Andrew Mandelbaum from OpeningParliament.org: “Around the world, parliaments, governments, civil society organizations, and even individual parliamentarians, are taking measures to make the legislative process more participatory. Some are creating their own tools — often open source, which allows others to use these tools as well — that enable citizens to markup legislation or share ideas on targeted subjects. Others are purchasing and implementing tools developed by private companies to good effect. In several instances, these initiatives are being conducted through collaboration between public institutions and civil society, while many compliment online and offline experiences to help ensure that a broader population of citizens is reached.
The list below provides examples of some of the more prominent efforts to engage citizens in the legislative process.
Brazil
Implementer: Brazilian Chamber of Deputies…
Website: http://edemocracia.camara.gov.br/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament.org Case Study
Estonia
Implementer: Estonian President & Civil Society
Project Name: Rahvakogu (The People’s Assembly)…
Website: http://www.rahvakogu.ee/
Additional Information: Enhancing Estonia’s Democracy Through Rahvakogu
Finland
Implementer: Finnish Parliament
Project Name: Inventing Finland again! (Keksitään Suomi uudelleen!)…
Website: http://www.suomijoukkoistaa.fi/
Additional Information: Democratic Participation and Deliberation in Crowdsourced Legislative Processes: The Case of the Law on Off-Road Traffic in Finland
France
Implementer: SmartGov – Démocratie Ouverte…
Website: https://www.parlement-et-citoyens.fr/
Additional Information: OpeningParliament Case Study
Italy
Implementer: Government of Italy
Project Name: Public consultation on constitutional reform…
Website: http://www.partecipa.gov.it/
Spain
Implementer: Basque Parliament…
Website: http://www.adi.parlamentovasco.euskolegebiltzarra.org/es/
Additional Information: Participation in Parliament
United Kingdom
Implementer: Cabinet Office
Project Name: Open Standards Consultation…
Website: http://consultation.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/openstandards/
Additional Information: Open Policy Making, Open Standards Consulation; Final Consultation Documents
United States
Implementer: OpenGov Foundation
Project Name: The Madison Project
Tool: The Madison Project“
New Journal Helps Behavioral Scientists Find Their Way to Washington
The PsychReport: “When it comes to being heard in Washington, classical economists have long gotten their way. Behavioral scientists, on the other hand, haven’t proved so adept at getting their message across.
It isn’t for lack of good ideas. Psychology’s applicability has been gaining momentum in recent years, namely in the U.K.’s Behavioral Insights Team, which has helped prove the discipline’s worth to policy makers. The recent (but not-yet-official) announcement that the White House is creating a similar team is another major endorsement of behavioral science’s value.
But when it comes to communicating those ideas to the public in general, psychologists and other behavioral scientists can’t name so many successes. Part of the problem is PR know-how: writing for a general audience, publicizing good ideas, reaching-out to decision makers. Another is incentive: academics need to publish, and many times publishing means producing long, dense, jargon-laden articles for peer-reviewed journals read by a rarified audience of other academics. And then there’s time, or lack of it.
But a small group of prominent behavioral scientists is working to help other researchers find their way to Washington. The brainchild of UCLA’s Craig Fox and Duke’s Sim Sitkin, Behavioral Science & Policy is a peer-reviewed journal set to launch online this fall and in print early next year, whose mission is to influence policy and practice through promoting high-quality behavioral science research. Articles will be brief, well written, and will all provide straightforward, applicable policy recommendations that serve the public interest.
“What we’re trying to do is create policies that are mindful of how individuals, groups, and organizations behave. How can you create smart policies if you don’t do that?”
In bringing behavioral science to the capital, Fox echoed a similar motivation as David Halpern of the Behavioral Insights Team.
“What we’re trying to do is create policies that are mindful of how individuals, groups, and organizations behave. How can you create smart policies if you don’t do that?” Fox said. “Because after all, all policies affect individuals, groups, and/or organizations.”
