Bloomberg Philanthropies Launches $42 Million “What Works Cities” Initiative

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Press Release: “Today, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the launch of the What Works Cities initiative, a $42 million program to help 100 mid-sized cities better use data and evidence. What Works Cities is the latest initiative from Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation portfolio which promotes public sector innovation and spreads effective ideas amongst cities.

Through partners, Bloomberg Philanthropies will help mayors and local leaders use data and evidence to engage the public, make government more effective and improve people’s lives. U.S. cities with populations between 100,000 and 1 million people are invited to apply.

“While cities are working to meet new challenges with limited resources, they have access to more data than ever – and they are increasingly using it to improve people’s lives,” said Michael R. Bloomberg. “We’ll help them build on their progress, and help even more cities take steps to put data to work. What works? That’s a question that every city leader should ask – and we want to help them find answers.”

The $42 million dollar effort is the nation’s most comprehensive philanthropic initiative to help accelerate the ability of local leaders to use data and evidence to improve the lives of their residents. What Works Cities will provide mayors with robust technical assistance, expertise, and peer-to-peer learning opportunities that will help them enhance their use of data and evidence to improve services to solve problems for communities. The program will help cities:

1. Create sustainable open data programs and policies that promote transparency and robust citizen engagement;

2. Better incorporate data into budget, operational, and policy decision making;

3. Conduct low-cost, rapid evaluations that allow cities to continually improve programs; and

4. Focus funding on approaches that deliver results for citizens.

Across the initiative, Bloomberg Philanthropies will document how cities currently use data and evidence in decision making, and how this unique program of support helps them advance. Over time, the initiative will also launch a benchmark system which will collect standardized, comparable data so that cities can understand their performance relative to peers.

In cities across the country, mayors are increasingly relying on data and evidence to deliver better results for city residents. For example, New Orleans’ City Hall used data to reduce blighted residences by 10,000 and increased the number of homes brought into compliance by 62% in 2 years. The City’s “BlightStat” program has put New Orleans, once behind in efforts to revitalize abandoned and decaying properties, at the forefront of national efforts.

In New York City and other jurisdictions, open data from transit agencies has led to the creation of hundreds of apps that residents now use to get around town, choose where to live based on commuting times, provide key transit information to the visually impaired, and more. And Louisville has asked volunteers to attach GPS trackers to their asthma inhalers to see where they have the hardest time breathing. The city is now using that data to better target the sources of air pollution….

To learn more and apply to be a What Works City, visitwww.WhatWorksCities.org.”

What, Exactly, Do You Want?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cass Sunstein at the New York Times: “Suppose that you value freedom of choice. Are you committed to the mere opportunity to choose, or will you also insist that people actually exercise that opportunity? Is it enough if the government, or a private institution, gives people the option of going their own way? Or is it particularly important to get people to say precisely what they want? In coming decades, these seemingly abstract questions will grow in importance, because they will decide central features of our lives.

Here’s an example. Until last month, all 50 states had a simple policy for voter registration: If you want to become a voter, you have the opportunity to register. Oregon is now the first state to adopt a radically different approach: If the relevant state officials know that you live in Oregon and are 18 or older, you’re automatically registered as a voter. If you don’t want to be one, you have the opportunity to opt out.

We could easily imagine a third approach. A state might decide that if you want some kind of benefit — say, a driver’s license — you have to say whether you want to register to vote. Under this approach, the state would require you to make an active choice about whether to be a voter. You would have to indicate your desires explicitly.

In countless contexts, the government, or some private institution, must decide among three possible approaches: Give people the opportunity to opt in; give people the opportunity to opt out; or require people to make some kind of active choice. For example, an employer may say that employees will be enrolled in a pension plan only if they opt in. Alternatively, it may automatically enroll employees in a pension plan (while allowing them the opportunity to opt out). Or it may instead tell employees that they can’t start work unless they say whether they want to participate in a pension plan.

