Using Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy to reduce crime

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper of the week selected by the British Nudge Unit: “The paper we would like to highlight this week describes a large-scale randomised controlled trial aimed at improving life outcomes for disadvantaged youth.

Preventing youth violence and dropout: a randomized field experiment (April 25, 2013)
Sara B. Heller, Harold A. Pollack, Roseanna Ander and Jens Ludwig
The paper presents promising results from a trial in which teenagers were offered after-school programming in combination with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helps people reconsider biased beliefs they have about the world. In the domain of crime this includes learning to avoid overestimating the extent to which others want to hurt or harm someone else (i.e. hostile attribution bias).
The trial was run in 18 public schools in some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. 2,740 young males were offered either to participate in the programme (treatment group) or not (control group). Around half of those in the treatment group actually participated – on average for 13 sessions over the course of a year. Offering them the programme reduced the rate at which they were arrested for violent crime by 3.3 percentage points, from 16.7 percentage points in the control group. This is a fall of 20%.
Click here to access the paper”

The Age of Democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Xavier Marquez at Abandoned Footnotes: “This is the age of democracy, ideologically speaking. As I noted in an earlier post, almost every state in the world mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” in its constitutional documents today. But the public acknowledgment of the idea of democracy is not something that began just a few years ago; in fact, it goes back much further, all the way back to the nineteenth century in a surprising number of cases.
Here is a figure I’ve been wanting to make for a while that makes this point nicely (based on data graciously made available by the Comparative Constitutions Project). The figure shows all countries that have ever had some kind of identifiable constitutional document (broadly defined) that mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic” (in any context – new constitution, amendment, interim constitution, bill of rights, etc.), arranged from earliest to latest mention. Each symbol represents a “constitutional event” – a new constitution adopted, an amendment passed, a constitution suspended, etc. – and colored symbols indicate that the text associated with the constitutional event in question mentions the word “democracy” or “democratic”…
The earliest mentions of the word “democracy” or “democratic” in a constitutional document occurred in Switzerland and France in 1848, as far as I can tell.[1] Participatory Switzerland and revolutionary France look like obvious candidates for being the first countries to embrace the “democratic” self-description; yet the next set of countries to embrace this self-description (until the outbreak of WWI) might seem more surprising: they are all Latin American or Caribbean (Haiti), followed by countries in Eastern Europe (various bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire), Southern Europe (Portugal, Spain), Russia, and Cuba. Indeed, most “core” countries in the global system did not mention democracy in their constitutions until much later, if at all, despite many of them having long constitutional histories; even French constitutions after the fall of the Second Republic in 1851 did not mention “democracy” until after WWII. In other words, the idea of democracy as a value to be publicly affirmed seems to have caught on first not in the metropolis but in the periphery. Democracy is the post-imperial and post-revolutionary public value par excellence, asserted after national liberation (as in most of the countries that became independent after WWII) or revolutions against hated monarchs (e.g., Egypt 1956, Iran 1979, both of them the first mentions of democracy in these countries but not their first constitutions).

