How Helsinki Became the Most Successful Open-Data City in the World

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Olli Sulopuisto in Atlantic Cities:  “If there’s something you’d like to know about Helsinki, someone in the city administration most likely has the answer. For more than a century, this city has funded its own statistics bureaus to keep data on the population, businesses, building permits, and most other things you can think of. Today, that information is stored and freely available on the internet by an appropriately named agency, City of Helsinki Urban Facts.
There’s a potential problem, though. Helsinki may be Finland’s capital and largest city, with 620,000 people. But it’s only one of more than a dozen municipalities in a metropolitan area of almost 1.5 million. So in terms of urban data, if you’re only looking at Helsinki, you’re missing out on more than half of the picture.
Helsinki and three of its neighboring cities are now banding together to solve that problem. Through an entity called Helsinki Region Infoshare, they are bringing together their data so that a fuller picture of the metro area can come into view.
That’s not all. At the same time these datasets are going regional, they’re also going “open.” Helsinki Region Infoshare publishes all of its data in formats that make it easy for software developers, researchers, journalists and others to analyze, combine or turn into web-based or mobile applications that citizens may find useful. In four years of operation, the project has produced more than 1,000 “machine-readable” data sources such as a map of traffic noise levels, real-time locations of snow plows, and a database of corporate taxes.
A global leader
All of this has put the Helsinki region at the forefront of the open-data movement that is sweeping cities across much of the world. The concept is that all kinds of good things can come from assembling city data, standardizing it and publishing it for free. Last month, Helsinki Region Infoshare was presented with the European Commission’s prize for innovation in public administration.

The project is creating transparency in government and a new digital commons. It’s also fueling a small industry of third-party application developers who take all this data and turn it into consumer products.
For example, Helsinki’s city council has a paperless system called Ahjo for handling its agenda items, minutes and exhibits that accompany council debates. Recently, the datasets underlying Ahjo were opened up. The city built a web-based interface for browsing the documents, but a software developer who doesn’t even live in Helsinki created a smartphone app for it. Now anyone who wants to keep up with just about any decision Helsinki’s leaders have before them can do so easily.
Another example is a product called BlindSquare, a smartphone app that helps blind people navigate the city. An app developer took the Helsinki region’s data on public transport and services, and mashed it up with location data from the social networking app Foursquare as well as mapping tools and the GPS and artificial voice capabilities of new smartphones. The product now works in dozens of countries and languages and sells for about €17 ($24 U.S.)
…
Helsinki also runs competitions for developers who create apps with public-sector data. That’s nothing new — BlindSquare won the Apps4Finland and European OpenCities app challenges in 2012. But this year, they’re trying a new approach to the app challenge concept, funded by the European Commission’s prize money and Sitra.
It’s called Datademo. Instead of looking for polished but perhaps random apps to heap fame and prize money on, Datademo is trying to get developers to aim their creative energies toward general goals city leaders think are important. The current competition specifies that apps have to use open data from the Helsinki region or from Finland to make it easier for citizens to find information and participate in democracy. The competition also gives developers seed funding upfront.
Datademo received more than 40 applications in its first round. Of those, the eight best suggestions were given three months and €2,000 ($2,770 U.S) to implement their ideas. The same process will be repeated two times, resulting in dozens of new app ideas that will get a total of €48,000 ($66,000 U.S.) in development subsidies. Keeping with the spirit of transparency, the voting and judging process is open to all who submit an idea for each round….”

How Britain’s Getting Public Policy Down to a Science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Governing: “Britain has a bold yet simple plan to do something few U.S. governments do: test the effectiveness of multiple policies before rolling them out. But are American lawmakers willing to listen to facts more than money or politics?

In medicine they do clinical trials to determine whether a new drug works. In business they use focus groups to help with product development. In Hollywood they field test various endings for movies in order to pick the one audiences like best. In the world of public policy? Well, to hear members of the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) characterize it, those making laws and policies in the public sector tend to operate on some well-meaning mix of whim, hunch and dice roll, which all too often leads to expensive and ineffective (if not downright harmful) policy decisions.

