future of work

Making Citizen-Generated Data Work

Curated on December 23, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Danny Lämmerhirt at Open Knowledge: “We are pleased to announce a new research series investigating how citizens and civil society create data to drive sustainable development. The series follows on from earlier papers on Democratising The Data Revolution and how citizen-generated data can change what public institutions measure. The first report “Making Citizen-Generated Data Work” asks what makes citizens and others want to produce and use citizen-generated data. It was written by myself, Shazade Jameson, and Eko Prasetyo.

“The goal of Citizen-Generated Data is to monitor, advocate for, or drive change around an issue important to citizens”

The report demonstrates that citizen-generated data projects are rarely the work of individual citizens. Instead, they often depend on partnerships to thrive and are supported by civil society organisations, community-based organisations, governments, or business. These partners play a necessary role to provide resources, support, and knowledge to citizens. In return, they can harness data created by citizens to support their own mission. Thus, citizens and their partners often gain mutual benefits from citizen-generated data.

But if CGD projects rely on partnerships, who has to be engaged, and through which incentives, to enable CGD projects to achieve their goals? How are such multi-stakeholder projects organised, and which resources and expertise do partners bring into a project? What can other projects do to support and benefit their own citizen-generated data initiatives? This report offers recommendations to citizens, civil society organisations, policy-makers, donors, and others on how to foster stronger collaborations….(Read the full report here).

Open eGovernment practices in all EU Member States make public services more collaborative, efficient and inclusive

Curated on December 22, 2016May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

European Commission: “In a digital single market, public services should be digital, open and cross-border by design. As part of the eGovernment Action Plan, public administrations and public institutions should be providing borderless user-friendly and end-to-end digital public services to all citizens and businesses by 2020. Two Commission studies highlight how collaborative and digitally-based Open eGovernment Services (OGS) can enhance transparency and responsiveness in citizens’ dealings with administration, build trust across sectors and provide better public services.

The studies provide a valuable information base and could inspire current and future activities under the European Commission e-Government Action Plan 2016-2020, in particular those related to facilitating digital interaction between administrations and citizens/businesses.

The emergence of Open Government in Member States

The study “Towards faster implementation and uptake of open government” maps 395 inspiring examples of Open eGovernment Services across Europe. This wealth of data and practices, is proof of successful cooperation between public administrations, companies, organizations and citizens. It demonstrates how the process of digitalisation can create better opportunities for everyone and shows concretely how to make it happen. The European Commission will give visibility to these best practices, support the policy processes and invest in digital innovation in the public sector.

Openness between public administrations

This is mostly driven by administrations seeking better efficiency and cost reduction. For example, applying once-only principle – under which people and businesses provide information only once to public authorities – may result in increasingly automated exchanges. For example,

By applying the once-only principle, the Spanish government saved € 2.8 million (costs of exchange of paper documents between administrations) by introducing SIR (System of Interconnection of Registers).
In the Netherlands, public administrations share among them the data hosted in 12 existing base registers., This helps to speed up administrative processes and citizens or companies no longer need to provide the same information time and again.
Agiv, the agency for geographical information in Flanders (Belgium) has a central platform KLIP where administrations share the location of underground cables and pipes, helping thus companies to plan construction works. Its services were requested 100.000 times during the first six months after its launch.

Openness towards third parties

Openess towards third parties aims at increasing transparency and responsiveness and even participation in decision-making, for instance,

Greek citizens use the Vouliwatch platform to publicly question government officials and share their own expertise;
More and more cities foresee that citizens can have a say about how their money gets spent. The residents of Madrid vote online on 2% of city budget and those of Paris even on 5% of municipal expenses and can suggest projects within these financial limits; the inhabitants of Southern Italy submit formal web-based evaluations of public services and infrastructure thanks to cooperation of administration with the third sector.
OpenSpending, an initiative by the Open Knowledge Foundation, contains datasets on public administrations expenditure in 76 countries so that citizens can see how authorities spend taxpayers’ money. Moreover, it allowed the UK government to save £ 4 million in only 15 minutes by simply comparing markets for different services.

Open government can also unlock economic potential for growth and jobs, for example,

The Belgian Mercurius e-invoicing and e-procurement platform which allows all levels of administrations and businesses to cooperate and reduces the costs of invoices for companies by 62% (with expected 4,5 M € of savings per year)
The Dutch Base Register Topography works as open data for anyone interested and has developed TopoGPS , a GPS application, based on data from the base registry, with an economic effect estimated at €9 million.
The British NHS Job Platform, now used by 500 NHS employers, is a focal point for job seekers in the medical sector. Also in the UK, TransportAPI aggregates and analyses public transport data, allowing users and developers to access the transport data opened up by public transportation bodies and to work on their own applications.

