Could the open government movement shut the door on Freedom of Information

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

,  and  in The Conversation: “For democracy to work, citizens need to know what their government is doing. Then they can hold government officials and institutions accountable.

Over the last 50 years, Freedom of Information – or FOI – laws have been one of the most useful methods for citizens to learn what government is doing. These state and federal laws give people the power to request, and get, government documents. From everyday citizens to journalists, FOI laws have proven a powerful way to uncover the often-secret workings of government.

But a potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws.

We are scholars of government administration, ethics and transparency. And our research leads us to believe that while FOI laws have always faced many challenges, including resistance, evasion,  and poor implementation and enforcement, the last decade has brought a different kind of challenge in the form of a new approach to transparency….

The open government movement could help FOI implementation. Government information posted online, which is a core goal of open government advocates, can reduce the number of FOI requests. Open government initiatives can explicitly promote FOI by encouraging the passage of FOI laws, offering more training for officials who fill FOI requests, and developing technologies to make it easier to process and track FOI requests.

On the other hand, the relationship between open government and FOI may not always be positive in practice.

First, as with all kinds of public policy issues, resources – both money and political attention – are inherently scarce. Government officials now have to divide their attention between FOI and other open government initiatives. And funders now have to divide their financial resources between FOI and other open government initiatives.

Second, the open government reform movement as well as the FOI movement have long depended on nonprofit advocacy groups – from the National Freedom of Information Coalition and its state affiliates to the Sunlight Foundation – to obtain and disseminate government information. This means that the financial stability of those nonprofit groups is crucial. But their efforts, as they grow, may each only get a shrinking portion of the total amount of grant money available. Freedominfo.org, a website for gathering and comparing information on FOI laws around the world, had to suspend its operations in 2017 due to resources drying up.

We believe that priorities among government officials and good government advocates may also shift away from FOI. At a time when open data is “hot,” FOI programs could get squeezed as a result of this competition. Further, by allowing governments to claim credit for more politically convenient reforms such as online data portals, the open government agenda may create a false sense of transparency – there’s a lot more government information that isn’t available in those portals.

This criticism was leveled recently against Kenya, whose government launched a high-profile open data portal for publishing data on government performance and activities in 2011, yet delayed passage of an FOI law until 2016.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, one government minister said in 2012,“I’d like to make Freedom of Information redundant, by pushing out so much data that people won’t have to ask for it.”…(More)”

Issuing Bonds to Invest in People

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tina Rosenberg at the New York Times: “The first social impact bond began in 2010 in Peterborough, England. Investors funded a program aimed at keeping newly released short-term inmates out of prison. It reduced reoffending by 9 percent compared to a control group, exceeding its target. So investors got their money back, plus interest.

Seldom has a policy idea gone viral so fast. There are now 108 such bonds, in 24 countries. The United States has 20, leveraging $211 million in investment capital, and at least 50 more are on the way. These bonds fund programs to reduce Oklahoma’s population of women in prison, help low-income mothers to have healthy pregnancies in South Carolina, teach refugees and immigrants English and job skills in Boston, house the homeless in Denver, and reduce storm water runoff in the District of Columbia. There’s a Forest Resilience Bond underway that seeks to finance desperately needed wildfire prevention.

Here’s how social impact bonds differ from standard social programs:

They raise upfront money to do prevention. Everyone knows most prevention is a great investment. But politicians don’t do “think ahead” very well. They hate to spend money now to create savings their successors will reap. Issuing a social impact bond means they don’t have to.

They concentrate resources on what works. Bonds build market discipline, since investors demand evidence of success.

They focus attention on outcomes rather than outputs. “Take work-force training,” said David Wilkinson, commissioner of Connecticut’s Office of Early Childhood. “We tend to pay for how many people receive training. We’re less likely to pay for — or even look at — how many people get good jobs.” Providers, he said, were best recognized for their work “when we reward them for outcomes they want to see and families they are serving want to achieve.”

They improve incentives.Focusing on outcomes changes the way social service providers think. In Connecticut, said Duryea, they now have a financial incentive to keep children out of foster care, rather than bring more in.

They force decision makers to look at data. Programs start with great fanfare, but often nobody then examines how they are doing. But with a bond, evaluation is essential.