….One of the prime BIT examples for why facts and not intuition ought to drive policy hails from the U.S. The much-vaunted “Scared Straight” program that swept the U.S. in the 1990s involved shepherding at-risk youth into maximum security prisons. There, they would be confronted by inmates who, presumably, would do the scaring while the visiting juveniles would do the straightening out. Scared Straight seemed like a good idea — let at-risk youth see up close and personal what was in store for them if they continued their wayward ways. Initially the results reported seemed not just good, but great. Programs were reporting “success rates” as high as 94 percent, which inspired other countries, including the U.K., to adopt Scared Straight-like programs.

The problem was that none of the program evaluations included a control group — a group of kids in similar circumstances with similar backgrounds who didn’t go through a Scared Straight program. There was no way to see how they would fare absent the experience. Eventually, a more scientific analysis of seven U.S. Scared Straight programs was conducted. Half of the at-risk youth in the study were left to their own devices and half were put through the program. This led to an alarming discovery: Kids who went through Scared Straight were more likely to offend than kids who skipped it — or, more precisely, who were spared it. The BIT concluded that “the costs associated with the programme (largely related to the increase in reoffending rates) were over 30 times higher than the benefits, meaning that ‘Scared Straight’ programmes cost the taxpayer a significant amount of money and actively increased crime.”

It was witnessing such random acts of policymaking that in 2010 inspired a small group of political and social scientists to set up the Behavioural Insights Team. Originally a small “skunk works” tucked away in the U.K. Treasury Department, the team gained traction under Prime Minister David Cameron, who took office evincing a keen interest in both “nonregulatory solutions to policy problems” and in spending public money efficiently, Service says. By way of example, he points to a business support program in the U.K. that would give small and medium-sized businesses up to £3,000 to subsidize advice from professionals. “But there was no proven link between receiving that money and improving business. We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be better if you could first test the efficacy of some million-pound program or other, rather than just roll it out?’”

The BIT was set up as something of a policy research lab that would scientifically test multiple approaches to a public policy problem on a limited, controlled basis through “randomized controlled trials.” That is, it would look at multiple ways to skin the cat before writing the final cat-skinning manual. By comparing the results of various approaches — efforts to boost tax compliance, say, or to move people from welfare to work — policymakers could use the results of the trials to actually hone in on the most effective practices before full-scale rollout.

The various program and policy options that are field tested by the BIT aren’t pie-in-the-sky surmises, which is where the “behavioural” piece of the equation comes in. Before settling on what options to test, the BIT takes into account basic human behavior — what motivates us and what turns us off — and then develops several approaches to a policy problem based on actual social science and psychology.

The approach seems to work. Take, for example, the issue of recruiting organ donors. It can be a touchy topic, suggesting one’s own mortality while also conjuring up unsettling images of getting carved up and parceled out by surgeons. It’s no wonder, then, that while nine out of 10 people in England profess to support organ donations, fewer than one in three are officially registered as donors. To increase the U.K.’s ratio, the BIT decided to play around with the standard recruitment message posted on a high-traffic gov.uk website that encourages people to sign up with the national Organ Donor Register (see “‘Please Help Others,’” page 18). Seven different messages that varied in approach and tone were tested, and at the end of the trial, one message emerged clearly as the most effective — so effective, in fact, that the BIT concluded that “if the best-performing message were to be used over the whole year, it would lead to approximately 96,000 extra registrations completed.”

According to the BIT there are nine key steps to a defensible controlled randomized trial, the first and second — and the two most obvious — being that there must be at least two policy interventions to compare and that the outcome that the policies they’re meant to influence must be clear. But the “randomized” factor in the equation is critical, and it’s not necessarily easy to achieve.

In BIT-speak, “randomization units” can range from individuals (randomly chosen clients) entering the same welfare office but experiencing different interventions, to different groups of clientele or even different institutions like schools or congregate care facilities. The important point is to be sure that the groups or institutions chosen for comparison are operating in circumstances and with clientele similar enough so that researchers can confidently say that any differences in outcomes are due to different policy interventions and not other socioeconomic or cultural exigencies. There are also minimum sampling sizes that ensure legitimacy — essentially, the more the merrier.