You may think that while the decision raises philosophical puzzles, the stakes are small. If so, you would be wrong; the decision can have huge consequences. By itself, the opportunity to choose is not all that matters, because many people will not exercise that opportunity. Inertia has tremendous force, and people tend to procrastinate. If a state or a private company switches from a system of opt-out to one of opt-in, or vice versa, it can have major effects on people’s lives.

For example, Oregon expects that its new policy will produce up to 300,000 new registered voters. In 2004, Congress authorized the Department of Agriculture to allow states and localities to automatically enroll eligible poor children in school meal programs, rather than requiring their parents to sign them up. As a result, millions of such children now have access to school meals. In many nations, including the United States, Britain and Denmark, automatic enrollment in pension plans has significantly increased the number of employees who participate in pension plans. The Affordable Care Act builds on this practice with a provision that will require large employers to enroll employees automatically in health insurance plans.

In light of findings of this kind (and there are many more), a lot of people have argued that people would be much better off if many institutions switched, today or tomorrow, from “opt in” designs to “opt out.” Often they’re right; “opt out” can be a lot better. But from the standpoint of both welfare and personal freedom, opt out raises problems of its own, precisely because it does not involve an actual exercise of the power to choose….(More)

21st-Century Public Servants: Using Prizes and Challenges to Spur Innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jenn Gustetic at the Open Government Initiative Blog: “Thousands of Federal employees across the government are using a variety of modern tools and techniques to deliver services more effectively and efficiently, and to solve problems that relate to the missions of their Agencies. These 21st-century public servants are accomplishing meaningful results by applying new tools and techniques to their programs and projects, such as prizes and challenges, citizen science and crowdsourcing, open data, and human-centered design.

Prizes and challenges have been a particularly popular tool at Federal agencies. With 397 prizes and challenges posted on challenge.gov since September 2010, there are hundreds of examples of the many different ways these tools can be designed for a variety of goals. For example:

  • NASA’s Mars Balance Mass Challenge: When NASA’s Curiosity rover pummeled through the Martian atmosphere and came to rest on the surface of Mars in 2012, about 300 kilograms of solid tungsten mass had to be jettisoned to ensure the spacecraft was in a safe orientation for landing. In an effort to seek creative concepts for small science and technology payloads that could potentially replace a portion of such jettisoned mass on future missions, NASA released the Mars Balance Mass Challenge. In only two months, over 200 concepts were submitted by over 2,100 individuals from 43 different countries for NASA to review. Proposed concepts ranged from small drones and 3D printers to radiation detectors and pre-positioning supplies for future human missions to the planet’s surface. NASA awarded the $20,000 prize to Ted Ground of Rising Star, Texas for his idea to use the jettisoned payload to investigate the Mars atmosphere in a way similar to how NASA uses sounding rockets to study Earth’s atmosphere. This was the first time Ted worked with NASA, and NASA was impressed by the novelty and elegance of his proposal: a proposal that NASA likely would not have received through a traditional contract or grant because individuals, as opposed to organizations, are generally not eligible to participate in those types of competitions.
  • National Institutes of Health (NIH) Breast Cancer Startup Challenge (BCSC): The primary goals of the BCSC were to accelerate the process of bringing emerging breast cancer technologies to market, and to stimulate the creation of start-up businesses around nine federally conceived and owned inventions, and one invention from an Avon Foundation for Women portfolio grantee.  While NIH has the capacity to enable collaborative research or to license technology to existing businesses, many technologies are at an early stage and are ideally suited for licensing by startup companies to further develop them into commercial products. This challenge established 11 new startups that have the potential to create new jobs and help promising NIH cancer inventions support the fight against breast cancer. The BCSC turned the traditional business plan competition model on its head to create a new channel to license inventions by crowdsourcing talent to create new startups.

These two examples of challenges are very different, in terms of their purpose and the process used to design and implement them. The success they have demonstrated shouldn’t be taken for granted. It takes access to resources (both information and people), mentoring, and practical experience to both understand how to identify opportunities for innovation tools, like prizes and challenges, to use them to achieve a desired outcome….

