Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene in GOVERNING: “The easier it is for us to find important information about cities, counties and states, the better we’re able to report on topics of interest to our readers. But transparency isn’t just about us. It can help citizen organizations, good government bodies, advocacy groups, the press at large and even the general public. What’s more, accessible information makes it easier for legislators and city council members to drill down to the facts, creating more capacity for informed decision-making.
To be sure, progress has been made on a number of transparency fronts, and we certainly appreciate the additional data we’re able to find easily each year. That said, from our personal experience and conversations with experts in the field, much of the talk about heightened transparency in government is more rhetoric than reality.
Take so-called “online spending transparency,” or Web-based checkbooks that offer a clear and simple way to see where tax dollars are going. All 50 states have them. Optimally users would get, according to the nonprofit U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a host of “checkbook-level information about expenditures including those made through contracts, grants, tax credits and other discretionary spending.”
Sounds swell, and in fact, PIRG’s studies of the 50 states have revealed consistent improvement. Each year, the organization has raised the bar on its criteria for grading the states. Still, in its most recent work, five states were given an F: California, Hawaii, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Wyoming. According to Phineas Baxandall, senior analyst for U.S. PIRG, in lagging and failing states—the dozen that got D’s and F’s—“you’ll find PDFs instead of searchable, sortable databases; you’ll find much more partial information about departments, and they generally don’t integrate economic subsidies.”
When it comes to disclosures of any kind there’s a huge chunk of information that’s as transparent as a window with the blinds closed. This includes a host of entities that generally don’t get their cash through the general fund. Starting the list are affiliated not-for-profits set up to provide government services and often funded through so-called “corporate funds” or grants, as well as public-private partnerships, authorities and a variety of other quasi-governmental bodies.”
Open Data and Citizen Engagement – Disentangling the Relationship
Tiago Peixoto: “…Within an ecosystem that combines transparency and participation, examining the relationship between the two becomes essential. More specifically, a clearer understanding of the interaction between open data and participatory institutions remains a frontier to be explored….
R&D for Data-Driven Participation
Coming up with clear hypotheses and testing them is essential if we are to move forward with the ecosystem that brings together open data, participation and accountability. Surely, many organizations working in the open government space are operating with limited resources, squeezing their budgets to keep their operational work going. In this sense, conducting experiments to test hypotheses may appear as a luxury that very few can afford.
Nevertheless, one of the opportunities provided by the use of technologies for civic behavior is that of potentially driving down the costs for experimentation. For instance, online and mobile experiments could play the role of tech-enabled (and affordable) randomized controlled trials, improving our understanding of how open data can be best used to spur collective action. Thinking of the ways in which technology can be used to conduct lowered costs experiments to shed light on behavioral and causal chains is still limited to a small number of people and organizations, and much work is needed on that front.
Yet, it is also important to acknowledge that experiments are not the only source of relevant knowledge. To stick with a simple example, in some cases even an online survey trying to figure out who is accessing data, what data they use, and how they use it may provide us with valuable knowledge about the interaction between open data and citizen action. In any case, however, it may be important that the actors working in that space agree upon a minimal framework that facilitates comparison and incremental learning: the field of technology for accountability desperately needs a more coordinated research agenda.
Citizen Data Platforms?
As more and more players engage in participatory initiatives, there is a significant amount of citizen-generated data being collected, which is important on its own. However, in a similar vein to government data, the potential of citizen data may be further unlocked if openly available to third parties who can learn from it and build upon it. In this respect, it might not be long before we realize the need to have adequate structures and platforms to host this wealth of data that – hopefully – will be increasingly generated around the world. This would entail that not only governments open up their data related to citizen engagement initiatives, but also that other actors working in that field – such as donors and NGOs – do the same. Such structures would also be the means by which lessons generated by experiments and other approaches are widely shared, bringing cumulative knowledge to the field.
However, as we think of future scenarios, we should not lose sight of current challenges and knowledge gaps when it comes to the relationship between citizen engagement and open data. Better disentangling the relationship between the two is the most immediate priority, and a long overdue topic in the open government conversation.”
Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Funds
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 crowdsourcing was originally published in 2013.
Crowdsourcing funds, or crowdfunding, is an emerging method for raising money that allows a wide pool of people to make small investments, gain access to ideas and projects they feel personally connected to, and spur growth in small businesses and social ventures. Popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo helped bring the practice into the public consciousness. Now, civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor and Spacehive are helping to apply this innovative funding model already in use for helping to fund artists, charities and inventors to help address public concerns traditionally considered under government’s purview.
