Report by K.Zuegel, E. Cantera, and A. Bellantoni: “Ombudsman institutions (OIs) act as the guardians of citizens’ rights and as a mediator between citizens and the public administration. While the very existence of such institutions is rooted in the notion of open government, the role they can play in promoting openness throughout the public administration has not been adequately recognized or exploited. Based on a survey of 94 OIs, this report examines the role they play in open government policies and practices. It also provides recommendations on how, given their privileged contact with both people and governments, OIs can better promote transparency, integrity, accountability, and stakeholder participation; how their role in national open government strategies and initiatives can be strengthened; and how they can be at the heart of a truly open state….(More)”.
The Theory and Practice of Social Machines
Book by Nigel Shadbolt, David De Roure, Kieron O’Hara and Wendy Hall: “Social machines are a type of network connected by interactive digital devices made possible by the ubiquitous adoption of technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the read/write World Wide Web, connecting people at scale to document situations, cooperate on tasks, exchange information, or even simply to play. Existing social processes may be scaled up, and new social processes enabled, to solve problems, augment reality, create new sources of value, and disrupt existing practice.
This book considers what talents one would need to understand or build a social machine, describes the state of the art, and speculates on the future, from the perspective of the EPSRC project SOCIAM – The Theory and Practice of Social Machines. The aim is to develop a set of tools and techniques for investigating, constructing and facilitating social machines, to enable us to narrow down pragmatically what is becoming a wide space, by asking ‘when will it be valuable to use these methods on a sociotechnical system?’ The systems for which the use of these methods adds value are social machines in which there is rich person-to-person communication, and where a large proportion of the machine’s behaviour is constituted by human interaction….(More)”.
Cybersecurity of the Person
Paper by Jeff Kosseff: “U.S. cybersecurity law is largely an outgrowth of the early-aughts concerns over identity theft and financial fraud. Cybersecurity laws focus on protecting identifiers such as driver’s licenses and social security numbers, and financial data such as credit card numbers. Federal and state laws require companies to protect this data and notify individuals when it is breached, and impose civil and criminal liability on hackers who steal or damage this data. In this paper, I argue that our current cybersecurity laws are too narrowly focused on financial harms. While such concerns remain valid, they are only one part of the cybersecurity challenge that our nation faces.
Too often overlooked by the cybersecurity profession are the harms to individuals, such as revenge pornography and online harassment. Our legal system typically addresses these harms through retrospective criminal prosecution and civil litigation, both of which face significant limits. Accounting for such harms in our conception of cybersecurity will help to better align our laws with these threats and reduce the likelihood of the harms occurring….(More)”,
Using insights from behavioral economics to nudge individuals towards healthier choices when eating out
Paper by Stéphane Bergeron, Maurice Doyon, Laure Saulais and JoAnne Labrecque: “Using a controlled experiment in a restaurant with naturally occurring clients, this study investigates how nudging can be used to design menus that guide consumers to make healthier choices. It examines the use of default options, focusing specifically on two types of defaults that can be found when ordering food in a restaurant: automatic and standard defaults. Both types of defaults significantly affected choices, but did not adversely impact the satisfaction of individual choices. The results suggest that menu design could effectively use non-informational strategies such as nudging to promote healthier individual choices without restricting the offer or reducing satisfaction….(More)”.
When a Nudge Backfires: Using Observation with Social and Economic Incentives to Promote Pro-Social Behavior
Our study questions the universality of these claims. We employ a novel four-party setup to disentangle the roles three observational mechanisms play in mediating behavior. We systematically vary the observability of one’s actions by others as well as the (non-)monetary relationship between observer and observee. Observability involving economic incentives
crowds-out anti-social behavior in favor of more pro-social behavior.
Surprisingly, social observation without economic incentives fails to achieve any aggregate pro-social effect, and if anything it backfires. Additional experiments confirm that observability without additional monetary incentives can indeed backfire. However, they also show that the effect of observability on pro-social behavior is increased when social norms are made salient….(More)”.
Bad Landlord? These Coders Are Here to Help
Luis Ferré-Sadurní in the New York Times: “When Dan Kass moved to New York City in 2013 after graduating from college in Boston, his introduction to the city was one that many New Yorkers are all too familiar with: a bad landlord….
Examples include an app called Heatseek, created by students at a coding academy, that allows tenants to record and report the temperature in their homes to ensure that landlords don’t skimp on the heat. There’s also the Displacement Alert Project, built by a coalition of affordable housing groups, that maps out buildings and neighborhoods at risk of displacement.