Today only 16 countries have ever failed to mention their “democratic” character in their constitutional documents (Australia, Brunei, Denmark, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Monaco, Nauru, Oman, Samoa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Tonga, the United Kingdom, the USA, and Vatican City).[2] And no country that has ever mentioned “democracy” in an earlier constitutional document fails to mention it in its current constitutional documents (though some countries in the 19th and early 20th centuries went back and forth – mentioning democracy in one constitution, not mentioning it in the next). Indeed, after WWII the first mention of democracy in constitutions tended to be contemporaneous with the first post-independence constitution of the country; and with time, even countries with old and settled constitutional traditions seem to be more and more likely to mention “democracy” or “democratic” in some form as amendments or bills of rights accumulate (e.g., Belgium in 2013, New Zealand in 1990, Canada in 1982, Finland in 1995). The probability of a new constitution mentioning “democracy” appears to be asymptotically approaching 1. To use the language of biology, the democratic “meme” has nearly achieved “fixation” in the population, despite short-term fluctuations, and despite the fact that there appears to be no particular correlation between a state calling itself democratic and actually being democratic, either today or in the past.[3]
Though the actual measured level of democracy around the world has trended upwards (with some ups and downs) over the last two centuries, I don’t think this is the reason why the idea of democracy has achieved near-universal recognition in public documents. Countries do not first become democratic and then call themselves democracies; if anything, most mentions of democracy seem to be rather aspirational, if not entirely cynical. (Though many constitutions that mention democracy were also produced by people who seem to have been genuinely committed to some such ideal, even if the regimes that eventually developed under these constitutions were not particularly democratic). What we see, instead, is a broad process in which earlier normative claims about the basis of authority – monarchical, imperial, etc. – get almost completely replaced, regardless of the country’s cultural context, by democratic claims, regardless of the latter’s effectiveness as an actual basis for authority or the existence of working mechanisms for participation or vertical accountability. (These democratic claims to authority also sometimes coexist in uneasy tension with other claims to authority based on divine revelation, ideological knowledge, or tradition, invented or otherwise; consider the Chinese constitution‘s claims about the “people’s democratic dictatorship” led by the CCP).
I thus suspect the conquest of ideological space by “democratic” language did not happen just because democratic claims to authority (especially in the absence of actual democracy) have proved more persuasive than other claims to authority. Rather, I think the same processes that resulted in the emergence of modern national communities – e.g. the rituals associated with nationalism, which tended to “sacralize” a particular kind of imagined community – led to the symbolic production of the nation not only as the proper object of government but also as its proper active agent (the people, actively ruling itself), regardless of whether or not “the people” had any ability to rule or even to exercise minimal control over the rulers.[4] There thus seems to have been a kind of co-evolution of symbols of nationality and symbols of democracy, helped along by the practice/ritual of drafting constitutions and approving them through plebiscites or other forms of mass politics, a ritual that already makes democratic assumptions about “social contracts.” The question is whether the symbolic politics of democracy eventually has any sort of impact on actual institutions. But more on this later….”

Britain’s Ministry of Nudges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the New York Times: “A 24-year-old psychologist working for the British government, Mr. Gyani was supposed to come up with new ways to help people find work. He was intrigued by an obscure 1994 study that tracked a group of unemployed engineers in Texas. One group of engineers, who wrote about how it felt to lose their jobs, were twice as likely to find work as the ones who didn’t. Mr. Gyani took the study to a job center in Essex, northeast of London, where he was assigned for several months. Sure, it seemed crazy, but would it hurt to give it a shot? Hayley Carney, one of the center’s managers, was willing to try.

Ms. Carney walked up to a man slumped in a plastic chair in the waiting area as Mr. Gyani watched from across the room. The man — 28, recently separated and unemployed for most of his adult life — was “our most difficult case,” Ms. Carney said later.

“How would you like to write about your feelings” about being out of a job? she asked the man. Write for 20 minutes. Once a week. Whatever pops into your head.

An awkward silence followed. Maybe this was a bad idea, Mr. Gyani remembers thinking.

But then the man shrugged. Why not? And so, every week, after seeing a job adviser, he would stay and write. He wrote about applying for dozens of jobs and rarely hearing back, about not having anything to get up for in the morning, about his wife who had left him. He would reread what he had written the week before, and then write again.

Over several weeks, his words became less jumbled. He started to gain confidence, and his job adviser noticed the change. Before the month was out, he got a full-time job in construction — his first.

An Idea Born in America

Did the writing exercise help the man find a job? Even now it’s hard for Mr. Gyani to say for sure. But it was the start of a successful research trial at the Essex job center — one that is part of a much larger social experiment underway in Britain. A small band of psychologists and economists is quietly working to transform the nation’s policy making. Inspired by behavioral science, the group fans out across the country to job centers, schools and local government offices and tweaks bureaucratic processes to better suit human nature. The goal is to see if small interventions that don’t cost much can change behavior in large ways that serve both individuals and society.

It is an American idea, refined in American universities and popularized in 2008 with the best seller “Nudge,” by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein. Professor Thaler, a contributor to the Economic View column in Sunday Business, is an economist at the University of Chicago, and Mr. Sunstein was a senior regulatory official in the Obama administration, where he applied behavioral findings to a range of regulatory policies, but didn’t have the mandate or resources to run experiments.

