Joan Okitoi-Heisig at DW Akademie: “…The Mera Swasthya Meri Aawaz (MSMA) project is the first of its kind in India to track illicit maternal fees demanded in government hospitals located in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.
MSMA (“My Health, My Voice”) is part of SAHAYOG, a non-governmental umbrella organization that helped launch the project. MSMA uses an Ushahidi platform to map and collect data on unofficial fees that plague India’ ostensibly “free” maternal health services. It is one of the many projects showcased in DW Akademie’s recently launched Digital Innovation Library. SAHAYOG works closely with grassroots organizations to promote gender equality and women’s health issues from a human rights perspective…
SAYAHOG sees women’s maternal health as a human rights issue. Key to the MSMA project is exposing government facilities that extort bribes from among the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
Sandhya and her colleagues are convinced that promoting transparency and accountability through the data collected can empower the women. If they’re aware of their entitlements, she says, they can demand their rights and in the process hold leaders accountable.
“Information is power,” Sandhya explains. Without this information, she says, “they aren’t in a position to demand what is rightly theirs.”
Health care providers hold a certain degree of power when entrusted with taking care of expectant mothers. Many give into bribes for fear of being otherwise neglected or abused.
With the MSMA project, however, poor rural women have technology that is easy to use and accessible on their mobile phones, and that empowers them to make complaints and report bribes for services that are supposed to be free.
MSMA is an innovative data-driven platform that combines a toll free number, an interactive voice response system (IVRS) and a website that contains accessible reports. In addition to enabling poor women to air their frustrations anonymously, the project aggregates actionable data which can then be used by the NGO as well as the government to work towards improving the situation for mothers in India….(More)”
The best-known examples include the U.K.’s Behavioural Insights Team, created in 2010, and the White House-based Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, introduced by the Obama administration in 2014. Their mission is to leverage findings from behavioral science so that people’s decisions can be nudged in the direction of their best intentions without curtailing their ability to make choices that don’t align with their priorities.
Overall, these – and other – governments have made important strides when it comes to using behavioral science to nudge their constituents into better choices.
Yet, the same governments have done little to improve their own decision-making processes. Consider big missteps like the Flint water crisis. How could officials in Michigan decide to place an essential service – safe water – and almost 100,000 people at risk in order to save US$100 per day for three months? No defensible decision-making process should have allowed this call to be made.
When it comes to many of the big decisions faced by governments – and the private sector – behavioral science has more to offer than simple nudges.
Behavioral scientists who study decision-making processes could also help policy-makers understand why things went wrong in Flint, and how to get their arms around a wide array of society’s biggest problems – from energy transitions to how to best approach the refugee crisis in Syria.
When nudges are enough
The idea of nudging people in the direction of decisions that are in their own best interest has been around for a while. But it was popularized in 2008 with the publication of the bestseller “Nudge“ by Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein of Harvard.
A common nudge goes something like this: if we want to eat better but are having a hard time doing it, choice architects can reengineer the environment in which we make our food choices so that healthier options are intuitively easier to select, without making it unrealistically difficult to eat junk food if that’s what we’d rather do. So, for example, we can shelve healthy foods at eye level in supermarkets, with less-healthy options relegated to the shelves nearer to the floor….
Sometimes a nudge isn’t enough
Nudges work for a wide array of choices, from ones we face every day to those that we face infrequently. Likewise, nudges are particularly well-suited to decisions that are complex with lots of different alternatives to choose from. And, they are advocated in situations where the outcomes of our decisions are delayed far enough into the future that they feel uncertain or abstract. This describes many of the big decisions policy-makers face, so it makes sense to think the solution must be more nudge units.
But herein lies the rub. For every context where a nudge seems like a realistic option, there’s at least another context where the application of passive decision support would be either be impossible – or, worse, a mistake.
Take, for example, the question of energy transitions. These transitions are often characterized by the move from infrastructure based on fossil fuels to renewables to address all manner of risks, including those from climate change. These are decisions that society makes infrequently. They are complex. And, the outcomes – which are based on our ability to meet conflicting economic, social and environmental objectives – will be delayed.
But, absent regulation that would place severe restrictions on the kinds of options we could choose from – and which, incidentally, would violate the freedom-of-choice tenet of choice architecture – there’s no way to put renewable infrastructure options at proverbial eye level for state or federal decision-makers, or their stakeholders.
Simply put, a nudge for a decision like this would be impossible. In these cases, decisions have to be made the old-fashioned way: with a heavy lift instead of a nudge.