As a matter of popular political culture, the BIT’s approach is known as “nudge theory,” a strand of behavioral economics based on the notion that the economic decisions that human beings make are just that — human — and that by tuning into what motivates and appeals to people we can much better understand why those economic decisions are made. In market economics, of course, nudge theory helps businesses tune into customer motivation. In public policy, nudge theory involves figuring out ways to motivate people to do what’s best for themselves, their families, their neighborhoods and society.

When the BIT started playing around with ways to improve tax compliance, for example, the group discovered a range of strategies to do that, from the very obvious approach — make compliance easy — to the more behaviorally complex. The idea was to key in on the sorts of messages to send to taxpayers that will resonate and improve voluntary compliance. The results can be impressive. “If you just tell taxpayers that the majority of folks in their area pay their taxes on time [versus sending out dunning letters],” says the BIT’s Service, “that adds 3 percent more people who pay, bringing in millions of pounds.” Another randomized controlled trial showed that in pestering citizens to pay various fines, personal text messages were more effective than letters.

There has been pushback on using randomized controlled trials to develop policy. Some see it as a nefarious attempt at mind control on the part of government. “Nudge” to some seems to mean “manipulate.” Service bridles at the criticism. “We’re sometimes referred to as ‘the Nudge Team,’ but we’re the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ because we’re interested in human behavior, not mind control.”

The essence of the philosophy, Service adds, is “leading people to do the right thing.” For those interested in launching BIT-like efforts without engendering immediate ideological resistance, he suggests focusing first on “non-headline-grabbing” policy areas such as tax collection or organ donation that can be launched through administrative fiat.”

Out in the Open: An Open Source Website That Gives Voters a Platform to Influence Politicians

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Klint Finley in Wired: “This is the decade of the protest. The Arab Spring. The Occupy Movement. And now the student demonstrations in Taiwan.
Argentine political scientist Pia Mancini says we’re caught in a “crisis of representation.” Most of these protests have popped up in countries that are at least nominally democratic, but so many people are still unhappy with their elected leaders. The problem, Mancini says, is that elected officials have drifted so far from the people they represent, that it’s too hard for the average person to be heard.
“If you want to participate in the political system as it is, it’s really costly,” she says. “You need to study politics in university, and become a party member and work your way up. But not every citizen can devote their lives to politics.”

Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them.

That’s why Mancini started the Net Democracy foundation, a not-for-profit that explores ways of improving civic engagement through technology. The foundation’s first project is something called Democracy OS, an online platform for debating and voting on political issues, and it’s already finding a place in the world. The federal government in Mexico is using this open-source tool to gather feedback on a proposed public data policy, and in Tunisia, a non-government organization called iWatch has adopted it in an effort to give the people a stronger voice.
Mancini’s dissatisfaction with electoral politics stems from her experience working for the Argentine political party Unión Celeste y Blanco from 2010 until 2012. “I saw some practices that I thought were harmful to societies,” she says. Parties were too interested in the appearances of the candidates, and not interested enough in their ideas. Worse, citizens were only consulted for their opinions once every two to four years, meaning politicians could get away with quite a bit in the meantime.
Democracy OS is designed to address that problem by getting citizens directly involved in debating specific proposals when their representatives are actually voting on them. It operates on three levels: one for gathering information about political issues, one for public debate about those issues, and one for actually voting on specific proposals.
Various communities now use a tool called Madison to discuss policy documents, and many activists and community organizations have adopted Loomio to make decisions internally. But Democracy OS aims higher: to provide a common platform for any city, state, or government to actually put proposals to a vote. “We’re able to actually overthrow governments, but we’re not using technology to decide what to do next,” Mancini says. “So the risk is that we create power vacuums that get filled with groups that are already very well organized. So now we need to take it a bit further. We need to decide what democracy for the internet era looks like.”
Image: Courtesy of Net Democracy

Software Shop as Political Party

Today Net Democracy is more than just a software development shop. It’s also a local political party based in Beunos Aires. Two years ago, the foundation started pitching the first prototype of the software to existing political parties as a way for them to gather feedback from constituents, but it didn’t go over well. “They said: ‘Thank you, this is cool, but we’re not interested,’” Mancini remembers. “So we decided to start our own political party.”
The Net Democracy Party hasn’t won any seats yet, but it promises that if it does, it will use Democracy OS to enable any local registered voter to tell party representatives how to vote. Mancini says the party representatives will always vote the way constituents tell them to vote through the software.