Last month, the Challenge.gov program at the General Services Administration (GSA), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM)’s Innovation Lab, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and a core team of Federal leaders in the prize-practitioner community began collaborating with the Federal Community of Practice for Challenges and Prizes to develop the other half of the open innovation toolkit, the prizes and challenges toolkit. In developing this toolkit, OSTP and GSA are thinking not only about the information and process resources that would be helpful to empower 21st-century public servants using these tools, but also how we help connect these people to one another to add another meaningful layer to the learning environment…..

Creating an inventory of skills and knowledge across the 600-person (and growing!) Federal community of practice in prizes and challenges will likely be an important resource in support of a useful toolkit. Prize design and implementation can involve tricky questions, such as:

  • Do I have the authority to conduct a prize or challenge?
  • How should I approach problem definition and prize design?
  • Can agencies own solutions that come out of challenges?
  • How should I engage the public in developing a prize concept or rules?
  • What types of incentives work best to motivate participation in challenges?
  • What legal requirements apply to my prize competition?
  • Can non-Federal employees be included as judges for my prizes?
  • How objective do the judging criteria need to be?
  • Can I partner to conduct a challenge? What’s the right agreement to use in a partnership?
  • Who can win prize money and who is eligible to compete? …(More)

User Experience is a Social Justice Issue

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sumana Harihareswara at code4lib: “…Before I worked in open source, I worked in customer service. I saw first-hand how design flaws (in architecture, signage, and websites) could frustrate and drive away customers and make more work for me. Every time I participated in an open source project — AltLaw, GNOME, MediaWiki, and more — I’ve brought that experience with me. I found it particularly striking that small changes on Wikipedia could cause large changes in user behavior, as I discuss in this essay, which is adapted from my keynote speech.
This issue goes beyond software, as I explain with the healthcare and banking examples. The spark that caused me to write the speech was reading Professor Lisa J. Servon’s piece in The Atlantic about the usability of storefront check cashing services; I saw a pattern where poor user experience repels people from crucial and empowering services, and decided, in a flash of anger and inspiration, to write “User Experience is a Human Rights Issue.”…

The Last Mile Problem

The largest hurdles we as technologists face are choosing to make the right things in the first place and choosing to make them usable. In the 1990’s, telecommunications companies laid down a lot of fiber to connect big hubs to one another, but often it took years to connect those hubs to the actual houses and schools and shops and offices, because it was expensive, or because companies were not creative enough to do it well. This is called the “last mile problem,” and I think usability has a similar problem. We have to be creative and disciplined enough to actually provide services in a way that people can use them.
When we’re building services for people, we often have a lot more practice seeing things from the computer’s point of view or from the data’s point of view than from another person’s point of view. In tech, we understand how to build arteries better than we understand how to build capillaries. Personally, I think capillaries are more interesting than arteries. Maybe it’s just personal temperament, but I like all the little surprising details of how people end up experiencing the ripple effects of big new systems, and how users actually interact with the user interface of a service, especially ones that we don’t really think of as having a user interface. Like taxes, or healthcare, or hotels. All these big systems end in little capillaries, where people exchange information or get healed or get whatever they need. And when those capillaries aren’t working correctly, then those people just don’t get what they need. The hubs are connected to each other, but people aren’t connected to the hubs.
Over and over, in lots of different fields, we see that bad usability makes a huge difference. When choosing between two services, people will make very different choices, depending on which service actually seems designed around the user’s needs….(More)”

Beta Release of the NETmundial Solutions Map

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“…the GovLab is pleased to announce the beta release of the NETmundial Solutions Map for further public comment (from April 1 -May 1, 2015). The release is the culmination of a 6-month engagement and development strategy to ensure that the tool reflects input from a diverse set of global stakeholders. The NETmundial Solutions Map is co-developed by the GovLab and Second Rise, and is facilitated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

 

Screen Shot 2015-03-31 at 2.29.10 PM

The tool seeks to support innovation in global governance toward a more distributed Internet Governance approach. It is designed to enable information sharing and collaboration across Internet governance issues. It will serve as a repository of information that links issues, actors, solutions and resources, and help users understand the current landscape of Internet governance.