They build in flexibility.“It’s a big advantage that they don’t prescribe what needs to be done,” said Cohen. The people on the ground choose the strategy, and can change it if necessary. “Innovators can think outside the box and tackle health or education in revolutionary ways,” he said.

…In the United States, social impact bonds have become synonymous with “pay for success” programs. But there are other ways to pay for success. For example, Wilkinson, the Connecticut official, has just started an Outcomes Rate Card — a way for a government to pay for home visits for vulnerable families. The social service agencies get base pay, but also bonuses. If a client has a full-term birth, the agency gets an extra $135 for a low-risk family, $170 for a hard-to-help one. A client who finds stable housing brings $150 or $220 to the agency, depending on the family’s situation….(More)”.

The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Open Access Book by Justin Parkhurst: “There has been an enormous increase in interest in the use of evidence for public policymaking, but the vast majority of work on the subject has failed to engage with the political nature of decision making and how this influences the ways in which evidence will be used (or misused) within political areas. This book provides new insights into the nature of political bias with regards to evidence and critically considers what an ‘improved’ use of evidence would look like from a policymaking perspective.

Part I describes the great potential for evidence to help achieve social goals, as well as the challenges raised by the political nature of policymaking. It explores the concern of evidence advocates that political interests drive the misuse or manipulation of evidence, as well as counter-concerns of critical policy scholars about how appeals to ‘evidence-based policy’ can depoliticise political debates. Both concerns reflect forms of bias – the first representing technical bias, whereby evidence use violates principles of scientific best practice, and the second representing issue bias in how appeals to evidence can shift political debates to particular questions or marginalise policy-relevant social concerns.

Part II then draws on the fields of policy studies and cognitive psychology to understand the origins and mechanisms of both forms of bias in relation to political interests and values. It illustrates how such biases are not only common, but can be much more predictable once we recognise their origins and manifestations in policy arenas.

Finally, Part III discusses ways to move forward for those seeking to improve the use of evidence in public policymaking. It explores what constitutes ‘good evidence for policy’, as well as the ‘good use of evidence’ within policy processes, and considers how to build evidence-advisory institutions that embed key principles of both scientific good practice and democratic representation. Taken as a whole, the approach promoted is termed the ‘good governance of evidence’ – a concept that represents the use of rigorous, systematic and technically valid pieces of evidence within decision-making processes that are representative of, and accountable to, populations served….(More)”.

The world’s first blockchain-powered elections just happened in Sierra Leone

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Yomi Kazeem in Quartz: “On Mar. 7, elections in Sierra Leone marked a global landmark: the world’s first ever blockchain-powered presidential elections….

In Sierra Leone’s Western District, the most populous in the country, votes cast were manually recorded by Agora, a Swiss foundation offering digital voting solutions, using a permissioned blockchain. The idea was simple: just like blockchain technology helps ensure transparency with crytpocurrency transactions using public ledgers, by recording each vote on blockchain, Agora ensured transparency with votes cast in the district. While entries on permissioned blockchains can be viewed by everyone, entries can only be validated by authorized persons.

A lack of transparency has plagued many elections around the world, but particularly in some African countries where large sections of the electorate are often suspicions incumbent parties or ethnic loyalties have been responsible for the manipulation of the results in favor of one candidate or another. These suspicions remain even when there is little evidence of manipulation. A more transparent system could help restore trust.

Leonardo Gammar, CEO of Agora, says Sierra Leone’s NEC was “open minded” about the potential of blockchain in its elections after talks began late last year. “I also thought that if we can do it in Sierra Leone, we can do it everywhere else,” he says. That thinking is rooted in Sierra Leone’s developmental challenges which make electoral transparency difficult: poor network connectivity, low literacy levels and frequent electoral violence.

The big picture for Agora is to deploy solutions to automate the entire electoral process with citizens voting electronically using biometric data and personalized cryptographic keys and the votes in turn validated by blockchain. Gammar hopes Agora can replicate its work in other African elections on a larger scale but admits that doing so will require understanding the differing challenges each country faces.

Gammar says blockchain-powered electronic voting will be cheaper for African countries by cutting out the printing cost of paper-based elections but perhaps, more importantly, vastly reduce electoral violence…(More)”.