Fox has already assembled an impressive team of scientists from around the country for the journal’s advisory board including Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, authors of Nudge which helped inspire the creation of the Behavioral Insights Team, The New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman. They’ve created a strong partnership with the prestigious think tank Brookings Institute, who will serve as their publishing partner and who they plan will also co-host briefings for policy makers in Washington…”
Open Data is a Civil Right
Yo Yoshida, Founder & CEO, Appallicious in GovTech: “As Americans, we expect a certain standardization of basic services, infrastructure and laws — no matter where we call home. When you live in Seattle and take a business trip to New York, the electric outlet in the hotel you’re staying in is always compatible with your computer charger. When you drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, I-5 doesn’t all-of-a-sudden turn into a dirt country road because some cities won’t cover maintenance costs. If you take a 10-minute bus ride from Boston to the city of Cambridge, you know the money in your wallet is still considered legal tender.
But what if these expectations of consistency were not always a given? What if cities, counties and states had absolutely zero coordination when it came to basic services? This is what it is like for us in the open data movement. There are so many important applications and products that have been built by civic startups and concerned citizens. However, all too often these efforts are confided to city limits, and unavailable to anyone outside of them. It’s time to start reimagining the way cities function and how local governments operate. There is a wealth of information housed in local governments that should be public by default to help fuel a new wave of civic participation.
Appallicious’ Neighborhood Score provides an overall health and sustainability score, block-by-block for every neighborhood in the city of San Francisco. The first time metrics have been applied to neighborhoods so we can judge how government allocates our resources, so we can better plan how to move forward. But, if you’re thinking about moving to Oakland, just a subway stop away from San Francisco and want to see the score for a neighborhood, our app can’t help you, because that city has yet to release the data sets we need.
In Contra Costa County, there is the lifesaving PulsePoint app, which notifies smartphone users who are trained in CPR when someone nearby may be in need of help. This is an amazing app—for residents of Contra Costa County. But if someone in neighboring Alameda County needs CPR, the app, unfortunately, is completely useless.
Buildingeye visualizes planning and building permit data to allow users to see what projects are being proposed in their area or city. However, buildingeye is only available in a handful of places, simply because most cities have yet to make permits publicly available. Think about what this could do for the construction sector — an industry that has millions of jobs for Americans. Buildingeye also gives concerned citizens access to public documents like never before, so they can see what might be built in their cities or on their streets.
Along with other open data advocates, I have been going from city-to-city, county-to-county and state-to-state, trying to get governments and departments to open up their massive amounts of valuable data. Each time one city, or one county, agrees to make their data publicly accessible, I can’t help but think it’s only a drop in the bucket. We need to think bigger.
Every government, every agency and every department in the country that has already released this information to the public is a case study that points to the success of open data — and why every public entity should follow their lead. There needs to be a national referendum that instructs that all government data should be open and accessible to the public.
Last May, President Obama issued an executive order requiring that going forward, any data generated by the federal government must be made available to the public in open, machine-readable formats. In the executive order, Obama stated that, “openness in government strengthens our democracy, promotes the delivery of efficient and effective services to the public, and contributes to economic growth.”
If this is truly the case, Washington has an obligation to compel local and state governments to release their data as well. Many have tried to spur this effort. California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom created the Citizenville Challenge to speed up adoption on the local level. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has also been vocal in promoting open data efforts. But none of these initiatives could have the same effect of a federal mandate.
What I am proposing is no small feat, and it won’t happen overnight. But there should be a concerted effort by those in the technology industry, specifically civic startups, to call on Congress to draft legislation that would require every city in the country to make their data open, free and machine readable. Passing federal legislation will not be an easy task — but creating a “universal open data” law is possible. It would require little to no funding, and it is completely nonpartisan. It’s actually not a political issue at all; it is, for lack of a better word, and administrative issue.
Often good legislation is blocked because lawmakers and citizens are concerned about project funding. While there should be support to help cities and towns achieve the capability of opening their data, a lot of the time, they don’t need it. In 2009, the city and county of San Francisco opened up its data with zero dollars. Many other cities have done the same. There will be cities and municipalities that will need financial assistance to accomplish this. But it is worth it, and it will not require a significant investment for a substantial return. There are free online open data portals, like ckan, dkan and a new effort from Accela, CivicData.com, to centralize open data efforts.