Numerous initiatives also support inclusion:

Konto Bariery uses accessibility data for an app-based map of buildings accessible to disabled people in Czech Republic and the non-profit
Techfugees is an initiative organised by tech professionals that makes engineers, entrepreneurs, NGOs, public administrations collaborate in order to provide innovative technology solutions to help refugees….(More)

The Centre for Humanitarian Data

Curated on December 21, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Centre for HumData: “The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is establishing a Centre for Humanitarian Data in the Netherlands. It will be operational by early 2017 for an initial three years.

The Centre’s mission is to increase the use and impact of data in the humanitarian sector. The vision is to create a future where all people involved in a humanitarian situation have access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions.

The Centre will support humanitarian partners and OCHA staff in the field and at headquarters with their data efforts. It will be part of the city of The Hague’s Humanity Hub, a dedicated building for organizations working on data and innovation in the social sector. The location offers OCHA and partners a new, neutral setting where a hybrid culture can be created around data collaboration.

The Centre is a key contribution towards the Secretary-General’s Agenda for Humanity under core commitment four — changing the way we work to end need. The Centre’s activities will accelerate the changes required for the humanitarian system to become data driven….(More)”

Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability

Curated on December 18, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford in New Media and Society: “Models for understanding and holding systems accountable have long rested upon ideals and logics of transparency. Being able to see a system is sometimes equated with being able to know how it works and govern it—a pattern that recurs in recent work about transparency and computational systems. But can “black boxes’ ever be opened, and if so, would that ever be sufficient? In this article, we critically interrogate the ideal of transparency, trace some of its roots in scientific and sociotechnical epistemological cultures, and present 10 limitations to its application. We specifically focus on the inadequacy of transparency for understanding and governing algorithmic systems and sketch an alternative typology of algorithmic accountability grounded in constructive engagements with the limitations of transparency ideals….(More)”

Privacy of Public Data

Curated on December 17, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Kirsten E. Martin and Helen Nissenbaum: “The construct of an information dichotomy has played a defining role in regulating privacy: information deemed private or sensitive typically earns high levels of protection, while lower levels of protection are accorded to information deemed public or non-sensitive. Challenging this dichotomy, the theory of contextual integrity associates privacy with complex typologies of information, each connected with respective social contexts. Moreover, it contends that information type is merely one among several variables that shape people’s privacy expectations and underpin privacy’s normative foundations. Other contextual variables include key actors – information subjects, senders, and recipients – as well as the principles under which information is transmitted, such as whether with subjects’ consent, as bought and sold, as required by law, and so forth. Prior work revealed the systematic impact of these other variables on privacy assessments, thereby debunking the defining effects of so-called private information.

In this paper, we shine a light on the opposite effect, challenging conventional assumptions about public information. The paper reports on a series of studies, which probe attitudes and expectations regarding information that has been deemed public. Public records established through the historical practice of federal, state, and local agencies, as a case in point, are afforded little privacy protection, or possibly none at all. Motivated by progressive digitization and creation of online portals through which these records have been made publicly accessible our work underscores the need for more concentrated and nuanced privacy assessments, even more urgent in the face of vigorous open data initiatives, which call on federal, state, and local agencies to provide access to government records in both human and machine readable forms. Within a stream of research suggesting possible guard rails for open data initiatives, our work, guided by the theory of contextual integrity, provides insight into the factors systematically shaping individuals’ expectations and normative judgments concerning appropriate uses of and terms of access to information.

Using a factorial vignette survey, we asked respondents to rate the appropriateness of a series of scenarios in which contextual elements were systematically varied; these elements included the data recipient (e.g. bank, employer, friend,.), the data subject, and the source, or sender, of the information (e.g. individual, government, data broker). Because the object of this study was to highlight the complexity of people’s privacy expectations regarding so-called public information, information types were drawn from data fields frequently held in public government records (e.g. voter registration, marital status, criminal standing, and real property ownership).