DataShift: “No-one can communicate the importance of citizen-generated data better than those who are actually working with it. At DataShift, we want to highlight the civil society organisations who have told us about the tangible results they have achieved through innovative approaches to harnessing data from citizens.
Each essay profiles the objectives, challenges and targets of an organisation using data generated by citizens to achieve their goals. We hope that the essays in this collection can help more people feel more confident about asking questions of the data that affects their lives, and taking a hands-on approach to creating it. (More)”
Collaborative citizen science to tackleKosovo’s air pollution problem and simultaneously engage with a politically disenfranchised generation of young people
Larry Lessig: “In the history of constitutions across the world, America has had a unique place: Ours was the first constitution ratified by the people in convention. But Iceland has now done something much more significant: For the first time in the history of the world, and using a technology only possible in the21st century, the people of a nation have crafted their own constitution through an open and inclusive crowd-sourcing process. Yet astonishingly,that constitution remains unenforced.
As everyone in [Iceland] knows, after the financial disasters of 2008, the citizens of Iceland began a process to claim back their own sovereignty.Building on the values identified by 1,000 randomly selected citizens,Icelanders launched a process to crowdsource a new constitution. That initiative was then ratified when the Parliament established a procedure for selecting delegates to a drafting commission. More than 500 citizens ran to serve on that 25 person commission. Over four months, the commissioners met to draft a constitution, with their work made available for public comment throughout the process. More than 3600 comments were offered by the public, leading to scores of modifications. The final draft, adopted unanimously, was then sent to the parliament and to the people. More than2/3ds of voters endorsed the document in a non-binding referendum as the basis of a new constitution.
Never in the history of constitutionalism has anything like this ever been done. If democracy is rule by the people — if the sovereignty of a democratic nation is ultimately the people — then this process and the constitution it produced is as authentic and binding as any in the world. Yet the parliament of Iceland has refused to allow this constitution to go into effect. And the question that anyone in the movements for democracy across the world must ask is just this: By what right?
No doubt, the procedure for crafting and ultimately ratifying the constitution included as the final step Parliament’s sanction — just as the procedure for selecting a government in Britain is subject ultimately to theQueen’s sanction. But the Queen understands the limited power that right conveys — if Britain is to call itself a democracy. And the same is true ofIceland. When the people have acted as they have here — by crafting a constitution in the most inclusive and reflective way that has ever, in the history of constitutionalism, happened, and then endorsed that work by a popular vote, by what moral authority does the Parliament now say no? No doubt, there are parts of the constitution that some don’t like. But democracy is not a promise of perfection. And no constitution in the history of the world has ever been loved by everyone it affected — just ask the million African slaves whose freedom was made unconstitutional through1808 by America’s popularly ratified constitution.
The question for Iceland is, who is sovereign? Is it the people or is it not?And if it is the people, will the people demand that their will be respected?…(More)”
Part 3 of an interview series by Henry Farrell for the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance: “…Complexity theorists have devoted enormous energy and attention to thinking about how complex problems, in which different factors interact in ways that are hard to predict, can best be solved. One key challenge is categorizing problems, so as to understand which approaches are best suited to addressing them.
Scott Page is the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and one of the world’s foremost experts on diversity and problem-solving. I asked him a series of questions about how we might use insights from academic research to think better about how problem solving works.
Henry: One of the key issues of collective problem-solving is what you call the ‘problem of problems’ – the question of identifying which problems we need to solve. This is often politically controversial – e.g., it may be hard to get agreement that global warming, or inequality, or long prison sentences are a problem. How do we best go about identifying problems, given that people may disagree?
Scott: In a recent big think paper on the potential of diversity for collective problem solving in Scientific American, Katherine Phillips writes that group members must feel validated, that they must share a commitment to the group, and they must have a common goal if they are going to contribute. This implies that you won’t succeed in getting people to collaborate by setting an agenda from on high and then seeking to attract diverse people to further that agenda.
One way of starting to tackle the problem of problems is to steal a rule of thumb from Getting to Yes, by getting to think people about their broad interests rather than the position that they’re starting from. People often agree on their fundamental desires but disagree on how they can be achieved. For example, nearly everyone wants less crime, but they may disagree over whether they think the solution to crime involves tackling poverty or imposing longer prison sentences. If you can get them to focus on their common interest in solving crime rather than their disagreements, you’re more likely to get them to collaborate usefully.