NASA’s Asteroid Grand Challenge: Strategy, results, and lessons learned

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jennifer L. Gustetic et al in Space Policy: “Beginning in 2012, NASA utilized a strategic process to identify broad societal questions, or grand challenges, that are well suited to the aerospace sector and align with national priorities. This effort generated NASA’s first grand challenge, the Asteroid Grand Challenge (AGC), a large-scale effort using multi-disciplinary collaborations and innovative engagement mechanisms focused on finding and addressing asteroid threats to human populations. In April 2010, President Barack Obama announced a mission to send humans to an asteroid by 2025. This resulted in the agency’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) to leverage and maximize existing robotic and human efforts to capture and reroute an asteroid, with the goal of eventual human exploration. The AGC, initiated in 2013, complemented ARM by expanding public participation, partnerships, and other approaches to find, understand, and overcome these potentially harmful asteroids.

This paper describes a selection of AGC activities implemented from 2013 to 2017 and their results, excluding those conducted by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program and other organizations. The strategic development of the initiative is outlined as well as initial successes, strengths, and weaknesses resulting from the first four years of AGC activities and approaches. Finally, we describe lesson learned and areas for continued work and study. The AGC lessons learned and strategies could inform the work of other agencies and organizations seeking to conduct a global scientific investigation with matrixed organizational support, multiple strategic partners, and numerous internal and external open innovation approaches and audiences….(More)”.

 

How tech used to track the flu could change the game for public health response

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Cathie Anderson in the Sacramento Bee: “Tech entrepreneurs and academic researchers are tracking the spread of flu in real-time, collecting data from social media and internet-connected devices that show startling accuracy when compared against surveillance data that public health officials don’t report until a week or two later….

Smart devices and mobile apps have the potential to reshape public health alerts and responses,…, for instance, the staff of smart thermometer maker Kinsa were receiving temperature readings that augured the surge of flu patients in emergency rooms there.

Kinsa thermometers are part of the movement toward the Internet of Things – devices that automatically transmit information to a database. No personal information is shared, unless users decide to input information such as age and gender. Using data from more than 1 million devices in U.S. homes, the staff is able to track fever as it hits and use an algorithm to estimate impact for a broader population….

Computational researcher Aaron Miller worked with an epidemiological team at the University of Iowa to assess the feasibility of using Kinsa data to forecast the spread of flu. He said the team first built a model using surveillance data from the CDC and used it to forecast the spread of influenza. Then the team created a model where they integrated the data from Kinsa along with that from the CDC.

“We got predictions that were … 10 to 50 percent better at predicting the spread of flu than when we used CDC data alone,” Miller said. “Potentially, in the future, if you had granular information from the devices and you had enough information, you could imagine doing analysis on a really local level to inform things like school closings.”

While Kinsa uses readings taken in homes, academic researchers and companies such as sickweather.com are using crowdsourcing from social media networks to provide information on the spread of flu. Siddharth Shah, a transformational health industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, pointed to an award-winning international study led by researchers at Northeastern University that tracked flu through Twitter posts and other key parameters of flu.

When compared with official influenza surveillance systems, the researchers said, the model accurately forecast the evolution of influenza up to six weeks in advance, much earlier than prior models. Such advance warnings would give health agencies significantly more time to expand upon medical resources or to alert the public to measures they can take to prevent transmission of the disease….

For now, Shah said, technology will probably only augment or complement traditional public data streams. However, he added, innovations already are changing how diseases are tracked. Chronic disease management, for instance, is going digital with devices such as Omada health that helps people with Type 2 diabetes better manage health challenges and Noom, a mobile app that helps people stop dieting and instead work toward true lifestyle change….(More).

Ostrom in the City: Design Principles and Practices for the Urban Commons

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Chapter by Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione in Routledge Handbook of the Study of the Commons (Dan Cole, Blake Hudson, Jonathan Rosenbloom eds.): “If cities are the places where most of the world’s population will be living in the next century, as is predicted, it is not surprising that they have become sites of contestation over use and access to urban land, open space, infrastructure, and culture. The question posed by Saskia Sassen in a recent essay—who owns the city?—is arguably at the root of these contestations and of social movements that resist the enclosure of cities by economic elites (Sassen 2015). One answer to the question of who owns the city is that we all do. In our work we argue that the city is a common good or a “commons”—a shared resource that belongs to all of its inhabitants, and to the public more generally.