Crowdfunding has also received recent attention from policymakers in the US through the US Securities JOBS Act, which provides an exemption from the registration requirements for offerings of securities by a company made through an SEC registered Crowdfunding Platform.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Tanja Aitamurto — The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism — an article exploring crowdfunding in journalism, particularly related to reporting for the benefit of the public good.
- Peter Baeck and Liam Collins — Working the Crowd: A Short Guide to Crowdfunding and How It Can Work for You — a general overview of crowdfunding models and the technological advances that make them possible.
- Jason Best, Sherwood Neiss and Davis Jones — How Crowdfund Investing Helps Solve Three Pressing Socioeconomic Challenges — a paper describing the various public benefits of the rise of crowdfunding.
- Kristof De Buysere, Oliver Gajda, Ronald Kleverlaan, Dan Marom and Matthias Klaes — A Framework for European Crowdfunding — an exploration of the crowdfunding ecosystem in Europe with an eye toward developing strategic crowdfunding policy frameworks for the continent.
- Matthew Hollow — Crowdfunding and Civic Society in Europe: A Profitable Partnership? — a paper on crowdfunding’s effects on civil society in Europe.
- Ethan R. Mollick — The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study — an overview of the varied dynamics of success and failure in crowdfunding initiatives.
- Abbey R. Stemler — The JOBS Act and Crowdfunding: Harnessing the Power—and Money—of the Masses — a discussion of the JOBS Act’s effects on the public, including changing the relationship between businesses and the government.
Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Aitamurto, Tanja. “The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism.” Journalism Practice 5, no. 4 (2011): 429–445. http://bit.ly/1bk4wNI.
- This article analyzes the impact of crowdfunding on journalism, where, “readers’ donations accumulate into judgments about the issues that need to be covered.”
- Aitamurto’s central findings inspire optimism regarding the potential of crowdfunding for the public good. She finds that, “From the donor’s perspective, donating does not create a strong relationship from donor to journalist or to the story to which they contributed;” rather, “[t]he primary motivation for donating is to contribute to the common good and social change.”
Baeck, Peter and Liam Collins. Working the Crowd: A Short Guide to Crowdfunding and How It Can Work for You. Nesta, May 2013. http://bit.ly/Hkl3rx.
- This report “aims to give a quick overview of crowdfunding, the different versions of the model and how they work.”
- The authors list four technological innovations that have contributed to the growth of modern crowdfunding:
- An online place for pitches
- Moving your money with a click
- The social engine
- Fueling campaigns with algorithms
- Baeck and Collins consider public and social projects to be one of the areas where crowdfunding can have a significant impact. They argue that civic crowdfunding “has the potential to disrupt how money for charitable causes is sourced and how public services and spaces are used and paid for.”
Best, Jason, Sherwood Neiss and Davis Jones. “How Crowdfund Investing Helps Solve Three Pressing Socioeconomic Challenges.” Crowdfunding PR, Social Media & Marketing Campaigns. http://bit.ly/1aaTGwQ.
- This paper outlines the forces driving the widespread use of crowdfund investing, namely social media, the existence of funding systems that marginalize people outside of major urban centers and the ability of people to function remotely from their work spaces.
- The authors also discuss a number of public-facing benefits of crowdfund investing:
- Crowdfund Investing Creates Jobs
- Bringing capital in off the sidelines for use by small businesses
- Funding entrepreneurs everywhere
- Capital no longer for the chosen few
- Crowdfund Investing Grows GDP
- Reduction in the failure rate of small businesses
- Crowd monitoring reduces agency costs
De Buysere, Kristof, Oliver Gajda, Ronald Kleverlaan, Dan Marom, and Matthias Klaes. A Framework for European Crowdfunding, 2012. http://bit.ly/1aaTFsE.
- This paper seeks to provide a “concise overview of the state of crowdfunding in Europe, with the aim of establishing policy and a distinct framework for the European crowdfunding industry,” which the authors believe, “will aid in the economic recovery of Europe.”
- The authors, in their advocacy for greater crowdfunding opportunities for businesses in Europe, provide a rationale for the practice that also helps demonstrate the potential benefits of greater crowdfunding opportunities within government. They argue that, “Crowdfunding can offer unique support for budding and existing entrepreneurs on multiple levels. No other investment form, be it debt or equity, can provide the benefits of pre-sales, market research, word-of-mouth promotion, and crowd wisdom without additional cost.”
