Governance Innovation ver.2: A Guide to Designing and Implementing Agile Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Draft report by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI): “Japan has been aiming at the realization of “Society 5.0,” a policy for building a human-centric society which realizes both economic development and solutions to social challenges by taking advantage of a system in which cyberspaces, including AI, IoT and big data, and physical spaces are integrated in a sophisticated manner (CPSs: cyber-physical systems). In advancing social implementation of innovative technologies toward the realization of the Society 5.0, it is considered necessary to fundamentally reform governance models in view of changes in social structures which new technologies may bring about.

Triggered by this problem awareness, at the G20 Ministerial Meeting on Trade and Digital Economy, which Japan hosted in June 2019, the ministers declared in the ministerial statement the need for “governance innovation” tailored to social changes which will be brought about by digital technologies and social implementation thereof.

In light of this, METI inaugurated its Study Group on a New Governance Model in Society 5.0 (hereinafter referred to as the “study group”) and in July 2020, the study group published a report titled “GOVERNANCE INNOVATION: Redesigning Law and Architecture for Society 5.0” (hereinafter referred to as the “first report”). The first report explains ideal approaches to cross-sectoral governance by multi-stakeholders, including goal-based regulations, importance for businesses to fulfill their accountability, and enforcement of laws with an emphasis on incentives.

Against this backdrop, the study group, while taking into consideration the outcomes of the first report, presented approaches to “agile governance” as an underlying idea of the governance shown in the Society 5.0 policy, and then prepared the draft report titled “Governance Innovation ver.2: A Guide to Designing and Implementing Agile Governance” as a compilation presenting a variety of ideal approaches to governance mechanisms based on agile governance, including corporate governance, regulations, infrastructures, markets and social norms.

In response, METI opened a call for public comments on this draft report in order to receive opinions from a variety of people. As the subjects shown in the draft report are common challenges seen across the world and many parts of the subjects require international cooperation, METI wishes to receive wide-ranging, frank opinions not only from people in Japan but also from those in overseas countries….(More)”.

Coming wave of video games could build empathy on racism, environment and aftermath of war

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Mike Snider at USA Today: “Some of the newest video games in development aren’t really games at all, but experiences that seek to build empathy for others.

Among the five such projects getting funding grants and support from 3D software engine maker Unity is “Our America,” in which the player takes the role of a Black man who is driving with his son when their car is pulled over by a police officer.

The father worries about getting his car registration from the glove compartment because the officer “might think it’s a gun or something,” the character says in the trailer.

On the project’s website, the developers describe “Our America” as “an autobiographical VR Experience” in which “the audience must make quick decisions, answer questions – but any wrong move is the difference between life and death.”…

The other Unity for Humanity winners include:

  • Ahi Kā Rangers: An ecological mobile game with development led by Māori creators. 
  • Dot’s Home: A game that explores historical housing injustices faced by Black and brown home buyers. 
  • Future Aleppo: A VR experience for children to rebuild homes and cities destroyed by war. 
  • Samudra: A children’s environmental puzzle game that takes the player across a polluted sea to learn about pollution and plastic waste.

While “Our America” may serve best as a VR experience, other projects such as “Dot’s Home” may be available on mobile devices to expand its accessibility….(More)”.

How can we measure productivity in the public sector?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ravi Somani at the World Bank: “In most economies, the public sector is a major purchaser of goods, services and labor. According to the Worldwide Bureaucracy Indicators, globally the public sector accounts for around 25% of GDP and 38% of formal employment. Generating efficiency gains in the public sector can, therefore, have important implications for a country’s overall economic performance.  

Public-sector productivity measures the rate with which inputs are converted into desirable outputs in the public sector. Measures can be developed at the level of the employee, organization, or overall public sector, and can be tracked over time. Such information allows policymakers to identify good and bad performers, understand what might be correlated with good performance, and measure the returns to different types of public expenditures. This knowledge can be used to improve the allocation of public resources in the future and maximize the impact of the public purse.

But how can we measure it?

However, measuring productivity in the public sector can be tricky because:

  • There are often no market transactions for public services, or they are distorted by subsidies and other market imperfections.
  • Many public services are complex, requiring (often immeasurable) inputs from multiple individuals and organizations.
  • There is often a substantial time lag between investments in inputs and the realization of outputs and outcomes.

This recent World Bank publication provides a summary of the different approaches to measuring productivity in the public sector, presented in the table below.  For simplicity, the approaches are separated into: ‘macro’ approaches, which provide aggregate information at the level of an organization, sector, or service as a whole; and ‘micro’ approaches, which can be applied to the individual employee, task, project, and process.   
 

Macro and Micro Approaches to measure public-sector productivity

There is no silver bullet for accurately measuring public-sector productivity – each approach has its own limitations.  For example, the cost-weighted-output approach requires activity-level data, necessitates different approaches for different sectors, and results in metrics with difficult-to-interpret absolute levels.  Project-completion rates require access to project-level data and may not fully account for differences in the quality and complexity of projects. The publication includes a list of the pros, cons, and implementation requirements for each approach….(More)”.

Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Noam Cohen at Wired: “From the start, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of trustworthy information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google’s bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name “Knol,” short for knowledge. Knol never did catch on, despite Google’s offer to pay the principal author of an article a share of advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even tighter—not only linking to its articles but reprinting key excerpts on its search result pages to quickly deliver Wikipedia’s knowledge to those seeking answers.

The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming its own household word. But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet.

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia’s content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too)….(More)”.

The Handbook: How to regulate?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Handbook edited by the Regulatory Institute: “…presents an inventory of regulatory techniques from over 40 jurisdictions and a basic universal method. The Handbook is based on the idea that officials with an inventory of regulatory techniques have more choices and can develop better regulations. The same goes for officials using methodological knowledge. The Handbook is made available free of charge because better regulations benefit us all….

The purpose of the Handbook is to assist officials involved in regulatory activities. Readers can draw inspiration from it, can learn how colleagues have tackled a certain regulatory challenge and can even develop a tailor-made systematic approach to improve their regulation. The Handbook can also be used as a basis for training courses or for self-training.

The Handbook is not intended to be read from A to Z. Instead, readers are invited to pick and choose the sections that are relevant to them. The Handbook was not developed to be the authoritative source of how to regulate, but to offer in the most neutral and objective way possibilities for improving regulation…

The Handbook explores the empty space between:

  • the constitution or similar documents setting the legal frame,
  • the sector-specific policies followed by the government, administration, or institution,
  • the impact assessment, better regulation, simplification, and other regulatory policies,
  • applicable drafting instructions or recommendations, and
  • the procedural settings of the respective jurisdiction….(More)”.

Thinking systems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Geoff Mulgan: “…describes methods for understanding how vital everyday systems work, and how they could work better, through improved shared cognition – observation, memory, creativity and judgement – organised as commons.

Much of our life we depend on systems: interconnected webs of activity that link many organisations, technologies and people. These bring us food and clothing; energy for warmth and light; mobility including rail, cars and global air travel; care, welfare and handling of waste. Arguably the biggest difference between the modern world and the world of a few centuries ago is the thickness and complexity of these systems. These have brought huge gains.

But one of their downsides is that they have made the world around us harder to understand or shape. A good example is the Internet: essential to much of daily life but largely obscure and opaque to its users. Its physical infrastructures, management, protocols and flows are almost unknown except to specialists, as are its governance structures and processes (if you are in any doubt, just ask a random sample of otherwise well-informed people). Other vital systems like those for food, energy or care are also hardly visible to those within them as well as those dependent on them. This makes it much harder to hold them to account, or to ensure they take account of more voices and needs. We often feel that the world is much more accessible thanks to powerful search engines and ubiquitous data. But try to get a picture of the systems around you and you quickly discover just how much is opaque and obscure.

If you think seriously about these systems it’s also hard not to be struck by another feature. Our systems generally use much more data and knowledge than their equivalents in the past. But this progress also highlights what’s missing in the data they use (often including the most important wants and needs). Moreover, huge amounts of potentially relevant data is lost immediately or never captured and how much that is captured is then neither organised nor shared. The result is a strangely lop-sided world: vast quantities of data are gathered and organised at great expense for some purposes (notably defense or click-through advertising)

So how could we recapture our systems and help them make the most of intelligence of all kinds? The paper shares methods and approaches that could make our everyday systems richer in intelligence and also easier to guide. It advocates:

· A cognitive approach to systems – focusing on how they think, and specifically how they observe, analyse, create and remember. It argues that this approach can help to bridge the often abstract language of systems thinking and practical action

· It advocates that much of this systems intelligence needs to be organised as a commons – which is very rarely the case now

· And it advocates new structures and roles within government and other organisations, and the growth of a practice of systems architects with skills straddling engineering, management, data and social science – who are adept at understanding, designing and improving intelligent systems that are transparent and self-aware.

The background to the paper is the great paradox of systems right now: there is a vast literature, a small industry of consultancies and labs, and no shortage of rhetorical commitment in many fields. Yet these have had at best uneven impact on how decisions are made or large organisations are run….(More)”.

The Future of Nudging Will Be Personal

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Essay by Stuart Mills: “Nudging, now more than a decade old as an intervention tool, has become something of a poster child for the behavioral sciences. We know that people don’t always act in their own best interest—sometimes spectacularly so—and nudges have emerged as a noncoercive way to live better in a world shaped by our behavioral foibles.

But with nudging’s maturity, we’ve also begun to understand some of the ways that it falls short. Take, for instance, research by Linda Thunström and her colleagues. They found that “successful” nudges can actually harm subgroups of a population. In their research, spendthrifts (those who spend freely) spent less when nudged, bringing them closer to optimal spending. But when given the same nudge, tightwads also spent less, taking them further from the optimal.