Segregation amplifies the problem of problems. We live in towns and neighborhoods segregated by race, income, ideology, and human capital. Democrats live near Democrats and Republicans near Republicans. Consensus requires integration. We must work across ideologies. Relatedly, opportunity requires more than access. Many people grow up not knowing any engineers, dentists, doctors, lawyers, and statisticians. This isolation narrows the set of careers they consider and it reduces the diversity of many professions. We cannot imagine lives we do not know.
Henry: Once you get past the problem of problems, you still need to identify which kind of problem you are dealing with. You identify three standard types of problems: solution problems, selection problems and optimization problems. What – very briefly – are the key differences between these kinds of problems?
Scott: I’m constantly pondering the potential set of categories in which collective intelligence can emerge. I’m teaching a course on collective intelligence this semester and the undergraduates and I developed an acronym SCARCE PIGS to describe the different types of domains. Here’s the brief summary:
Predict: when individuals combine information, models, or measurements to estimate a future event, guess an answer, or classify an event. Examples might involve betting markets, or combined efforts to guess a quantity, such as Francis Galton’s example of people at a fair trying to guess the weight of a steer.
Identify: when individuals have local, partial, or possibly erroneous knowledge and collectively can find an object. Here, an example is DARPA’s Red Balloon project.
Solve: when individuals apply and possibly combine higher order cognitive processes and analytic tools for the purpose of finding or improving a solution to a task. Innocentive and similar organizations provide examples of this.
Generate: when individuals apply diverse representations, heuristics, and knowledge to produce something new. An everyday example is creating a new building.
Coordinate: when individuals adopt similar actions, behaviors, beliefs, or mental frameworks by learning through local interactions. Ordinary social conventions such as people greeting each other are good examples.
Cooperate: when individuals take actions, not necessarily in their self interest, that collectively produce a desirable outcome. Here, think of managing common pool resources (e.g. fishing boats not overfishing an area that they collectively control).
Arrange: when individuals manipulate items in a physical or virtual environment for their own purposes resulting in an organization of that environment. As an example, imagine a student co-op which keeps twenty types of hot sauce in its pantry. If each student puts whichever hot sauce she uses in the front of the pantry, then on average, the hot sauces will be arranged according to popularity, with the most favored hot sauces in the front and the least favored lost in the back.
Respond: when individuals react to external or internal stimuli creating collective responses that maintains system level functioning. For example, when yellow jackets attack a predator to maintain the colony, they are displaying this kind of problem solving.
Emerge: when individual parts create a whole that has categorically distinct and new functionalities. The most obvious example of this is the human brain….(More)”
Eurofound: “Innovative organisational practices in the workplace, which aim to make best use of human capital, are traditionally associated with the private sector. The nature of the public sector activities makes it more difficult to identify these types of internal innovation in publicly funded organisations.
It is widely thought that public sector organisations are neither dynamic nor creative and are typified by a high degree of inertia. Yet the necessity of innovation ought not to be dismissed. The public sector represents a quarter of total EU employment, and it is of critical importance as a provider and regulator of services. Improving how it performs has a knock-on effect not only for private sector growth but also for citizens’ satisfaction. Ultimately, this improves governance itself.
So how can innovative organisation practices help in dealing with the challenges faced by the public sector? Eurofound, as part of a project on workplace innovation in European companies, carried out case studies of both private and public sector organisations. The findings show a number of interesting practices and processes used.
Employee participation
The case studies from the public sector, some of which are described below, demonstrate the central role of employee participation in the implementation of workplace innovation and its impacts on organisation and employees. They indicate that innovative practices have resulted in enhanced organisational performance and quality of working life.
It is widely thought that changes in the public sector are initiated as a response to government policies. This is often true, but workplace innovation may also be introduced as a result of well-designed initiatives driven by external pressures (such as the need for a more competitive public service) or internal pressures (such as a need to update the skills map to better serve the public).
Case study findings
The state-owned Lithuanian energy company Lietuvos Energijos Gamyba (140 KB PDF) encourages employee participation by providing a structured framework for all employees to propose improvements. This has required a change in managerial approach and has spread a sense of ownership horizontally and vertically in the company. The Polish public transport company Jarosław City Transport (191 KB PDF), when faced with serious financial stability challenges, as well as implementing operational changes, set up ways for employees’ voices to be heard, which enabled a contributory dialogue and strengthened partnerships. Consultation, development of mutual trust, and common involvement ensured an effective combination of top-down and bottom-up initiatives.