But it is in Britain that such experiments have taken root.  Prime Minister David Cameron has embraced the idea of testing the power of behavioral change to devise effective policies, seeing it not just as a way to help people make better decisions, but also to help government do more for less.

In 2010, Mr. Cameron set up the Behavioral Insights Team or nudge unit, as it’s often called. Three years later, the team has doubled in size and is about to announce a joint venture with an external partner to expand the program.

The unit has been nudging people to pay taxes on time, insulate their attics, sign up for organ donation, stop smoking during pregnancy and give to charity — and has saved taxpayers tens of millions of pounds in the process, said David Halpern, its director. Every civil servant in Britain is now being trained in behavioral science. The nudge unit has a waiting list of government departments eager to work with it, and other countries, from Denmark to Australia, have expressed interest.

In fact, five years after it arrived in Washington, nudging appears to be entering the next stage, with a new team in the White House planning to run policy trials inspired in part by Britain’s program. “First the idea traveled to Britain and now the lessons are traveling back,” said Professor Thaler, who is an official but unpaid adviser to the nudge unit. “Britain is the first country that has mainstreamed this on a national level.”

See also: A Few Findings of Britain’s Nudge

Net Effects: The Past, Present & Future Impact of Our Networks – History, Challenges and Opportunities

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ebook by FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler: “Almost a month into my new job, the fact that I’ve always been a “network guy” and an intrepid history buff should come as no surprise. Reading history has reinforced the central importance networks play and revealed the common themes in successive periods of network-driven change. Now, at the FCC, I find myself joining my colleagues in a position of both responsibility and authority over how the public is affected by and interfaces with the networks that connect us.

Prior to my appointment by President Obama, I was doing research for a book about the history of networks. The new job stopped that project. However, I believe strongly that our future is informed by our past. While awaiting Senate confirmation, I tried to distill the project on which I had been working to connect what I had learned in my research to the challenges in my new job.
The result is a short, free eBook, “Net Effects: The Past, Present & Future Impact of Our Networks – History, Challenges and Opportunities”. It’s a look at the history of three network revolutions – the printing press, the railroad, and the telegraph and telephony – and how the fourth network revolution – digital communications – will be informed by those experiences.
It was this process that led me to what I’ve been describing as the “prisms” for looking at policy, or the “pillars” of communication policy: ensuring that our new networks promote economic growth, preserving the fundamental values that have traditionally been the foundation of our communications networks, and enabling public purpose benefits of our networks.
We have the privilege of being present at a hinge moment in history to wrestle with the future of our networks and their effect on our commerce and our culture. If such a topic is of interest to you, I hope you’ll download this short eBook. Hopefully, it’s the beginning of a dialogue.
Download the book on the following platforms for free:

Give People Choices, Not Edicts

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter Orszag and Cass Sunstein in Bloomberg: “Over the past few years, many nations have adopted policies that promise to improve people’s lives while preserving their freedom of choice. These approaches, informed by behavioral economics, are sometimes called nudges.
Nudges include disclosure policies, as in the idea that borrowers should “know before they owe.” They include simplification, as in recent reductions in the paperwork requirements for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Nudges include default rules, which establish what happens if people do nothing at all — as with automatic enrollment in a savings plan. They also include reminders, such as text messages informing people they are about to go over their monthly allowance of mobile-phone minutes.
When the two of us worked in the Obama administration, we were interested in approaches of this kind, because the evidence suggests they work. For example, the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 imposes numerous disclosure requirements, which are helping to save consumers more than $20 billion in annual late fees and overuse charges.
In the U.S. and other nations, automatic enrollment has significantly increased participation in savings plans. A recent study found that in Denmark, automatic enrollment has had a larger impact than significant tax incentives in getting people to save. The study found that 99 percent of the retirement contributions made in response to tax incentives would have been saved anyway; by contrast, the bulk of the contributions made by people who were automatically enrolled in a retirement plan represented a net addition to saving.
Big Benefits
In an economically challenging time, the nudge approach can deliver major benefits without imposing big costs on the public or private sector. And, like a GPS, nudges still have the virtue of allowing people to go their own way. If informed consumers want to run a risk, they can do that. A nudge isn’t a shove. Yet this approach to government has stirred up objections from both the right and the left.
What makes it legitimate for public officials to nudge people they are supposed to serve? Whenever government acts, isn’t there a risk of error, bias and overreaching?
These are good questions, and some nudges should be avoided. But the whole point of the approach is to preserve freedom of choice, and being nudged is part of the human condition. Both private and public institutions are inevitably engaged in nudging, simply because they design the background against which people make choices, and no choice is ever made without a background.
Whenever the government is designing applications and forms, its choices affect people’s decisions. Complexity produces different results from simplicity. Many laws require disclosure from the government or the private sector, and this can occur in different ways. The architecture of disclosure (including which items are placed first, font size, color, readability) is likely to influence what people select.
Life would be impossible to navigate without default rules. Computers, mobile phones, health-care plans and mortgages come with defaults, which you can change if you wish. An employer might say that you must opt in to be enrolled in a savings plan, or alternatively that you must opt out if you don’t want to participate. In either case, a default rule is involved.
Some skeptics (especially on the left) object that nudges may be ineffective or even counterproductive. In their view, coercion is often both necessary and justified. The objections are most pointed, as New York University School of Law professors Ryan Bubb and Richard Pildes argue in a forthcoming article in the Harvard Law Review, when nudges are seen as affirmatively harmful.
Automatic Enrollment
An example involves automatic enrollment in savings plans, which both of us have supported. Critics point out that if employers choose a low contribution rate, automatic enrollment can decrease employees’ total savings — a perverse effect. That observation, however, is a reason for smarter nudging, not for coercion, and is thus not a persuasive critique of nudges in general. One smarter approach in this area is “automatic escalation,” a complement to automatic enrollment.
With automatic escalation, as time goes on and people earn more money, a higher share of their wages goes into savings — unless they opt out. The objection that nudges reduce retirement savings collapses.
And guess what? A survey from Towers Watson & Co. found that in 2012, 71 percent of plans with automatic enrollment included escalation. In 2009, 50 percent did. So much for the critique that contributions in these plans are fixed at their initial levels.
To be sure, coercion might turn out to be justified when the benefits clearly outweigh the costs. But behaviorally informed approaches, which maintain freedom of choice, have growing appeal. As we continue to learn what works, we will identify numerous ways to improve people’s lives while avoiding the costs and the rigidity of more heavy-handed alternatives”

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on Posted on by Andrew Young

The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of smart disclosure was originally published in 2013.

While much attention is paid to open data, data transparency need not be managed by a simple On/Off switch: It’s often desirable to make specific data available to the public or individuals in targeted ways. A prime example is the use of government data in Smart Disclosure, which provides consumers with data they need to make difficult marketplace choices in health care, financial services, and other important areas. Governments collect two kinds of data that can be used for Smart Disclosure: First, governments collect information on services of high interest to consumers, and are increasingly releasing this kind of data to the public. In the United States, for example, the Department of Health and Human Services collects and releases online data on health insurance options, while the Department of Education helps consumers understand the true cost (after financial aid) of different colleges. Second, state, local, or national governments hold information on consumers themselves that can be useful to them. In the U.S., for example, the Blue Button program was launched to help veterans easily access their own medical records.

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy. Progress Report. Consumer Empowerment Strategy. United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills, December 2012. http://bit.ly/17MqnL3.

  • The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.
  • The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.
Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.
  • This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.
  • Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

Brodi, Elisa. “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection. SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, September 4, 2012. http://bit.ly/17hssEK.

  • This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.
  • The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”
National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.
    • This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.
  • In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

“Policies in Practice: The Download Capability.” Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement, August 2010. http://bit.ly/HhMJyc.

  • This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”
  • To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
    • Make the download capability a common practice
    • Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
    • Collaborate on sample data sets
    • Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
    • Include the download capability in procurement requirements.
  • The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
    • Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
    • Patients need and want the information
    • The download capability would encourage innovation
    • A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
    • A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.
Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.
  • This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.
  • Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

Thaler, Richard H., and Will Tucker. “Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.” Harvard Business Review January – February 2013. The Big Idea. http://bit.ly/18gimxw.