We have been writing about the urban commons for the last decade, very much inspired by the work of Jane Jacobs and Elinor Ostrom. The idea of the urban commons captures the ecological view of the city that characterizes Jane Jacobs classic work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. (Foster 2006) It also builds on Elinor Ostrom’s finding that common resources are capable of being collectively managed by users in ways that support their needs yet sustains the resource over the long run (Ostrom 1990).

Jacobs analyzed cities as complex, organic systems and observed the activity within them at the neighborhood and street level, much like an ecologist would study natural habitats and the species interacting within them. She emphasized the diversity of land use, of people and neighborhoods, and the interaction among them as important to maintaining the ecological balance of urban life in great cities like New York. Jacob’s critique of the urban renewal slum clearance programs of the 1940s and 50s in the United States was focused not just on the destruction of physical neighborhoods, but also on the destruction of the “irreplaceable social capital”—the networks of residents who build and strengthen working relationships over time through trust and voluntary cooperation—necessary for “self-governance” of urban neighborhoods. (Jacobs 1961) As political scientist Douglas Rae has written, this social capital is the “civic fauna” of urbanism (Rae 2003)…(More)”.

Artificial intelligence could identify gang crimes—and ignite an ethical firestorm

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matthew Hutson at Science: “When someone roughs up a pedestrian, robs a store, or kills in cold blood, police want to know whether the perpetrator was a gang member: Do they need to send in a special enforcement team? Should they expect a crime in retaliation? Now, a new algorithm is trying to automate the process of identifying gang crimes. But some scientists warn that far from reducing gang violence, the program could do the opposite by eroding trust in communities, or it could brand innocent people as gang members.

That has created some tensions. At a presentation of the new program this month, one audience member grew so upset he stormed out of the talk, and some of the creators of the program have been tight-lipped about how it could be used….

For years, scientists have been using computer algorithms to map criminal networks, or to guess where and when future crimes might take place, a practice known as predictive policing. But little work has been done on labeling past crimes as gang-related.

In the new work, researchers developed a system that can identify a crime as gang-related based on only four pieces of information: the primary weapon, the number of suspects, and the neighborhood and location (such as an alley or street corner) where the crime took place. Such analytics, which can help characterize crimes before they’re fully investigated, could change how police respond, says Doug Haubert, city prosecutor for Long Beach, California, who has authored strategies on gang prevention.

To classify crimes, the researchers invented something called a partially generative neural network. A neural network is made of layers of small computing elements that process data in a way reminiscent of the brain’s neurons. A form of machine learning, it improves based on feedback—whether its judgments were right. In this case, researchers trained their algorithm using data from the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in California from 2014 to 2016 on more than 50,000 gang-related and non–gang-related homicides, aggravated assaults, and robberies.

The researchers then tested their algorithm on another set of LAPD data. The network was “partially generative,” because even when it did not receive an officer’s narrative summary of a crime, it could use the four factors noted above to fill in that missing information and then use all the pieces to infer whether a crime was gang-related. Compared with a stripped-down version of the network that didn’t use this novel approach, the partially generative algorithm reduced errors by close to 30%, the team reported at the Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES) conference this month in New Orleans, Louisiana. The researchers have not yet tested their algorithm’s accuracy against trained officers.

It’s an “interesting paper,” says Pete Burnap, a computer scientist at Cardiff University who has studied crime data. But although the predictions could be useful, it’s possible they would be no better than officers’ intuitions, he says. Haubert agrees, but he says that having the assistance of data modeling could sometimes produce “better and faster results.” Such analytics, he says, “would be especially useful in large urban areas where a lot of data is available.”…(More).

Infection forecasts powered by big data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael Eisenstein at Nature: “…The good news is that the present era of widespread access to the Internet and digital health has created a rich reservoir of valuable data for researchers to dive into….By harvesting and combining these streams of big data with conventional ways of monitoring infectious diseases, the public-health community could gain fresh powers to catch and curb emerging outbreaks before they rage out of control.