The Lithuanian Post, AB Lietuvos Pastas (136 KB PDF) experienced a major organisation transformation in 2010 to improve efficiency and quality of service. Through a programme of ‘Loyalty day’ monthly visits, both top and middle management of the central administration visit any part of the company and work with colleagues in other units. Under budgetary pressure to ‘earn their money’, the Danish Vej and Park Bornholm (142 KB PDF)construction services in roads, parks and forests had to find innovative solutions to deal with a merger and privatisation. Their intervention had the characteristics of workplace partnership with a new set of organisational values set from the bottom up. Self-managing teams are essential for the operation of the company.
The world of education has provided new structures that provide better outcomes for students. The South West University of Bulgaria (214 KB PDF) also operates small self-managing teams responsible for employee scheduling. Weekly round-tables encourage participation in collectively finding solutions, creating a more effective environment in which to respond to the competitive demands of education provision.
In Poland, an initiative by the Pomeranian Library (185 KB PDF) improved employee–management dialogue and communication through increased participation. The initiative is a response to the new frameworks for open access to knowledge for users, with the library mirroring the user experience through its own work practices.
Through new dialogue, government advisory bodies have also developed employee-led improvement. Breaking away from a traditional hierarchy is considered important in achieving a more flexible work organisation. Under considerable pressure, the top-heavy management of the British Geological Survey (89 KB PDF) now operates a flexible matrix that promotes innovative and entrepreneurial ways of working. And in Germany, Niersverband (138 KB PDF), a publicly owned water-management company innovated through training, learning, reflection partnerships and workplace partnerships. New occupational profiles were developed to meet external demands. Based on dialogue concerning workplace experiences and competences, employees acquired new qualifications that allowed the company to be more competitive.
In the Funen Village Museum in Odense, Denmark, (143 KB PDF) innovation came about at the request of staff looking for more flexibility in how they work. Formerly most of their work was maintenance tasks, but now they can now engage more with visitors. Control of schedules has moved to the team rather than being the responsibility of a single manager. As a result, museum employees are now hosts as well as craftspeople. They no longer feel ‘forgotten’ and are happier in their work….(More)”
Gavin Hayman at the Huffington Post: “This week the British Prime Minister David Cameron is hosting an international anti-corruption summit. The scourge of anonymous shell companies and hidden identities rightly seizes the public’s imagination. We can all picture the suitcases of cash and tropical islands involved. As well as acting on offshore and onshore money laundering havens, world leaders at the summit should also be asking themselves where all this money is being stolen from in the first place.
The answer is mostly from public contracting: government spending through private companies to deliver works, goods and services to citizens. It is technical, dull and universally obscure. But it is the single biggest item of spending by government – amounting to a staggering $9,500,000,000,000 each year. This concentration of money, government discretion, and secrecy makes public contracting so vulnerable to corruption. Data on prosecutions tracked by the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention shows that roughly 60% of bribes were paid to win public contracts.
Corruption in contracting deprives ordinary people of vital goods and services, and sometimes even kills: I was one of many Londoners moved by Ai Wei Wei’s installation that memorialised the names of thousands of children killed in China’s Sichuan earthquake in 2008. Their supposed earthquake-proof schools collapsed on them like tofu.
Beyond corruption, inefficiency and mismanagement of public contracts cost countries billions. Governments just don’t seem to know what they are buying, when, from whom, and whether they got a good price.
This problem can be fixed. But it will require a set of innovations best described as open contracting: using accessible open data and better engagement so that citizens, government and business can follow the money in government contracts from planning to tendering to performance and closure. The coordination required can be hard work but it is achievable: any country can make substantial progress on open contracting with some political leadership. My organisation supports an open data standard and a free global helpdesk to assist governments, civil society, and business in this transition….(More)”
Public Agenda: “From 2014 to 2015, more than 70,000 residents across the United States and Canada directly decided how their cities and districts should spend nearly $50 million in public funds through a process known as participatory budgeting (PB). PB is among the fastest growing forms of public engagement in local governance, having expanded to 46 communities in the U.S. and Canada in just 6 years.
PB is a young practice in the U.S. and Canada. Until now, there’s been no way for people to get a general understanding of how communities across the U.S. implement PB, who participates, and what sorts of projects get funded. Our report, “Public Spending, By the People” offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of PB in the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s a summary of what we found:
Overall, communities using PB have invested substantially in the process and have seen diverse participation. But cities and districts vary widely in how they implemented their processes, who participated and what projects voters decided to fund. Officials vary in how much money they allocate to PB and some communities lag far behind in their representation of lower-income and less educated residents.