‘We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time. What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.’

She also uses the term “net democracy” to refer to the type of democracy that the party advocates, a form of delegative democracy that attempts to strike a balance between representative democracy and direct democracy. “We’re not saying everyone should vote on every issue all the time,” Mancini explains. “What were saying is that issues should be open for everyone to participate.”
Individuals will also be able to delegate their votes to other people. “So, if you’re not comfortable voting on health issues, you can delegate to someone else to vote for you in that area,” she says. “That way people with a lot of experience in an issue, like a community leader who doesn’t have lobbyist access to the system, can build more political capital.”
She envisions a future where decisions are made on two levels. Decisions that involve specific knowledge — macroeconomics, tax reforms, judiciary regulations, penal code, etc. — or that affect human rights are delegated “upwards” to representatives. But then decisions related to local issues — transport, urban development, city codes, etc. — cab be delegated “downwards” to the citizens.

The Secret Ballot Conundrum

Ensuring the integrity of the votes gathered via Democracy OS will be a real challenge. The U.S. non-profit organization Black Box Voting has long criticized electronic voting schemes as inherently flawed. “Our criticism of internet voting is that it is not transparent and cannot be made publicly transparent,” says Black Box Voting founder Bev Harris. “With transparency for election integrity defined as public ability to see and authenticate four things: who can vote, who did vote, vote count, and chain of custody.”
In short, there’s no known way to do a secret ballot online because any system for verifying that the votes were counted properly will inevitably reveal who voted for what.
Democracy OS deals with that by simply doing away with secret ballots. For now, the Net Democracy party will have people sign-up for Democracy OS accounts in person with their government issued ID cards. “There is a lot to be said about how anonymity allows you to speak more freely,” Mancini says. “But in the end, we decided to prioritize the reliability, accountability and transparency of the system. We believe that by making our arguments and decisions public we are fostering a civic culture. We will be more responsible for what we say and do if it’s public.”
But making binding decisions based on these online discussions would be problematic, since they would skew not just towards those tech savvy enough to use the software, but also towards those willing to have their names attached to their votes publicly. Fortunately, the software isn’t yet being used to gather real votes, just to gather public feedback….”

Innovation Contests

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Pérez Castrillo and David Wettstein: “We study innovation contests with asymmetric information and identical contestants, where contestants’ efforts and innate abilities generate inventions of varying qualities. The designer offers a reward to the contestant achieving the highest quality and receives the revenue generated by the innovation. We characterize the equilibrium behavior, outcomes and payoffs for both nondiscriminatory and discriminatory (where the reward is contestant-dependent) contests. We derive conditions under which the designer obtains a larger payoff when using a discriminatory contest and describe settings where these conditions are satisfied.”

The promise and perils of giving the public a policy ‘nudge’