While a nudge might appear effective because a population benefited on average, at the individual level the story could be different. Should nudging penalize people that differ from the average just because, on the whole, a policy would benefit the population? Though individual versus population trade-offs are part and parcel to policymaking, as our ability to personalize advances, through technology and data, these trade-offs seem less and less appealing….(More)”.

The Techlash and Tech Crisis Communication

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Nirit Weiss-Blatt: “This book provides an in-depth analysis of the evolution of tech journalism. The emerging tech-backlash is a story of pendulum swings: We are currently in tech-dystopianism after a long period spent in tech-utopianism. Tech companies were used to ‘cheerleading’ coverage of product launches. This long tech-press honeymoon ended, and was replaced by a new era of mounting criticism focused on tech’s negative impact on society. When and why did tech coverage shift? How did tech companies respond to the rise of tech criticism?

The book depicts three main eras: Pre-Techlash, Techlash, and Post-Techlash. The reader is taken on a journey from computer magazines, through tech blogs to the upsurge of tech investigative reporting. It illuminates the profound changes in the power dynamics between the media and the tech giants it covers.

The interplay between tech journalism and tech PR was underexplored. Through analyses of both tech media and the corporates’ crisis responses, this book examines the roots and characteristics of the Techlash, and provides explanations to ‘How did we get here?’. Insightful observations by tech journalists and tech public relations professionals are added to the research data, and together – they tell the story of the TECHLASH. It includes theoretical and practical implications for both tech enthusiasts and critics….(More)”.

A new approach to problem-solving across the Sustainable Development Goals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alexandra Bracken, John McArthur, and Jacob Taylor at Brookings: “The economic, social, and environmental challenges embedded throughout the world’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will require many breakthroughs from business as usual. COVID-19 has only underscored the SDGs’ central message that the underlying problems are both interconnected and urgent, so new mindsets are required to generate faster progress on many fronts at once. Our recent report, 17 Rooms: A new approach to spurring action for the Sustainable Development Goals, describes an effort to innovate around the process of SDG problem-solving itself.

17 Rooms aims to advance problem-solving within and across all the SDGs. As a partnership between Brookings and The Rockefeller Foundation, the first version of the undertaking was convened in September 2018, as a single meeting on the eve of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. The initiative has since evolved into a two-pronged effort: an annual flagship process focused on global-scale policy issues and a community-level process in which local actors are taking 17 Rooms methods into their own hands.

In practical terms, 17 Rooms consists of participants from disparate specialist communities each meeting in their own “Rooms,” or working groups, one for each SDG. Each Room is tasked with a common assignment of identifying cooperative actions they can take over the subsequent 12-18 months. Emerging ideas are then shared across Rooms to spot opportunities for collaboration.

The initiative continues to evolve through ongoing experimentation, so methods are not overly fixed, but three design principles help define key elements of the 17 Rooms mindset:

  1. All SDGs get a seat at the table. Insights, participants, and priorities are valued equally across all the specialist communities focused on individual dimensions of the SDGs
  2. Take a next step, not the perfect step. The process encourages participants to identify—and collaborate on—actions that are “big enough to matter, but small enough to get done”
  3. Conversations, not presentations. Discussions are structured around collaboration and peer-learning, aiming to focus on what’s best for an issue, not any individual organization

These principles appear to contribute to three distinct forms of value: the advancement of action, the generation of insights, and a strengthened sense of community among participants….(More)”.

Legislative Performance Futures

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Ben Podgursky on “Incentivize Good Laws by Monetizing the Verdict of History”….There are net-positive legislative policies which legislators won’t enact, because they only help people in the medium to far future.  For example:

  • Climate change policy
  • Infrastructure investments and mass-transit projects
  • Debt control and social security reform
  • Child tax credits

The (infrequent) times reforms on these issues are legislated — which happens rarely compared to their future value — they are passed not because of the value provided to future generations, but because of the immediate benefit to voters today:

  • Infrastructure investment goes to “shovel ready” projects, with an emphasis on short-term job creation, even when the prime benefit is to future GDP.  For example, Dams constructed in the 1930s (the Hoover Dam, the TVA) provide immense value today, but the projects only happened in order to create tens of thousands of jobs.
  • Climate change legislation is usually weakly directed.  Instead of policies which incur significant long-term benefits but short-term costs (ie, carbon taxes), “green legislation” aims to create green jobs and incentivize rooftop solar (reducing power bills today).
  • (small) child tax credits are passed to help parents today, even though the vastly larger benefit is incurred by children who exist because the marginal extra cash helped their parents afford an extra child.

On the other hand, reforms which provide nobenefit to today’s voter do not happen; this is why the upcoming Social Security Trust Fund shortfall will likely not be fixed until benefits are reduced and voters are directly impacted.

The issue is that while the future reaps the benefits or failures of today’s laws, people of the future cannot vote in today’s elections.  In fact, in almost no circumstances does the future have any ability to meaningfully reward or punish past lawmakers; there are debates today about whether to remove statues and rename buildings dedicated to those on the wrong side of history, actions which even proponents acknowledge as entirely symbolic….(More)”.