When the UK Government recently announced a £1.5 million investment to support open data initiatives, its Cabinet Office Minister said, “We know that it creates a more accountable, efficient and effective government. Open Data is a raw material for economic growth, supporting the creation of new markets, business and jobs and helping us compete in the global race.”
We should not fall behind these efforts. There is too much at stake for our citizens, not to mention our economy. A recent McKinsey report found that making open data has the potential to create $3 trillion in value worldwide.
Former Speaker Tip O’Neil famously said, “all politics are local.” But we in the civic startup space believe all data is local. Data is reporting potholes in your neighborhood and identifying high crime areas in your communities. It’s seeing how many farmers’ markets there are in your town compared to liquor stores. Data helps predict which areas of a city are most at risk during a heat wave and other natural disasters. A federal open data law would give the raw material needed to create tools to improve the lives of all Americans, not just those who are lucky enough to live in a city that has released this information on its own.
It’s a different way of thinking about how a government operates and the relationship it has with its citizens. Open data gives the public an amazing opportunity to be more involved with governmental decisions. We can increase accountability and transparency, but most importantly we can revolutionize the way local residents communicate and work with their government.
Access to this data is a civil right. If this is truly a government by, of and for the people, then its data needs to be available to all of us. By opening up this wealth of information, we will design a better government that takes advantage of the technology and skills of civic startups and innovative citizens….”
Intelligent Demand: Policy Rationale, Design and Potential Benefits
New OECD paper: “Policy interest in demand-side initiatives has grown in recent years. This may reflect an expectation that demand-side policy could be particularly effective in steering innovation to meet societal needs. In addition, owing to constrained public finances in most OECD countries, the possibility that demand-side policies might be less expensive than direct support measures is attractive. Interest may also reflect some degree of disappointment with the outcomes of traditional supply-side measures. This paper reviews demand-side innovation policies, their rationales and importance across countries, different approaches to their design, the challenges entailed in their implementation and evaluation, and good practices. Three main forms of demand-side policy are considered: innovation-oriented public procurement, innovation-oriented regulations, and standards. Emphasis is placed on innovation-oriented public procurement.”
Procurement and Civic Innovation
Derek Eder: “Have you ever used a government website and had a not-so-awesome experience? In our slick 2014 world of Google, Twitter and Facebook, why does government tech feel like it’s stuck in the 1990s?
The culprit: bad technology procurement.
Procurement is the procedure a government follows to buy something–letting suppliers know what they want, asking for proposals, restricting what kinds of proposal they will consider, limiting what kinds of firms they will do business with, and deciding if what they got what they paid for.
The City of Chicago buys technology about the same way that they buy health insurance, a bridge, or anything else in between. And that’s the problem.
Chicago’s government has a long history of corruption, nepotism and patronage. After each outrage, new rules are piled upon existing rules to prevent that crisis from happening again. Unfortunately, this accumulation of rules does not just protect against the bad guys, it also forms a huge barrier to entry for technology innovators.
So, the firms that end up building our city’s digital public services tend to be good at picking their way through the barriers of the procurement process, not at building good technology. Instead of making government tech contracting fair and competitive, procurement has unfortunately had the opposite effect.
So where does this leave us? Despite Chicago’s flourishing startup scene, and despite having one of the country’s largest community of civic technologists, the Windy City’s digital public services are still terribly designed and far too expensive to the taxpayer.
The Technology Gap
The best way to see the gap between Chicago’s volunteer civic tech community and the technology that the City pays is to look at an entire class of civic apps that are essentially facelifts on existing government websites….
You may have noticed an increase in quality and usability between these three civic apps and their official government counterparts.
Now consider this: all of the government sites took months to build and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Was My Car Towed, 2nd City Zoning and CrimeAround.us were all built by one to two people in a matter of days, for no money.
Think about that for a second. Consider how much the City is overpaying for websites its citizens can barely use. And imagine how much better our digital city services would be if the City worked with the very same tech startups they’re trying to nurture.