Hollow, Matthew. “Crowdfunding and Civic Society in Europe: A Profitable Partnership?” Open Citizenship 4, no. 1 (May 20, 2013). http://bit.ly/1cgzefL.
- In this paper, Hollow explores the rise of crowdfunding platforms (CFPs), particularly related to civil society. He notes that, “[f]or civil society activists and others concerned with local welfare issues, the emergence of these new CFPs has been hugely significant: It has opened up a new source of funding when governments and businesses around the world are cutting back on their spending.”
- Hollow argues that, “aside from their evident financial and economic benefits, CFPs also have the capacity to help foster and strengthen non-parliamentary democratic structures and practices. As such, they should be supported and encouraged as part of a framework of further European democratization and civic integration.”
Mollick, Ethan R. “The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Business Venturing (June 26, 2013). http://bit.ly/1aaTJIV.
- This paper “offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures,” focusing on how personal networks and the project quality and viability have an impact on the success of crowdfunding efforts.
- Mollick also highlights how other factors, like the geography of the project, design choices made by crowdfunding sites and developments in technology in this space all have an influence on the relationship between backers and project founders.
- The paper finally demonstrates that projects that succeed do so by a small margin and those that fail seemingly by a large margin suggesting the influence of social bias and crowd influence.
Stemler, Abbey R. “The JOBS Act and Crowdfunding: Harnessing the Power—and Money—of the Masses.” Business Horizons 56, no. 3 (May 2013): 271–275. http://bit.ly/1ih9lts.
- This paper discusses the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act signed into law by President Obama in 2012, with a specific focus on the CROWDFUND Act, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to sell limited equity in their companies to a “crowd” of investors.
- The objective of the Act is to exempt crowdfunding from registration requirement costs, allowing the potential of equity-based funding to be realized, by creating a pathway for underfunded entrepreneurs to access otherwise inaccessible streams of funding.
- Stemler argues that the Act helps to legitimize crowdfunding as a community-building and fundraising tool for the business community, and also helps build better relationships between small business owners and government.
How the City of San Francisco uses Social Media to Connect with Citizens
SalesForce Marketing Cloud: “San Francisco is one of the most diverse cities in the world and home to some of the most tech-savvy and innovative people in the world. …The city currently monitors 33 Facebook accounts, 39 Twitter accounts and 16 YouTube accounts – each is tracked by their respective department. This allows for a wide breadth of two-way conversation on regional issues. Employees are also taking steps to increase their social monitoring with a focus on public safety. High-tech people expect a high-tech government and the City of San Francisco is delivering this in spades.
Check out the video below to learn more about the amazing work the City and County of San Francisco are doing with social engagement.”
Healthcare.gov and the Gulf Between Planning and Reality
Clay Shirky: “This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem. This is a management problem, and a cultural problem. The preferred method for implementing large technology projects in Washington is to write the plans up front, break them into increasingly detailed specifications, then build what the specifications call for. It’s often called the waterfall method, because on a timeline the project cascades from planning, at the top left of the chart, down to implementation, on the bottom right.
Like all organizational models, waterfall is mainly a theory of collaboration. By putting the most serious planning at the beginning, with subsequent work derived from the plan, the waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the actual work. Instead, waterfall insists that the participants will understand best how things should work before accumulating any real-world experience, and that planners will always know more than workers.
This is a perfect fit for a culture that communicates in the deontic language of legislation. It is also a dreadful way to make new technology. If there is no room for learning by doing, early mistakes will resist correction. If the people with real technical knowledge can’t deliver bad news up the chain, potential failures get embedded rather than uprooted as the work goes on….
Given examples of technological success from commercial firms, a common response is that the government has special constraints, and thus cannot develop projects piecemeal, test with citizens, or learn from its mistakes in public. I was up at the Kennedy School a month after the launch, talking about technical leadership and Healthcare.gov, when one of the audience members made just this point, proposing that the difficult launch was unavoidable, because the government simply couldn’t have tested bits of the project over time.
That observation illustrates the gulf between planning and reality in political circles. It is hard for policy people to imagine that Healthcare.gov could have had a phased rollout, even while it is having one.
At launch, on October 1, only a tiny fraction of potential users could actually try the service. They generated concrete errors. Those errors were handed to a team whose job was to improve the site, already public but only partially working. The resulting improvements are incremental, and put in place over a period of months. That is a phased rollout, just one conducted in the worst possible way.