The data in this report came from 46 different PB processes across the U.S. and Canada. The report is a collaboration with local PB evaluators and practitioners. The work was funded by the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation, and completed through a research partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio: “…The New York City Digital Playbook outlines how we want residents to experience City services and how we will use digital tools to strengthen communities, online and off. The guidance within the Playbook will challenge all of our agencies and service providers to rethink the way they reach New Yorkers.
Our goal is to make our services more accessible, make our operations more transparent, and make it easy and fun to participate in government. In short — we aim to make New York the most user-friendly and innovative city in the world.
We believe that City government should be at New Yorkers’ fingertips and services should be just a swipe or a click away — just like so much of the technology in the rest of our lives. We also know that there are many people in New York City’s incomparable tech and design community who share this goal and want to lend expertise. So, another important goal of the Playbook is to make it easier for civically minded technologists to help us.
How to use the Playbook
This is an internal vision and strategy document that we will immediately begin to implement across government.
You may ask: if it’s an internal document, why share it publicly? A few reasons:
1. Transparency is a central tenet of our work;
2. This is a work in progress that we want to develop and update in the open.
3. We want to know how you think we can make it better.
Also, we’re giving a printed “strategy deck,” or set of cards, to staff across the city. Each card has a different principle or strategy printed on the front and key explanations and tips on the back. City leaders will use these cards to plan together and inspire each other when they’re designing new services, or thinking about how to make existing services better….(More)”
Sean Captain at FastCompany: “These days GPS technology can get you as close as about 10 feet from your destination, close enough to see it—assuming you can see.
But those last few feet are a chasm for the blind (and GPS accuracy sometimes falls only within about 30 feet).
“Actually finding the bus stop, not the right street, but standing in the right place when the bus comes, is pretty hard,” says Dave Power, president and CEO of the Perkins School for the Blind near Boston. Helen Keller’s alma mater is developing a mobile app that will provide audio directions—contributed by volunteers—so that blind people can get close enough to the stop for the bus driver to notice them.
Perkins’s app is one of 29 projects that recently received a total of $20 million in funding from Google.org’s Google Impact Challenge: Disabilities awards. Several of the winning initiatives rely on crowdsourced information to help the disabled—be they blind, in a wheelchair, or cognitively impaired. It’s a commonsense approach to tackling big logistical projects in a world full of people who have snippets of downtime during which they might perform bite-size acts of kindness online. But moving these projects from being just clever concepts to extensive services, based on the goodwill of volunteers, is going to be quite a hurdle.
People with limited mobility may have trouble traversing the last few feet between them and a wheelchair ramp, automatic doors, or other accommodations that aren’t easy to find (or may not even exist in some places).Wheelmap, based in Berlin, is trying to help by building online maps of accessible locations. Its website incorporates crowdsourced data. The site lets users type in a city and search for accessible amenities such as restaurants, hotels, and public transit.
Paris-based J’accede (which received 500,000 euros from Google, which is the equivalent of about $565,000) provides similar capabilities in both a website and an app, with a slicker design somewhat resembling TripAdvisor.
Both services have a long way to go. J’accede lists 374 accessible bars/restaurants in its hometown and a modest selection in other French cities like Marseille. “We still have a lot of work to do to cover France,” says J’accede’s president Damien Birambeau in an email. The goal is to go global though, and the site is available in English, German, and Spanish, in addition to French. Likewise, Wheelmap (which got 825,000 euros, or $933,000) performs best in the German capital of Berlin and cities like Hamburg, but is less useful in other places.
These sites face the same challenge as many other volunteer-based, crowdsourced projects: getting a big enough crowd to contribute information to the service. J’accede hopes to make the process easier. In June, it will connect itself with Google Places, so contributors will only need to supply details about accommodations at a site; information like the location’s address and phone number will be pulled in automatically. But both J’accede and Wheelmap recognize that crowdsourcing has its limits. They are now going beyond voluntary contributions, setting up automated systems to scrape information from other databases of accessible locations, such as those maintained by governments.
Wheelmap and J’accede are dwarfed by general-interest crowdsourced sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, which offer some information about accessibility, too. For instance, among the many filters they offer users searching for restaurants—such as price range and cuisine type—TripAdvisor and Yelp both offer a Wheelchair Accessible checkbox. Applying that filter to Parisian establishments brings up about 1,000 restaurants on TripAdvisor and 2,800 in Yelp.
So what can Wheelmap and J’accede provide that the big players can’t? Details. “A person in a wheelchair, for example, will face different obstacles than a partially blind person or a person with cognitive disabilities,” says Birambeau. “These different needs and profiles means that we need highly detailed information about the accessibility of public places.”…(More)”