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicholas Biddle and Katherine Curchin at the Conversation: “…These behavioural insights are more than just intellectual curiosities. They are increasingly being used by policymakers inspired by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s bestselling manifesto for libertarian paternalism, Nudge.
The British and New South Wales governments have set up behavioural insights units. Many other governments around Australia are following their lead.
Most of the attention so far has been on how behavioural insights could be employed to make people slimmer, greener, more altruistic or better savers. However, it’s time we started thinking and talking about the impact these ideas could have on social policy – programs and payments that aim to reduce disadvantage and narrow divergence in opportunity.
While applying behavioural insights can potentially improve the efficiency and effectiveness of social policy, unscrupulous or poorly thought through applications could be disturbing and damaging. It would appear behavioural insights inspired the UK government’s so-called “Nudge Unit” to force job seekers to undergo bogus personality tests – on pain of losing benefits if they refused.
The idea seemed to be that because people readily believe that any vaguely worded combination of character traits applies to them – which is why people connect with their star sign – the results of a fake psychometric test can dupe them into believing they have a go-getting personality.
In our view, this is not how behavioural insights should be applied. This UK example seems to be a particularly troubling case of the use of “nudges” in conjunction with, rather than instead of, coercion. This is the worst of both worlds: not libertarian paternalism, but authoritarian paternalism.
Ironically, this instance betrays a questionable understanding of behavioural insights or at the very least a very short-term focus. Research tells us that co-operative behaviour depends on the perception of fairness and successful framing requires trust.
Dishonest interventions, which make the government seem both unfair and untrustworthy, should have the longer-term effect of undermining its ability to elicit cooperation and successfully frame information.
Some critics have assumed nudge is inherently conservative or neoliberal. Yet these insights could inform progressive reform in many ways.
For example, taking behavioural insights seriously would encourage a redesign of employment services. There is plenty of scope for thinking more rigorously about how job seekers’ interactions with employment services unintentionally inhibit their motivation to search for work.

Beware accidental nudges

More than just a nudge here or there, behavioural insights can be used to reflect on almost all government decisions. Too often governments accidentally nudge citizens in the opposite direction to where they want them to go.
Take the disappointing take-up of the Matched Savings Scheme, which is part of New Income Management in the Northern Territory. It matches welfare recipients’ savings dollar-for-dollar up to a maximum of A$500 and is meant to get people into the habit of saving regularly.
No doubt saving is extremely hard for people on very low incomes. But another reason so few people embraced the savings program may be a quirk in its design: people had to save money out of their non-income-managed funds, but the $500 reward they received from the government went into their income-managed account.
To some people this appears to have signalled the government’s bad faith. It said to them: even if you demonstrate your responsibility with money, we still won’t trust you.
The Matched Savings Scheme was intended to be a carrot, not a stick. It was supposed to complement the coercive element of income management by giving welfare recipients an incentive to improve their budgeting. Instead it was perceived as an invitation to welfare recipients to be complicit in their own humiliation.
The promise of an extra $500 would have been a strong lure for Homo economicus, but it wasn’t for Homo sapiens. People out of work or on income support are no more or less rational than merchant bankers or economics professors. Their circumstances and choices are different though.
The idiosyncrasies of human decision-making don’t mean that the human brain is fundamentally flawed. Most of the biases that we mentioned earlier are adaptive. But they do mean that policy makers need to appreciate how we differ from rational utility maximisers.”
Real humans are not worse than economic man. We’re just different and we deserve policies made for Homo sapiens, not Homo economicus.

House passes bill to eliminate wasteful reports

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Federal Times: “Agencies would stop producing a variety of unnecessary reports, under legislation passed by the House April 28.
The Government Reports Elimination Act would cut reports from across government and save agencies about $1 million over the next five years. The legislation is sponsored by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif, and by Reps. Gerry Connolly, D-VA., and Rob Woodall, R-Ga. Senators Mark Warner, D-Va., and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., have introduced a companion bill in the Senate.
“Congress relies on accurate, timely reports to inform its spending and policy decisions, but outdated or duplicative reports are simply a waste of government resources,” Issa said in a press release.
Connolly said it is important that Congress leverage every opportunity to streamline or eliminate antiquated reporting requirements in a bipartisan way.
“Enacting our bipartisan legislation will free up precious agency resources, allowing taxpayer dollars to be devoted to operations that are truly mission-critical, high priority functions,” Connolly said.”
Bill at: http://www.cbo.gov/publication/45303