Our findings are noteworthy on both theoretical and practical grounds. In the first place, they reinforce key assertions of contextual integrity about the simultaneous relevance to privacy of other factors beyond information types. In the second place, they reveal discordance between truisms that have frequently shaped public policy relevant to privacy. …(More)”

How Artificial Intelligence Will Usher in the Next Stage of E-Government

Curated on December 17, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Daniel Castro at GovTech: “Since the earliest days of the Internet, most government agencies have eagerly explored how to use technology to better deliver services to citizens, businesses and other public-sector organizations. Early on, observers recognized that these efforts often varied widely in their implementation, and so researchers developed various frameworks to describe the different stages of growth and development of e-government. While each model is different, they all identify the same general progression from the informational, for example websites that make government facts available online, to the interactive, such as two-way communication between government officials and users, to the transactional, like applications that allow users to access government services completely online.

However, we will soon see a new stage of e-government: the perceptive.

The defining feature of the perceptive stage will be that the work involved in interacting with government will be significantly reduced and automated for all parties involved. This will come about principally from the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) — computer systems that can learn, reason and decide at levels similar to that of a human — into government services to make it more insightful and intelligent.

Consider the evolution of the Department of Motor Vehicles. The informational stage made it possible for users to find the hours for the local office; the interactive stage made it possible to ask the agency a question by email; and the transactional stage made it possible to renew a driver’s license online.

In the perceptive stage, the user will simply say, “Siri, I need a driver’s license,” and the individual’s virtual assistant will take over — collecting any additional information from the user, coordinating with the government’s system and scheduling any in-person meetings automatically. That’s right: AI might finally end your wait at the DMV.

In general, there are at least three ways that AI will impact government agencies. First, it will enable government workers to be more productive since the technology can be used to automate many tasks. …

Second, AI will create a faster, more responsive government. AI enables the creation of autonomous, intelligent agents — think online chatbots that answer citizens’ questions, real-time fraud detection systems that constantly monitor government expenditures and virtual legislative assistants that quickly synthesize feedback from citizens to lawmakers.

Third, AI will allow people to interact more naturally with digital government services…(More)”

Tech is moving beyond cities to focus on civic engagement in every U.S. county

Curated on December 14, 2016August 20, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Hollie Russon Gilman at TechCrunch: “While gridlock has taken hold in a paralyzed Washington, D.C. mayors across the country are taking a pragmatic approach to solving local problems and its time for tech to reach out to them….

The United States has 3,0007 counties. And all of them have an appetite to shift the momentum from the federal government to the communities where people live and work. This can’t just involve coastal cities or urban areas within states. Rather, after Trump’s election, now is the moment to redouble policy efforts in communities across the country from states to rural counties.

Cities from Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, to New York have been leading the way to think about how to provide better services and engagement opportunities. They’ve been exciting places where rich networks of talent from academia to philanthropy have been helping foster ecosystems to catalyze new policy solutions….

There are a host of illustrative experiments occurring across communities that are leveraging policy innovation, data, and technology for more responsive and inclusive governance. The engagements that work focus on process to ensure that diverse stakeholders are a part of decision making….

Wisconsin:

In Eau Claire, Wisconsin a local organization called Clear Vision is teaming up with stakeholders on a poverty summit to reduce the number of people living poverty in income insecurity and build more resilient and inclusive communities. Citizen action groups will work on key issues they identify as part of the engagement process.

A key component of this poverty summit is to bring in traditionally marginalized communities into the process including low-income households, rural poor, youth and black and Hispanic communities. There is even a community-supported, nonprofit journalism site to support the local work in Eau Claire, Chippewa, and Dunn counties….

Oregon:

In Oregon, a “Kitchen Table” is enabling residents from across the state to contribute ideas, resources, and feedback to inform public policy. The Kitchen Table enables public officials to consult with representatives about key policy areas, crowdfund, and micro-lend for local startups and community businesses….

Another practice in Oregon is the Citizens Initiative Review, where a representative sampling of citizens convenes for deliberations over several days to discuss state ballot measures. After being established by the state’s bipartisan legislature in 2009, there have been six random representative samples of citizens for multi-day deliberations to draft voting guides written for the people, by their neighbors….

This requires tapping into existing networks and civic organizations, leveraging data, technology and policy innovations, and re-shifting our focus from federal policy towards building an infrastructure of governance that is durable through collective development and buy-in from people…(More)”

Power To The People! (And Settings for Using It Wisely?)

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Public Agenda: “From its inception in Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting (PB) has incorporated, to varying degrees, both direct and deliberative democracy.