Today, information about internet governance is scattered and hard to find. At the same time we need more coordination and collaboration to address specific issues. The Map seeks to facilitate a more collaborative and distributed way of solving Internet governance issues by providing users with a baseline of what responses already exist and who is working on what — Stefaan Verhulst, Co-Founder and Chief of Research and Development of the GovLab.

..This beta version of the NETmundial Solutions Map seeks to explore how to map the Internet governance landscape in a useful and sustainable way. Future revisions will continue to be guided by community feedback.

To this end, we welcome your comments on the following (period runs till May 1st):

  • What do you feel works well in the map?
  • What needs improving?
  • How can the map help you in your work?
  • Would you want to be part of the next version as a content provider?”

Solving the obesity crisis: knowledge, nudge or nanny?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

BioMedCentral Blog: ” The 5th Annual Oxford London Lecture (17 March 2015) was delivered by Professor Susan Jebb from Oxford University. The presentation was titled: ‘Knowledge, nudge and nanny: Opportunities to improve the nation’s diet’. In this guest blog Dr Helen Walls, Research Fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, covers key themes from this presentation.

“Obesity and related non-communicable disease such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer poses a significant health, social and economic burden in countries worldwide, including the United Kingdom. Whilst the need for action is clear, the nutrition policy response is a highly controversial topic. Professor Jebb raised the question of how best to achieve dietary change: through ‘knowledge, nudge or nanny’?

Education regarding healthy nutrition is an important strategy, but insufficient. People are notoriously bad at putting their knowledge to work. The inclination to overemphasise the importance of knowledge, whilst ignoring the influence of environmental factors on human behaviours, is termed the ‘fundamental attribution error’. Education may also contribute to widening inequities.

Our choices are strongly shaped by the environments in which we live. So if ‘knowledge’ is not enough, what sort of interventions are appropriate? This raises questions regarding individual choice and the role of government. Here, Professor Jebb introduced the Nuffield Intervention Ladder.

 

Nuffield Intervention Ladder
Nuffield Intervention Ladder
Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Public health ethical issues. London: Nuffield Council on Bioethics. 2007.

The Nuffield Intervention Ladder or what I will refer to as ‘the ladder’ describes intervention types from least to most intrusive on personal choice. With addressing diets and obesity, Professor Jebb believes we need a range of policy types, across the range of rungs on the ladder.

Less intrusive measures on the ladder could include provision of information about healthy and unhealthy foods, and provision of nutritional information on products (which helps knowledge be put into action). More effective than labelling is the signposting of healthier choices.

Taking a few steps up the ladder brings in ‘nudge’, a concept from behavioural economics. A nudge is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives. Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

Nudges are not mandates. Putting fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.

The in-store environment has a huge influence over our choices, and many nudge options would fit here. For example, gondalar-end (end of aisle) promotions create a huge up-lift in sales. Removing unhealthy products from this position could make a considerable difference to the contents of supermarket baskets.

Nudge could be used to assist people make better nutritional choices, but it’s also unlikely to be enough. We celebrate the achievement we have made with tobacco control policies and smoking reduction. Here, we use a range of intervention types, including many legislative measures – the ‘nanny’ aspect of the title of this presentation….(More)”

New surveys reveal dynamism, challenges of open data-driven businesses in developing countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alla Morrison at World Bank Open Data blog: “Was there a class of entrepreneurs emerging to take advantage of the economic possibilities offered by open data, were investors keen to back such companies, were governments tuned to and responsive to the demands of such companies, and what were some of the key financing challenges and opportunities in emerging markets? As we began our work on the concept of an Open Fund, we partnered with Ennovent (India), MDIF (East Asia and Latin America) and Digital Data Divide (Africa) to conduct short market surveys to answer these questions, with a focus on trying to understand whether a financing gap truly existed in these markets. The studies were fairly quick (4-6 weeks) and reached only a small number of companies (193 in India, 70 in Latin America, 63 in South East Asia, and 41 in Africa – and not everybody responded) but the findings were fairly consistent.