Cyberlibertarians’ Digital Deletion of the Left

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in Jacobin: “The digital revolution, we are told everywhere today, produces democracy. It gives “power to the people” and dethrones authoritarians; it levels the playing field for distribution of information critical to political engagement; it destabilizes hierarchies, decentralizes what had been centralized, democratizes what was the domain of elites.
Most on the Left would endorse these ends. The widespread availability of tools whose uses are harmonious with leftist goals would, one might think, accompany broad advancement of those goals in some form. Yet the Left today is scattered, nearly toothless in most advanced democracies. If digital communication technology promotes leftist values, why has its spread coincided with such a stark decline in the Left’s political fortunes?
Part of this disconnect between advancing technology and a retreating left can be explained by the advent of cyberlibertarianism, a view that widespread computerization naturally produces democracy and freedom.
In the 1990s, UK media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, US journalist Paulina Borsook, and US philosopher of technology Langdon Winner introduced the term to describe a prominent worldview in Silicon Valley and digital culture generally; a related analysis can be found more recently in Stanford communication scholar Fred Turner’s work. While cyberlibertarianism can be defined as a general digital utopianism, summed up by a simple slogan like “computerization will set us free” or “computers provide the solution to any and all problems,” these writers note a specific political formation — one Winner describes as “ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right-wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.”
There are overt libertarians who are also digital utopians — figures like Jimmy Wales, Eric Raymond, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Julian Assange, Dread Pirate Roberts, and Sergey Brin, and the members of the Technology Liberation Front who explicitly describe themselves as cyberlibertarians. But the term also describes a wider ideological formation in which people embrace digital utopianism as compatible or even identical with leftist politics opposed to neoliberalism.
In perhaps the most pointed form of cyberlibertarianism, computer expertise is seen as directly applicable to social questions.  In The Cultural Logic of Computation, I argue that computational practices are intrinsically hierarchical and shaped by identification with power. To the extent that algorithmic forms of reason and social organization can be said to have an inherent politics, these have long been understood as compatible with political formations on the Right rather than the Left.
Yet today, “hacktivists” and other promoters of the liberatory nature of mass computerization are prominent political voices, despite their overall political commitments remaining quite unclear. They are championed by partisans of both the Right and the Left as if they obviously serve the political ends of each. One need only reflect on the leftist support for a project like Open Source software to notice the strange and under-examined convergence of the Right and Left around specifically digital practices whose underlying motivations are often explicitly libertarian. Open Source is a deliberate commercialization of Richard Stallman’s largely noncommercial notion ofFree Software (see Stallman himself on the distinction). Open Source is widely celebrated by libertarians and corporations, and was started by libertarian Eric Raymond and programmer Bruce Perens, with support from businessman and corporate sympathizer Tim O’Reilly. Today the term Open Source has wide currency as a political imperative outside the software development community, despite its place on the Right-Left spectrum being at best ambiguous, and at worst explicitly libertarian and pro-corporate.
When computers are involved, otherwise brilliant leftists who carefully examine the political commitments of most everyone they side with suddenly throw their lot in with libertarians — even when those libertarians explicitly disavow Left principles in their work…”