Why do these civic apps exist? Well, with the City of Chicago releasing hundreds of high quality datasets on their data portal over the past three years (for which they should be commended), a group of highly passionate and skilled technologists have started using their skills to develop these apps and many others.
It’s mostly for fun, learning, and a sense of civic duty, but it demonstrates there’s no shortage of highly skilled developers who are interested in using technology to make their city a better place to live in…
Two years ago, in the Fall of 2011, I learned about procurement in Chicago for the first time. An awesome group of developers, designers and I had just built ChicagoLobbyists.org – our very first civic app – for the City of Chicago’s first open data hackathon….
Since then, the City has often cited ChicagoLobbyists.org as evidence of the innovation-sparking potential of open data.
Shortly after our site launched, a Request For Proposals, or RFP, was issued by the City for an ‘Online Lobbyist Disclosure System.’
Hey! We just built one of those! Sure, we would need to make some updates to it—adding a way for lobbyists to log in and submit their info—but we had a solid start. So, our scrappy group of tech volunteers decided to respond to the RFP.
After reading all 152 pages of the document, we realized we had no chance of getting the bid. It was impossible for the ChicagoLobbyists.org group to meet the legal requirements (as it would have been for any small software shop):
- audited financial statements for the past 3 years
- an economic disclosure statement (EDS) and affidavit
- proof of $500k workers compensation and employers liability
- proof of $2 million in professional liability insurance”
Loomio: The world needs a better way to make decisions together.
Loomio: “Real democracy is about collaboration: groups of people getting together and making decisions that work for everyone….Loomio is free and open software for anyone, anywhere, to participate in decisions that affect them…
Loomio fills a critical gap: bringing online talk to real world action. Social media and email have made it so easy to communicate, but a decision is what turns talk into action. Right now, there’s no easy way to make decisions together online. It’s like a missing piece of the internet.
We’ve taken all the learning from thousands of groups using our beta prototype and designed a whole new platform for truly inclusive decision-making: Loomio 1.0″
We’ve taken all the learning from thousands of groups using our beta prototype and designed a whole new platform for truly inclusive decision-making: Loomio 1.0″
New Research Network to Study and Design Innovative Ways of Solving Public Problems
MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance formed to gather evidence and develop new designs for governing
NEW YORK, NY, March 4, 2014 – The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at New York University today announced the formation of a Research Network on Opening Governance, which will seek to develop blueprints for more effective and legitimate democratic institutions to help improve people’s lives.
Convened and organized by the GovLab, the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Opening Governance is made possible by a three-year grant of $5 million from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as well as a gift from Google.org, which will allow the Network to tap the latest technological advances to further its work.
Combining empirical research with real-world experiments, the Research Network will study what happens when governments and institutions open themselves to diverse participation, pursue collaborative problem-solving, and seek input and expertise from a range of people. Network members include twelve experts (see below) in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This core group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. Together, they will assess existing innovations in governing and experiment with new practices and how institutions make decisions at the local, national, and international levels.
Support for the Network from Google.org will be used to build technology platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world, empirical experiments with institutional partners such as governments and NGOs to discover what can enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The Network’s research will be complemented by theoretical writing and compelling storytelling designed to articulate and demonstrate clearly and concretely how governing agencies might work better than they do today. “We want to arm policymakers and practitioners with evidence of what works and what does not,” says Professor Beth Simone Noveck, Network Chair and author of Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citi More Powerful, “which is vital to drive innovation, re-establish legitimacy and more effectively target scarce resources to solve today’s problems.”
“From prize-backed challenges to spur creative thinking to the use of expert networks to get the smartest people focused on a problem no matter where they work, this shift from top-down, closed, and professional government to decentralized, open, and smarter governance may be the major social innovation of the 21st century,” says Noveck. “The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance is the ideal crucible for helping transition from closed and centralized to open and collaborative institutions of governance in a way that is scientifically sound and yields new insights to inform future efforts, always with an eye toward real-world impacts.”
MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci added, “Recognizing that we cannot solve today’s challenges with yesterday’s tools, this interdisciplinary group will bring fresh thinking to questions about how our governing institutions operate, and how they can develop better ways to help address seemingly intractable social problems for the common good.”