  • Open data is still a very nascent concept in emerging markets. and there’s only a small class of entrepreneurs/investors that is aware of the economic possibilities; there’s a lot of work to do in the ‘enabling environment’
    • In many regions the distinction between open data, big data, and private sector generated/scraped/collected data was blurry at best among entrepreneurs and investors (some of our findings consequently are better indicators of  data-driven rather than open data-driven businesses)
  • There’s a small but growing number of open data-driven companies in all the markets we surveyed and these companies target a wide range of consumers/users and are active in multiple sectors
    • A large percentage of identified companies operate in sectors with high social impact – health and wellness, environment, agriculture, transport. For instance, in India, after excluding business analytics companies, a third of data companies seeking financing are in healthcare and a fifth in food and agriculture, and some of them have the low-income population or the rural segment of India as an intended beneficiary segment. In Latin America, the number of companies in business services, research and analytics was closely followed by health, environment and agriculture. In Southeast Asia, business, consumer services, and transport came out in the lead.
    • We found the highest number of companies in Latin America and Asia with the following countries leading the way – Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, with Colombia and Argentina closely behind in Latin America; and India, Indonesia, Philippines, and Malaysia in Asia
  • An actionable pipeline of data-driven companies exists in Latin America and in Asia
    • We heard demand for different kinds of financing (equity, debt, working capital) but the majority of the need was for equity and quasi-equity in amounts ranging from $100,000 to $5 million USD, with averages of between $2 and $3 million USD depending on the region.
  • There’s a significant financing gap in all the markets
    • The investment sizes required, while they range up to several million dollars, are generally small. Analysis of more than 300 data companies in Latin America and Asia indicates a total estimated need for financing of more than $400 million
  • Venture capitals generally don’t recognize data as a separate sector and club data-driven companies with their standard information communication technology (ICT) investments
    • Interviews with founders suggest that moving beyond seed stage is particularly difficult for data-driven startups. While many companies are able to cobble together an initial seed round augmented by bootstrapping to get their idea off the ground, they face a great deal of difficulty when trying to raise a second, larger seed round or Series A investment.
    • From the perspective of startups, investors favor banal e-commerce (e.g., according toTech in Asia, out of the $645 million in technology investments made public across the region in 2013, 92% were related to fashion and online retail) or consumer service startups and ignore open data-focused startups even if they have a strong business model and solid key performance indicators. The space is ripe for a long-term investor with a generous risk appetite and multiple bottom line goals.
  • Poor data quality was the number one issue these companies reported.
    • Companies reported significant waste and inefficiency in accessing/scraping/cleaning data.

The analysis below borrows heavily from the work done by the partners. We should of course mention that the findings are provisional and should not be considered authoritative (please see the section on methodology for more details)….(More).”

The End of Asymmetric Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen: Might the age of asymmetric information – for better or worse – be over?  Market institutions are rapidly evolving to a situation where very often the buyer and the seller have roughly equal knowledge. Technological developments are giving everyone who wants it access to the very best information when it comes to product quality, worker performance, matches to friends and partners, and the nature of financial transactions, among many other areas.

These developments will have implications for how markets work, how much consumers benefit, and also economic policy and the law. As we will see, there may be some problematic sides to these new arrangements, specifically when it comes to privacy. Still, a large amount of economic regulation seems directed at a set of problems which, in large part, no longer exist…

Many “public choice” problems are really problems of asymmetric information. In William Niskanen’s (1974) model of bureaucracy, government workers usually benefit from larger bureaus, and they are able to expand their bureaus to inefficient size because they are the primary providers of information to politicians. Some bureaus, such as the NSA and the CIA, may still be able to use secrecy to benefit from information asymmetry. For instance they can claim to politicians that they need more resources to deter or prevent threats, and it is hard for the politicians to have well-informed responses on the other side of the argument. Timely, rich information about most other bureaucracies, however, is easily available to politicians and increasingly to the public as well. As information becomes more symmetric, Niskanen’s (1974) model becomes less applicable, and this may help check the growth of unneeded bureaucracy.