The vision of “technology” as something you can buy according to a plan, then have delivered as if it were coming off a truck, flatters and relieves managers who have no idea and no interest in how this stuff works, but it’s also a breeding ground for disaster. The mismatch between technical competence and executive authority is at least as bad in government now as it was in media companies in the 1990s, but with much more at stake…
Now, and from now on, government will interact with its citizens via the internet, in increasingly important ways. This is a non-partisan issue; whichever party is in the White House will build and launch new forms of public service online. Unfortunately for us, the last new technology the government adopted for interacting with citizens was the fax; our senior political figures have little habit of talking to their own technically adept employees.
If I had to design a litmus test for whether our political class grasps the internet, I would look for just one signal: Can anyone with authority over a new project articulate the tradeoff between features, quality, and time?
When a project cannot meet all three goals—a situation Healthcare.gov was clearly in by March—something will give. If you want certain features at a certain level of quality, you’d better be able to move the deadline. If you want overall quality by a certain deadline, you’d better be able to delay or drop features. And if you have a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.
Intoning “Failure is not an option” will be at best useless, and at worst harmful. There is no “Suddenly Go Faster” button, no way you can throw in money or additional developers as a late-stage accelerant; money is not directly tradable for either quality or speed, and adding more programmers to a late project makes it later. You can slip deadlines, reduce features, or, as a last resort, just launch and see what breaks.
Denying this tradeoff doesn’t prevent it from happening. If no one with authority over the project understands that, the tradeoff is likely to mean sacrificing quality by default. That just happened to this administration’s signature policy goal. It will happen again, as long politicians can be allowed to imagine that if you just plan hard enough, you can ignore reality. It will happen again, as long as department heads imagine that complex technology can be procured like pencils. It will happen again as long as management regards listening to the people who understand the technology as a distasteful act.”
Google's Civic Information API: now connecting US users with their representatives
Jonathan Tomer, Software Engineer at Google Blog: “Many applications track and map governmental data, but few help their users identify the relevant local public officials. Too often local problems are divorced from the government institutions designed to help. Today, we’re launching new functionality in the Google Civic Information API that lets developers connect constituents to their federal, state, county and municipal elected officials—right down to the city council district.
The Civic Information API has already helped developers create apps for US elections that incorporate polling place and ballot information, from helping those affected by Superstorm Sandy find updated polling locations over SMS to learning more about local races through social networks. We want to support these developers in their work beyond elections, including everyday civic engagement.
In addition to elected representatives, the API also returns your political jurisdictions using Open Civic Data Identifiers. We worked with the Sunlight Foundation and other civic technology groups to create this new open standard to make it easier for developers to combine the Civic Information API with their datasets. For example, once you look up districts and representatives in the Civic Information API, you can match the districts up to historical election results published by Open Elections.
Developers can head over to the documentation to get started; be sure to check out the “Map Your Reps” sample application from Bow & Arrow to get a sense of what the API can do. You can also see the API in action today through new features from some of our partners, for example:
- Change.org has implemented a new Decision Makers feature which allows users to direct a petition to their elected representative and lists that petition publicly on the representative’s profile page. As a result, the leader has better insight into the issues being discussed in their district, and a new channel to respond to constituents.
- PopVox helps users share their opinions on bills with their Congressional Representatives in a meaningful format. PopVox uses the API to connect the user to the correct Congressional District. Because PopVox verifies that users are real constituents, the opinions shared with elected officials have more impact on the political process.
Over time, we will expand beyond US elected representatives and elections to other data types and places. We can’t grow without your help. As you use the API, please visit our Developer Forum to share your experiences and tell us how we can help you build the next generation of civic apps and services.”
Open Government Guide
Open Government Partnership: “We were proud to unveil the new Open Government Guide… The Guide—with its accompanying web site—has been developed to support this action planning in three ways :
- It gives readers an overview of what open government means across a range of topics, to help countries identify core ‘cross-cutting issues’ (like conflict of interest management, and public contracting) and to select amongst ‘focused’ issues (like land, police, and extractive industries).
- For each topic, it also provides a “deep dive”, outlining potential commitments tagged as basic, intermediate, advanced and innovative.
- It links to other resources – over 330 case studies and country examples, and external resources on standards .
To read the Guide go to OpenGovGuide.com. You can also use the Report Builder function and create a custom download tailored to your own country or to the officials and other audiences in the local planning process.