Is Participatory Budgeting Real Democracy?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Anna Clark in NextCity: “Drawing from a practice pioneered 25 years ago in Porto Alegre, Brazil and imported to North America via progressive leaders in Toronto and Quebec, participatory budgeting cracks open the closed-door process of fiscal decision-making in cities, letting citizens vote on exactly how government money is spent in their community. It’s an auspicious departure from traditional ways of allocating tax dollars, let alone in Chicago, which has long been known for deeply entrenched machine politics. As Alderman Joe Moore puts it, in Chicago, “so many decisions are made from the top down.”
Participatory budgeting works pretty simply in the 49th Ward. Instead of Moore deciding how to spend $1.3 million in “menu money” that is allotted annually to each of Chicago’s 50 council members for capital improvements, the councilman opens up a public process to determine how to spend $1 million of the allotment. The remaining $300,000 is socked away in the bank for emergencies and cost overruns.
And the unusual vote on $1 million in menu money is open to a wider swath of the community than your standard Election Day: you don’t have to be a citizen to cast a ballot, and the voting age is sixteen.
Thanks to the process, Rogers Park can now boast of a new community garden, dozens of underpass murals, heating shelters at three transit stations, hundreds of tree plantings, an outdoor shower at Loyola Park, a $110,000 dog park, and eye-catching “You Are Here” neighborhood information boards at transit station entrances.
…
Another prominent supporter of participatory budgeting? The White House. In December—about eight months after Joe Moore met with President Barack Obama about bringing participatory budgeting to the federal level—PB became an option for determining how to spend community development block-grant money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The Obama administration also declared that, in a yet-to-be-detailed partnership, it will help create tools that can be used for participatory budgeting on a local level.
All this activity has so far added up to $45 million in tax dollars allocated to 203 voter-approved projects across the country. Some 46,000 people and 500 organizations nationwide have been part of the decision-making, according to the nonprofit Participatory Budgeting Project.
….
But to fulfill this vision, the process needs resources behind it—enough funds for projects to demonstrate a visible community benefit, and ample capacity from the facilitators of the process (whether it’s district officials or city hall) to truly reach out to the community. Without intention and capacity, PB risks duplicating the process of elections for ordinary representative democracy, where white middle- and upper-class voters are far more likely to vote and therefore enjoy an outsized influence on their neighborhood.
…
Participatory budgeting works differently for every city. In Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the process was created a generation ago by The Worker’s Party to give disadvantaged people a stronger voice in government, as many as 50,000 people vote on how to spend public money each year. More than $700 million has been funneled through the process since its inception. Vallejo, Calif., embraced participatory budgeting in 2012 after emerging from bankruptcy as part of its citywide reinvention. In its first PB vote in May 2013, 3,917 residents voted over the course of a week at 13 polling locations. That translated into four percent of the city’s eligible voters—a tiny number, but a much higher percentage than previous PB processes in Chicago and New York.
But the 5th Ward in Hyde Park, a South Side neighborhood that’s home to the University of Chicago, dropped PB in December, citing low turnout in neighborhood assemblies and residents who felt the process was too much work to be worthwhile. “They said it was very time consuming, a lot of meetings, and that they thought the neighborhood groups that they had were active enough to do it without having all of the expenses that were associated with it,” Alderman Leslie Hairston told the Hyde Park Herald. In 2013, its first year with participatory budgeting, the 5th Ward held a PB vote that saw only 100 ballots cast.
Josh Lerner of the Participatory Budgeting Project says low turnout is a problem that can be solved through outreach and promotion. “It is challenging to do this without capacity,” he said. Internationally, according to Lerner, PB is part of a city administration, with a whole office coordinating the process. Without the backing from City Hall in Porto Alegre, participatory budgeting would have a hard time attracting the tens of thousands who now count themselves as part of the process. And even with the support from City Hall, the 50,000 participants represent less than one percent of the city’s population of 1.4 million.
…
So what’s next for participatory budgeting in Rogers Park and beyond?
Well, first off, Rahm Emanuel’s new Manager of Participatory Budgeting will be responsible for supporting council districts if and when they opt to go participatory. There won’t be a requirement to do so, but if a district wishes to follow the 49th, they will have high-level backup from City Hall.
But this new manager—as well as Chicago’s aldermen and engaged citizens—must understand that there is no one-size-fits-all formula for participatory budgeting. The process must be adapted to the unique needs and culture of each district if it is to resonate with locals. And timing is key for rolling out the process.
While still in the hazy early days, federal support through the new White House initiative may also prove crucial in streamlining the participatory budgeting process, easing the burden on local leaders and citizens, and ultimately generating better participation—and, therefore, better on-the-ground results in communities around the country.
One of the key lessons of participatory budgeting—as with democracy more broadly—is that efficiency is not the highest value in the public sphere. It would be much easier and more cost-effective for aldermen to return to the old days and simply check off the boxes for where he or she thinks menu money should be spent. “We could sign off on menu money in a couple hours, a couple days,” Vandercook said. By choosing the participatory path, aldermen effectively create more work for themselves. They risk low rates of participation and the possibility that winning projects may not be the most worthy. Scalability, too, is a problem — the larger the community served by the process, the more difficult it is to ensure that both the process and the resulting projects reflect the needs of the entire community.
Nonetheless, participatory budgeting serves a harder-to-measure purpose that may well be, in the final accounting, more important. It is a profound civic education for citizens, who dig into both the limits and possibilities of public money. They experience what their elected leaders must navigate every day. But it’s also a civic education for council members and city staff who may find that they are engaging with those they represent more than they ever had before, learning about what they value most. Owen Burgh, chief of staff for Alderman Joe Arena in Chicago’s 45th Ward, told the Participatory Budgeting Project, “I was really surprised by the amazing knowledge base we have among our volunteers. So many of our volunteers came to the process with a background where they understood some principles of traffic management, community development and urban planning. It was very refreshing. Usually, in an alderman’s office, people contact us to fix an isolated problem. Through this process, we discussed not just what needed to be fixed but what we wanted our community to be.”
The participatory budgeting process expands the scope and depth of civic spaces in the community, where elected leaders work with—not for—residents. Even for those who do not show up to vote, there is an empowerment that comes simply in knowing that they could; the sincere invitation to participate matters, whether or not it is accepted…”