Cheap sensors are greatly extending how much information can be economically gathered and analyzed. It’s not uncommon for office workers to have every key stroke logged. When calling customer service, who has not been told “this call may be monitored for quality control purposes?” Service-call workers have their location tracked through cell phones. Even information that once was thought to be purely subjective can now be collected and analyzed, often with the aid of smart software or artificial intelligence. One firm, for example, uses badges equipped with microphones, accelerometers, and location sensors to measure tone of voice, posture, and body language, as well as who spoke to whom and for how long (Lohr 2014). The purpose is not only to monitor workers but to deduce when, where and why workers are the most productive. We are again seeing trade-offs which bring greater productivity, and limit asymmetric information, albeit at the expense of some privacy.

As information becomes more prevalent and symmetric, earlier solutions to asymmetric problems will become less necessary. When employers do not easily observe workers, for example, employers may pay workers unusually high wages, generating a rent. Workers will then work at high levels despite infrequent employer observation, to maintain their future rents (Shapiro and Stiglitz 1984). But those higher wages involved a cost, namely that fewer workers were hired, and the hires that were made often were directed to people who were already known to the firm. Better monitoring of workers will mean that employers will hire more people and furthermore they may be more willing to take chances on risky outsiders, rather than those applicants who come with impeccable pedigree. If the outsider does not work out and produce at an acceptable level, it is easy enough to figure this out and fire them later on….(More)”

International Statistical Agencies

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Via Census/BeSpacific – International Statistical Agencies – links to data from around the world. “The U.S. Census Bureau conducts demographic, economic, and geographic studies of other countries and strengthens statistical development around the world through technical assistance, training, and software products. For over 60 years, the Census Bureau has performed international analytical work and assisted in the collection, processing, analysis, dissemination, and use of statistics with counterpart governments in over 100 countries.”

Rebooting Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 John Boik, Lorenzo Fioramonti, and Gary Milante at Foreign Policy: “….The next generation of political and economic systems may look very different from the ones we know today.

Some changes along these lines are already happening. Civil society groups, cities, organizations, and government agencies have begun to experiment with a host of innovations that promote decentralization, redundancy, inclusion, and diversity. These include participatory budgeting, where residents of a city democratically choose how public monies are spent. They also include local currency systems, open-source development, open-design, open-data and open-government, public banking, “buy local” campaigns, crowdfunding, and socially responsible business models.

Such innovations are a type of churning on the edges of current systems. But in complex systems, changes at the periphery can cascade to changes at the core. Further, the speed of change is increasing. Consider the telephone, first introduced by Bell in 1876. It took about 75 years to reach adoption by 50 percent of the market. A century later the Internet did the same in about 35 years. We can expect that the next major innovations will be adopted even faster.

Following the examples of the telephone and Internet, it appears likely that the technology of new economic and political decision-making systems will first be adopted by small groups, then spread virally. Indeed, small groups, such as neighborhoods and cities, are among today’s leaders in innovation. The influence of larger bodies, such as big corporations and non-governmental organizations, is also growing steadily as nation states increasingly share their powers, willingly or not.

Changes are evident even within large corporations. Open-source software development has become the norm, for example, and companies as large as Toyota have announced plans to freely share their intellectual property.

While these innovations represent potentially important parts of new political and economic systems, they are only the tip of the iceberg. Systems engineering design could eventually integrate these and other innovations into efficient, user-friendly, scalable, and resilient whole systems. But the need for this kind of innovation is not yet universally acknowledged. In its list of 14 grand challenges for the 21st century, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering addresses many of the problems caused by poor decision making, such as climate change, but not the decision-making systems themselves. The work has only just begun.

…

The development of new options will dramatically alter how democracy is used, adjusted, and exported. Attention will shift toward groups, perhaps at the city/regional level, who wish to apply the flexible tools freely available on the Internet. Future practitioners of democracy will invest more time and resources to understand what communities want and need — helping them adapt designs to make them fit for their purpose — and to build networked systems that beneficially connect diverse groups into larger political and economic structures. In time, when the updates to next-generation political and economic near completion, we might find ourselves more fully embracing the notion “engage local, think global.”…(More)