Anyone seeking governance reforms, from inside or outside government, faces political as well as logistical challenges, so the Guide is also intended to serve as a way to frame the sometimes difficult conversations about the steps to make reform a reality and show examples from other countries
The OGP process includes four “cohorts” of countries. The largest group are currently drafting their first action plans, and another cohort are already at work on their second plans. The Open Government Guide can help any group seeking to promote reform.
While the Guide is quite comprehensive, it is also a living document. We will continue to add more detailed topic areas. A new section is currently in development on the security sector, drafted by the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Initiative and including recommendations on transparency and accountability of military spending and on surveillance, drawing on the new International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance and the Global Principles on National Security and the Right to Information (The Tswhane Principles). To preview and comment on this document, please watch for the draft version at www.opengovguide.com/news. “
Social innovation, an answer to contemporary societal challenges? Locating the concept in theory and practice
Paper by R. Grimm, C. Fox, S. Baines, and K. Albertson in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research: “Social innovation discourses see in social challenges opportunities to make societies more sustainable and cohesive through inclusive practices, coproduction and pro-active grassroots initiatives. In this paper we are concerned first that the concept has been stretched in so many directions that it is at breaking point. We illustrate this by documenting the varied uses of social innovation in different academic and policy discourses. Second, we assume that, if social innovation is to be a useful concept for policy-makers, then it must tell us something about what adjustments are needed to develop an effective political economy that is social innovation ready. Finally, we argue that what is needed is more theoretical and empirical work to help social innovation to develop into an effective policy tool”
Innovation in Multi-Stakeholder Engagement
New INSEAD working paper by Mahroum, Sami, Bell, Simon and Yassin, Nasser: “This paper is concerned with the multitude of interleaving issues which emerge when engaging multiple stakeholders in decision making. Whilst recognising the intrinsic values of group work (including shared views, wide option selection, public spirited focus, legitimacy of decisions and improved intellectual content) and keeping in mind the numerous issues which confuse and obscure clear findings from group work (including multiple roles for participants, bias due to domination and distortion emerging from uneven group inputs) this paper uses an innovative methodology – the Triple Task – to propose a new framework for organising multi-stakeholder consultations. The Triple Task methodology was applied to test the new framework on multi-stakeholders in the context of education in Abu Dhabi, where various small groups were tasked and assessed using the methodology. The results indicate that moving participants from heterogeneous to homogenous groups results on these groups becoming more focused in their outcomes with greater clarity in the thinking of group members”
Smithsonian turns to crowdsourcing for massive digitization project
PandoDaily: “There are 5 million plant specimens in the US Herbarium at the Natural History Museum’s Botany Department, one of the most extensive collections of plant life in the world. They all have labels. But only 1.3 million of those labels can be read by computers. That’s where you come in.
Jason Shen and Sarah Allen, a pair of Presidential Innovation Fellows working with the Smithsonian Institute to improve its open data initiatives, have gone all Mechanical Turk on the esteemed knowledge network.
In a pilot project that is serving as a test run for other large Smithsonian scientific collections – accouning for a total of about 126 million specimens – the innovation fellows are crowdsourcing the transcription of scanned images of the labels.
To get involved, you don’t need to commit to a certain number of hours, or make yourself available at specific times. You just log into the Smithsonian’s recently established transcription site, select a project to work on, and start transcribing. Different volunteers can work on the same project at different times. When you’ve done your bit, you submit it for review, at which point a different volunteer comes in to check to see that you’ve done the transcription correctly.
So, for instance, you might get to look at specimens collected by Martin W. Gorman on his 1902 expedition to Alaska’s Lake Iliamna Region, and read his thoughts on his curious findings. If you’re the type to get excited by a bit of vintage potentilla fruitcosa, then this is your Disneyland.
It’s the sort of crowdsourcing initiative that has been going on for years in other corners of the Internet, but the Smithsonian is only just getting going. It has long thought of itself as passer-on of knowledge – its mission is “the increase and diffusion of knowledge” – with the public as inherent recipients rather than contributors, so the “let’s get everyone to help us with this gargantuan task” mentality has not been its default position. It does rely on a lot of volunteers to lead tours and maintain back rooms, and the likes, but organizing knowledge is another thing…
Shen and Allen quietly launched the Smithsonian Transcription Center in August as part of a wider effort to digitize all of the Institute’s collections. The Herbarium effort is one of the most significant to date, but other projects have included field notes of bird observations to letters written between 20th-century American artists. More than 1,400 volunteers have contributed to the projects to date, accounting for more than 18,000 transcriptions.”