Going viral

Data scientists at Google were the first to make a major splash using data gathered online to track infectious diseases. The Google Flu Trends algorithm, launched in November 2008, combed through hundreds of billions of users’ queries on the popular search engine to look for small increases in flu-related terms such as symptoms or vaccine availability. Initial data suggested that Google Flu Trends could accurately map the incidence of flu with a lag of roughly one day. “It was a very exciting use of these data for the purpose of public health,” says Brownstein. “It really did start a whole revolution and new field of work in query data.”

Unfortunately, Google Flu Trends faltered when it mattered the most, completely missing the onset in April 2009 of the H1N1 pandemic. The algorithm also ran into trouble later on in the pandemic. It had been trained against seasonal fluctuations of flu, says Viboud, but people’s behaviour changed in the wake of panic fuelled by media reports — and that threw off Google’s data. …

Nevertheless, its work with Internet usage data was inspirational for infectious-disease researchers. A subsequent study from a team led by Cecilia Marques-Toledo at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, used Twitter to get high-resolution data on the spread of dengue fever in the country. The researchers could quickly map new cases to specific cities and even predict where the disease might spread to next (C. A. Marques-Toledo et al. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 11, e0005729; 2017). Similarly, Brownstein and his colleagues were able to use search data from Google and Twitter to project the spread of Zika virus in Latin America several weeks before formal outbreak declarations were made by public-health officials. Both Internet services are used widely, which makes them data-rich resources. But they are also proprietary systems for which access to data is controlled by a third party; for that reason, Generous and his colleagues have opted instead to make use of search data from Wikipedia, which is open source. “You can get the access logs, and how many people are viewing articles, which serves as a pretty good proxy for search interest,” he says.

However, the problems that sank Google Flu Trends still exist….Additionally, online activity differs for infectious conditions with a social stigma such as syphilis or AIDS, because people who are or might be affected are more likely to be concerned about privacy. Appropriate search-term selection is essential: Generous notes that initial attempts to track flu on Twitter were confounded by irrelevant tweets about ‘Bieber fever’ — a decidedly non-fatal condition affecting fans of Canadian pop star Justin Bieber.

Alternatively, researchers can go straight to the source — by using smartphone apps to ask people directly about their health. Brownstein’s team has partnered with the Skoll Global Threats Fund to develop an app called Flu Near You, through which users can voluntarily report symptoms of infection and other information. “You get more detailed demographics about age and gender and vaccination status — things that you can’t get from other sources,” says Brownstein. Ten European Union member states are involved in a similar surveillance programme known as Influenzanet, which has generally maintained 30,000–40,000 active users for seven consecutive flu seasons. These voluntary reporting systems are particularly useful for diseases such as flu, for which many people do not bother going to the doctor — although it can be hard to persuade people to participate for no immediate benefit, says Brownstein. “But we still get a good signal from the people that are willing to be a part of this.”…(More)”.

Launching the Data Culture Project

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New project by MIT Center for Civic Media and the Engagement Lab@Emerson College: “Learning to work with data is like learning a new language — immersing yourself in the culture is the best way to do it. For some individuals, this means jumping into tools like Excel, Tableau, programming, or R Studio. But what does this mean for a group of people that work together? We often talk about data literacy as if it’s an individual capacity, but what about data literacy for a community? How does an organization learn how to work with data?

About a year ago we (Rahul Bhargava and Catherine D’Ignazio) found that more and more users of our DataBasic.io suite of tools and activities were asking this question — online and in workshops. In response, with support from the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, we’ve worked together with 25 organizations to create the Data Culture Project. We’re happy to launch it publicly today! Visit datacultureproject.org to learn more.

The Data Culture Project is a hands-on learning program to kickstart a data culture within your organization. We provide facilitation videos to help you run creative introductions to get people across your organization talking to each other — from IT to marketing to programs to evaluation. These are not boring spreadsheet trainings! Try running our fun activities — one per month works as a brown bag lunch to focus people on a common learning goal. For example, “Sketch a Story” brings people together around basic concepts of quantitative text analysis and visual storytelling. “Asking Good Questions” introduces principles of exploratory data analysis in a fun environment. What’s more, you can use the sample data that we provide, or you can integrate your organization’s data as the topic of conversation and learning….(More)”.