Members
The MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance comprises:
Chair: Beth Simone Noveck
Network Coordinator: Andrew Young
Chief of Research: Stefaan Verhulst
Faculty Members:
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)/University of Southampton, UK)
- Deborah Estrin (Cornell Tech/Weill Cornell Medical College)
- Erik Johnston (Arizona State University)
- Henry Farrell (George Washington University)
- Sheena S. Iyengar (Columbia Business School/Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business)
- Karim Lakhani (Harvard Business School)
- Anita McGahan (University of Toronto)
- Cosma Shalizi (Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute)
Institutional Members:
- Christian Bason and Jesper Christiansen (MindLab, Denmark)
- Geoff Mulgan (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts – NESTA, United Kingdom)
- Lee Rainie (Pew Research Center)
The Network is eager to hear from and engage with the public as it undertakes its work. Please contact Stefaan Verhulst to share your ideas or identify opportunities to collaborate.”
Predicting Individual Behavior with Social Networks
Article by Sharad Goel and Daniel Goldstein (Microsoft Research): “With the availability of social network data, it has become possible to relate the behavior of individuals to that of their acquaintances on a large scale. Although the similarity of connected individuals is well established, it is unclear whether behavioral predictions based on social data are more accurate than those arising from current marketing practices. We employ a communications network of over 100 million people to forecast highly diverse behaviors, from patronizing an off-line department store to responding to advertising to joining a recreational league. Across all domains, we find that social data are informative in identifying individuals who are most likely to undertake various actions, and moreover, such data improve on both demographic and behavioral models. There are, however, limits to the utility of social data. In particular, when rich transactional data were available, social data did little to improve prediction.”
The disruptive power of collaboration: An interview with Clay Shirky
McKinsey: “From the invention of the printing press to the telephone, the radio, and the Internet, the ways people collaborate change frequently, and the effects of those changes often reverberate through generations. In this video interview, Clay Shirky, author, New York University professor, and leading thinker on the impact of social media, explains the disruptive impact of technology on how people live and work—and on the economics of what we make and consume. This interview was conducted by McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui, and an edited transcript of Shirky’s remarks follows….
Shirky:…The thing I’ve always looked at, because it is long-term disruptive, is changes in the way people collaborate. Because in the history of particularly the Western world, when communications tools come along and they change how people can contact each other, how they can share information, how they can find each other—we’re talking about the printing press, or the telephone, or the radio, or what have you—the changes that are left in the wake of those new technologies often span generations.
The printing press was a sustaining technology for the scientific revolution, the spread of newspapers, the spread of democracy, just on down the list. So the thing I always watch out for, when any source of disruption comes along, when anything that’s going to upset the old order comes along, is I look for what the collaborative penumbra is.”
Smart Governance: A Roadmap for Research and Practice
New report by Hans J. Scholl and Margit C. Scholl: “It has been the object of this article to make the case and present a roadmap for the study of the phenomena of smart governance as well as smart and open governance as an enactment of smart governance in practice. As a concept paper, this contribution aimed at sparking interest and at inspiring scholarly and practitioner discourse in this area of study inside the community of electronic government research and practice, and beyond. The roadmap presented here comprises and details seven elements of smart governance along with eight areas of focus in practice.
Smart governance along with its administrative enactment of smart and open government, it was argued, can help effectively address the three grand challenges to 21st century societal and individual well-being, which are (a) the Third Industrial Revolution with the information revolution at its core, (b) the rapidity of change and the lack of timely and effective government intervention, and (c) expansive government spending and exorbitant public debt financing. Although not seen as a panacea, it was also argued that smart governance principles could guide the relatively complex administrative enactment of smart and open government more intelligently than traditional static and inflexible governance approaches could do.
Since much of the road ahead metaphorically speaking leads through uncharted territory, dedicated research is needed that accompanies projects in this area and evaluates them. Research could further be embedded into practical projects providing for fast and systematic learning. We believe that such embedding of research into smart governance projects should become an integral part of smart projects’ agendas.”