In deliberative democracy, citizens become informed about an issue, talk about their concerns and goals, weigh different policy options and find common ground. They may give policy input to public officials, develop action ideas for implementation by other people and organizations or work to implement ideas themselves, or they may engage in some combination of the three. Advocates of deliberative democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective learners, advisors and volunteers.

In direct democracy, people have the opportunity to vote on policy questions through initiatives and referenda. Advocates of direct democracy believe in the potential of citizens to be effective public decision makers.

This white paper examines the extent to which North American PB processes are applying deliberative principles and practices, explore the tensions and challenges in making PB more deliberative, suggest questions for further research and offer recommendations for public officials and practitioners for improving their PB processes.

Boosting deliberative engagement in PB processes could have a variety of benefits for communities. First, higher levels of deliberation might produce greater empathy among citizens who hold different opinions or value different things about their communities—and greater understanding between residents and city staff. Second, more deliberative discussions would be more likely to bring to the surface issues of race, religion, class, immigration status and other differences that are always influential but seldom addressed in public life. Finally, the budget ideas produced might be more likely to represent compromises between different groups or opinions, and they might inspire greater efforts by participants to help implement them, beyond the decision to allocate public money.

PB organizers might improve the level and quality of deliberation in their processes in a number of ways:

1. Be more explicit about the importance of deliberation in the process…

2. Ensure participants have the chance to share their stories…

3. Connect the PB process to a broader discussion of city and/or district goals and priorities…

This report is the companion to “Brazil Has Reduced Inequality, Incrementally—Can We Do the Same?,” which focuses on the intersection of PB and economic inequality. Both draw on the data gathered by local PB researchers and by Public Agenda; on local evaluations of PB processes; and on interviews with public officials, also conducted by Public Agenda…(More)”.

Four steps to precision public health

Curated on December 13, 2016August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Scott F. Dowell, David Blazes & Susan Desmond-Hellmann at Nature: “When domestic transmission of Zika virus was confirmed in the United States in July 2016, the entire country was not declared at risk — nor even the entire state of Florida. Instead, precise surveillance defined two at-risk areas of Miami-Dade County, neighbourhoods measuring just 2.6 and 3.9 square kilometres. Travel advisories and mosquito control focused on those regions. Six weeks later, ongoing surveillance convinced officials to lift restrictions in one area and expand the other.

By contrast, a campaign against yellow fever launched this year in sub-Saharan Africa defines risk at the level of entire nations, often hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. More granular assessments have been deemed too complex.

The use of data to guide interventions that benefit populations more efficiently is a strategy we call precision public health. It requires robust primary surveillance data, rapid application of sophisticated analytics to track the geographical distribution of disease, and the capacity to act on such information¹.

The availability and use of precise data is becoming the norm in wealthy countries. But large swathes of the developing world are not reaping its advantages. In Guinea, it took months to assemble enough data to clearly identify the start of the largest Ebola outbreak in history. This should take days. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of childhood mortality in the world; it is also where we know the least about causes of death…..

The value of precise disease tracking was baked into epidemiology from the start. In 1854, John Snow famously located cholera cases in London. His mapping of the spread of infection through contaminated water dealt a blow to the idea that the disease was caused by bad air. These days, people and pathogens move across the globe swiftly and in great numbers. In 2009, the H1N1 ‘swine flu’ influenza virus took just 35 days to spread from Mexico and the United States to China, South Korea and 12 other countries…

The public-health community is sharing more data faster; expectations are higher than ever that data will be available from clinical trials and from disease surveillance. In the past two years, the US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust in London and the Gates Foundation have all instituted open data policies for their grant recipients, and leading journals have declared that sharing data during disease emergencies will not impede later publication.

Meanwhile, improved analysis, data visualization and machine learning have expanded our ability to use disparate data sources to decide what to do. A study published last year⁴ used precise geospatial modelling to infer that insecticide-treated bed nets were the single most influential intervention in the rapid decline of malaria.

However, in many parts of the developing world, there are still hurdles to the collection, analysis and use of more precise public-health data. Work towards malaria elimination in South Africa, for example, has depended largely on paper reporting forms, which are collected and entered manually each week by dozens of subdistricts, and eventually analysed at the province level. This process would be much faster if field workers filed reports from mobile phones.

Sources: Ref. 8/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

…Frontline workers should not find themselves frustrated by global programmes that fail to take into account data on local circumstances. Wherever they live — in a village, city or country, in the global south or north — people have the right to public-health decisions that are based on the best data and science possible, that minimize risk and cost, and maximize health in their communities…(More)”