The California Report Card

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

“The California Report Card (CRC) is an online platform developed by the CITRIS Data and Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley and Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom that explores how smartphones and networks can enhance communication between the public and government leaders. The California Report Card allows visitors to grade issues facing California and to suggest issues for future report cards.

The CRC is a mobile-optimized web application that allows participants to advise the state government on timely policy issues.  We are exploring how technology can streamline and structure input from the public to elected officials, to provide them with timely feedback on the changing opinions and priorities of their constituents.

Version 1.0 of the CRC was launched in California on 28 January 2014. Since then, over 7000 people from almost every county have assigned over 20,000 grades to the State of California and suggested issues for the next report card.
Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom: “The California Report Card is a new way for me to keep an ear to the ground.  This new app/website makes it easy for Californians to assign grades and suggest pressing issues that merit our attention.  In the first few weeks, participants conveyed that they approve of our rollout of Obamacare but are very concerned about the future of California schools and universities.  I’m also gaining insights on issues ranging from speed limits to fracking to disaster preparedness.”
“This platform allows us to have our voices heard. The ability to review and grade what others suggest is important. It enables us and elected officials to hear directly how Californians feel.” – Matt Harris, Truck Driver, Ione, CA
“This is the first system that lets us directly express our feelings to government leaders.  I also really enjoy reading and grading the suggestions from other participants.”  – Patricia Ellis Pasko, Senior Care Giver, Apple Valley, CA
“Everyone knows that report cards can motivate learning by providing quantitative feedback on strengths and weaknesses.  Similarly, the California Report Card has potential to motivate Californians and their leaders to learn from each other about timely issues.  As researchers, the patterns of participation and how they vary over time and across geography will help us learn how to design future platforms.” – Prof. Ken Goldberg, UC Berkeley.
It takes only two minutes and works on all screens (best on mobile phones held vertically), just click “Participate“.
Anyone can participate by taking a few minutes to assign grades to the State of California on issues such as: Healthcare, Education, Marriage Equality, Immigrant Rights, and Marijuana Decriminalization. Participants are also invited to enter an online “cafe” to propose issues that they’d like to see included in the next report card (version 2.0 will come out later this Spring).
Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and UC Berkeley Professor Ken Goldberg reviewed the data and lessons learned from version 1.0 in a public forum at UC Berkeley on 20 March 2014 that included participants who actively contributed to identifying the most important issues for version 2.0. The event can be viewed at http://bit.ly/1kv6523.
We offer community outreach programs/workshops to train local leaders on how to use the CRC and how to reach and engage under-represented groups (low-income, rural, persons with disabilities, etc.). If you are interested in participating in or hosting a workshop, please contact Brandie Nonnecke at [email protected]”

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page :”Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.
While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism –Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate) Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.
Each of these theoretical traditions has given rise to a large body of literature. Each is supported by a great deal of empirical evidence – some of it quantitative, some historical, some observational – concerning the importance of various sets of actors (or, all too often, a single set of actors) in U.S. policy making. This literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how American politics works and has helped illuminate how democratic or undemocratic (in various senses) our policy making process actually is. Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the diffe ring predictions of these theories against each other within a single statistical model that permits one to analyze
the independent effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.
Here – in a tentative and preliminary way – we offer such test, bringing a unique data set to bear on the problem. Our measures are far from
perfect, but we hope that this first step will help inspire further research into what we see as some of the most fundamental questions about American politics…”