will personally benefit form the idea but also ho they can be a part of making it happen.
- Epic: The idea must be a big one, capable of changing how things are done on a broad scale, and people must see the scope of the idea’s impact when it is presented.
Step Two: Do the Math
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All versions of the book (including free ones, of course) are available at the bottom of this page.”
Making All Voices Count
Launch of Making All Voices Count: “Making All Voices Count is a global initiative that supports innovation, scaling-up, and research to deepen existing innovations and help harness new technologies to enable citizen engagement and government responsiveness….Solvable problems need not remain unsolved. Democratic systems in the 21st century continue to be inhibited by 19th century timescales, with only occasional opportunities for citizens to express their views formally, such as during elections. In this century, many citizens have access to numerous tools that enable them to express their views – and measure government performance – in real time.
For example, online reporting platforms enable citizens to monitor the election process by reporting intimidation, vote buying, bias and misinformation; access to mobile technology allows citizens to update water suppliers on gaps in service delivery; crisis information can be crowdsourced via eyewitness reports of violence, as reported by email and sms.
The rise of mobile communication, the installation of broadband and the fast-growing availability of open data, offer tremendous opportunities for data journalism and new media channels. They can inspire governments to develop new ways to fight corruption and respond to citizens efficiently, effectively and fairly. In short, developments in technology and innovation mean that government and citizens can interact like never before.
Making All Voices Count is about seizing this moment to strengthen our commitments to promote transparency, fight corruption, empower citizens, and harness the power of new technologies to make government more effective and accountable.
The programme specifically aims to address the following barriers that weaken the link between governments and citizens:
- Citizens lack incentives: Citizens may not have the necessary incentives to express their feedback on government performance – due to a sense of powerlessness, distrust in the government, fear of retribution, or lack of reliable information
- Governments lack incentives: At the same time, governments need incentives to respond to citizen input whenever possible and to leverage citizen participation. The government’s response to citizens should be reinforced by proactive, public communication. This initiative will help create incentives for government to respond. Where government responds effectively, citizens’ confidence in government performance and approval ratings are likely to increase
- Governments lack the ability to translate citizen feedback into action: This could be due to anything from political constraints to a lack of skills and systems. Governments need better tools to effectively analyze and translate citizen input into information that will lead to solutions and shape resource allocation. Once captured, citizens’ feedback (on their experiences with government performance) must be communicated so as to engage both the government and the broader public in finding a solution.
- Citizens lack meaningful opportunities: Citizens need greater access to better tools and know-how to easily engage with government in a way that results in government action and citizen empowerment”