Now, many of these civic coders are trying to band together and formalize a community.
For more than a year, Mr. Kass and other housing-data wonks have met each month at a shared work space in Brooklyn to exchange ideas about projects and talk about data sets over beer and snacks. Some come from prominent housing advocacy groups; others work unrelated day jobs. They informally call themselves the Housing Data Coalition.
“The real estate industry has many more programmers, many more developers, many more technical tools at their disposal,” said Ziggy Mintz, 30, a computer programmer who is part of the coalition. “It never quite seems fair that the tenant side of the equation doesn’t have the same tools.”
“Our collaboration is a counteracting force to that,” said Lucy Block, a research and policy associate at the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, the group behind the Displacement Alert Project. “We are trying to build the capacity to fight the displacement of low-income people in the city.”
This week, Mr. Kass and his team at JustFix.nyc, a nonprofit technology start-up, launched a new database for tenants that was built off ideas raised during those monthly meetings.
The tool, called Who Owns What, allows tenants to punch in an address and look up other buildings associated with the landlord or management company. It might sound inconsequential, but the tool goes a long way in piercing the veil of secrecy that shrouds the portfolios of landlords….(More)”.
Prototyping for policy
Camilla Buchanan at Policy Lab Blog: “…Prototyping is common in the product and industrial design process – it has also extended to less tangible design sub-specialisms like service design. Prototypes are low fidelity mockups of an imagined idea or solution and they allow for testing before implementation. A product can be tested in cardboard form, a website can be tested through a
Policy is a more hazy concept, it implies a message or statement of intent which sets a direction of work. Before a policy statement is made there will be some form of strategic conversation. In governments this usually takes place at the political level amongst ministers or within political parties and there is little scope for outsiders to enter these spaces. Policies set by elected officials tend to be high-level statements – as short as a line or two in a manifesto – expressed through speeches or other policy documents like White Papers.
A policy statement therefore expresses a goal and it sets in motion realisations of that goal through laws, programmes or other activities. A short policy statement can determine major programmes of government work for many years. Policy programmes have their own problem spaces to define and there is much to do in order to translate a policy goal into practical activities. Whether consciously or not, policy programmes touch the lives of millions of people and the unintended consequences or conflicting results from the enactment of poor policies can be extremely harmful. The potential benefits of testing policy goals before they are put in place are therefore huge.
The idea of design interacting directly with
It is still early days for articulating exactly how and why the “physical making” aspect of design is so important in government contexts but almost all designers working in this way will emphasis it. An obvious benefit to building something real is that operational errors become more evident. And because prototypes make ideas manifest, they can help to build consensus or reveal where it is absent. They are also a way of asking questions and the presence of a prototype often prompts discussion of broader issues.
As an example, the picture below shows staff from the Service Design team at the consultancy OpenRoad in Vancouver considering advanced prototypes of changes to transit fare policy for the city for their client TransLink….(More).
New possibilities for cutting corruption in the public sector
Rema Hanna and Vestal McIntyre at VoxDev: “In their day-to-day dealings with the government, citizens of developing countries frequently encounter absenteeism, demands for bribes, and other forms of low-level corruption. When researchers used unannounced visits to gauge public-sector attendance across six countries, they found that 19% of teachers and 35% of health workers were absent during work hours (Chaudhury et al. 2006). A recent survey found that nearly 70% of Indians reported paying a bribe to access public services.
Corruption can set into motion vicious cycles: the government is impoverished of resources to provide services, and citizens are deprived of the things they need. For the poor, this might mean that they live without quality education, electricity, healthcare, and so forth. In contrast, the rich can simply pay the bribe or obtain the service privately, furthering inequality.
Much of the discourse around corruption focuses on punishing corrupt offenders. But punitive measures can only go so far, especially when corruption is seen as the ‘norm’ and is thus ingrained in institutions.
What if we could find ways of identifying the ‘goodies’ – those who enter the public sector out of a sense of civic responsibility, and serve honestly – and weeding out the ‘baddies’ before they are hired? New research shows this may be possible
You can test personality
For decades, questionnaires have dissected personality into the ‘Big Five’ traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits have been shown to be predictors of behaviour and outcomes in the workplace (Heckman 2011). As a result, private sector employers often use them in recruiting. Nobel laureate James Heckman and colleagues found that standardized adolescent measures of locus control and self-esteem (components of neuroticism) predict adult earnings to a similar degree as intelligence (Kautz et al. 2014).
Personality tests have also been put to use for the good of the poor: our colleague at Harvard’s Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), Asim Ijaz Khwaja and collaborators have tested, and then subsequently expanded, personality tests as a basis for identifying reliable borrowers. This way, lenders can offer products to poor entrepreneurs who lack traditional credit histories, but who are nonetheless creditworthy. (See the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab’s website.)
You can test for civic-mindedness and honesty
Out of the personality-test literature grew the Perry Public Sector Motivation questionnaire (Perry 1996), which comprises a series of statements that respondents can state their level of agreement or disagreement with measures of civic-mindedness. The questionnaire has six modules, including “Attraction to Policy Making”, “Commitment to Public Interest”, “Social Justice”, “Civic Duty”, “Compassion”, and “Self-Sacrifice.” Studies have found that scores on the instrument correlate positively with job performance, ethical behaviour, participation in civic organisations, and a host of other good outcomes (for a review, see Perry and Hondeghem 2008).
You can also measure honesty in different ways. For example, Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) formulated a game in which subjectsroll a die and write down the number that they get, receiving higher cash rewards for larger reported numbers. While this does not reveal with certainty if any one subject lied since no one else sees the die, it does reveal how far their reported numbers were from the uniform distribution. Those with high dice high points have a higher probability of having cheated. Implementing this, the authors found that “about 20% of inexperienced subjects lie to the fullest extent possible while 39% of subjects are fully honest.”
These and a range of other tools for psychological profiling have opened up new possibilities for improving governance. Here are a few lessons this new literature has yielded….(More)”.
Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change
Paper by Julie Posetti: “The news industry has a focus problem. ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’ –obsessive pursuit of technology in the absence of clear and research-informed strategies – is the diagnosis offered by participants in this research. The cure suggested involves a conscious shift by news publishers from being technology-led, to audience-focused and technology-empowered.
This report presents the first research from the Journalism Innovation Project anchored within the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. It is based on
Such a ‘pivot’ could also address the growing problem of burnout associated with ‘innovation fatigue’. To be effective, such strategies need to be focused on engaging audiences – the ‘end users’ – and they would benefit from research-informed innovation ‘indicators’.
The key themes identified in this report are:
a. The risks of ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’ and the impacts of ‘innovation fatigue’ in an era of perpetual change
b. Audiences: starting (again) with the end user
c. The need for a ‘user-led’ approach to researching journalism innovation and developing foundational frameworks to support it
Additionally, new journalism innovation considerations are noted, such as the implications of digital technologies’ ‘unintended consequences’, and the need to respond innovatively to media freedom threats – such as gendered online harassment, privacy breaches, and orchestrated disinformation campaigns
Our bold vision for Australia’s digital future
Speech by Minister for Human Services and Digital Transformation, Michael Keenan: ” …The job of the Australian Government is to keep Australia at the forefront of these changes and work to
This is the most exciting story in town. Digital transformation will change how
To power this transformation forward I am very pleased to announce today the launch of our Digital Transformation Strategy. This Strategy sets out a bold vision for Australia to remain in the top 3 digital governments in the world by 2025..
The Strategy will provide a clear direction for our work on data and digital transformation, with the aim to have all government services available digitally in the next 7 years.
The Strategy is accompanied by a comprehensive Roadmap of key projects and milestones being rolled out over the next two years
Our new approach is to design services that respond to common life events — like having a baby or starting a new job.
This is a big change from the way we do things now, where a member of the public has to go to any number of government departments, online or community groups to find information and services.
We currently
For example, digital technology will make it possible to deliver a fully personalised digital assistant.
That means that everyone accessing government services may have access to their own dedicated, personal avatar assistant, that can talk in their language, know their preferences, understand their needs and provide a familiar face to dealing with the government.
This is not science-fiction. In fact, a couple of years ago, my department had a prototype – Nadia – that was world leading.
Unfortunately, Nadia wasn’t quite ready at the time to deliver on the promise, but technology is evolving rapidly. I am confident that the day when such assistants will be around us – both in government and in private enterprise – is not that far away.
We already see smart assistants in our lives, whether it’s Siri and Cortana in our phones and computers, or Amazon’s Alexa or Google in our homes.
Having your own dedicated government digital assistant also means that, as a government, we will be able to deliver truly personalised services.
While we are starting with re-focusing government services around life events, our ambition is to end up offering you tailored support when you need it, based on your individual circumstances
See also: Digital Transformation Strategy.