  • In this article, Thaler and Tucker make three key observations regarding the challenges related to smart disclosure:
    • “We are constantly confronted with information that is highly important but extremely hard to navigate or understand.”
    • “Repeated attempts to improve disclosure, including efforts to translate complex contracts into “plain English,” have met with only modest success.”
    • “There is a fundamental difficulty of explaining anything complex in simple terms. Most people find it difficult to write instructions explaining how to tie a pair of shoelaces.

E-Government and Its Limitations: Assessing the True Demand Curve for Citizen Public Participation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by David Karpf: “Many e-government initiatives start with promise, but end up either as digital “ghost towns” or as a venue exploited by organized interests. The problem with these initiatives is rooted in a set of common misunderstandings about the structure of citizen interest in public participation – simply put, the Internet does not create public interest, it $2 public interest. Public interest can be high or low, and governmental initiatives can be polarized or non-polarized. The paper discusses two common pitfalls (“the Field of Dreams Fallacy” and “Blessed are the Organized”) that demand alternate design choices and modified expectations. By treating public interest and public polarization as variables, the paper develops a typology of appropriate e-government initiatives that can help identify the boundary conditions for transformative digital engagement.”

The Knight Foundation: Pulling back the curtain on civic tech

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The Knight Foundation: “A new report released today by Knight titled “The Emergence of Civic Tech: Investments in a Growing Field” aims to advance the movement by providing a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector. The report identifies more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013. In total, the analysis identifies 209 civic tech organizations that cluster around pockets of activity such as tools that improve government data utility, community organizing platforms and online neighborhood forums. Along with the report, we’ve developed an interactive data visualization tool to explore the network of civic tech organizations and their connections to one another.
In addition to scanning civic tech organizations, the report examines investors in this growing field and implications for ongoing philanthropic support. An overwhelming 84 percent of funding to civic tech organizations has come from private capital, though philanthropic capital outpaces private investment in clusters of tech related to open government. The analysis reveals an opportunity for greater co-investment by foundations, which have rarely teamed with other types of investors to fund civic tech organizations. Finally, the report suggests a few areas—such as peer-to-peer sharing of goods and services—that have already attracted significant amounts of private capital where philanthropy could perhaps have more influence by pursuing policy changes than it could through more small grants.
Equally exciting for us has been piloting this new, data-driven approach for doing social sector research. Knight worked with Quid, a firm that specializes in data analytics and network analysis, to map the field and overlay investment data contained in Quid’s database dating back to January 2011. Our intention from the start was to make the data open and we’ve developed a civic tech data directory with all the organizations and investments included in the review.
But the real power of the review will come through continuing to update it over time. Our current analysis is certainly not exhaustive, and there have undoubtedly been investments in civic tech organizations that eluded Quid’s review of private and philanthropic reporting databases. That’s why we’re seeking feedback and suggestions for other organizations and investments to include in the analysis; we will continuously update the data directory and will refresh the analysis in 2014. We don’t see this as just an attempt to document civic tech’s past; it’s a step for building shared insights and strategies around the future of civic tech where none previously existed.”

El Hacker Cívico: Civic-Minded Techies Gain Sway with Government in Mexico and Beyond

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

in the Huffington Post: “A handful of young hackers looked up from their laptops when Jorge Soto burst into the upstairs office they shared in an old Mexico City house one morning last spring. Soto wanted to be sure they’d seen the front-page headline then flying across Twitter: Mexico’s congress was set to spend 115 million pesos (then US $9.3 million) on a mobile app that would let 500 lawmakers track legislative affairs from their cellphones — more than a hundred times what such software could cost.
To many in Mexico, what became known as the “millionaire’s app” was just the latest in an old story of bloated state spending; but Soto and his colleagues saw a chance to push a new approach instead. In two days, they’d covered their white office walls with ideas for a cheaper alternative and launched an online contest that drew input from more than 150 software developers and designers, producing five open-source options in two weeks.
Lawmakers soon insisted they’d never known about the original app, which had been quietly approved by a legislative administrative board; and a congressional spokesman rushed to clarify that the project had been suspended. Invited to pitch their alternatives to Congress, a half-dozen young coders took the podium in a sloping auditorium at the legislature. The only cost for their work: a 11,500-peso (then US $930) prize for the winner.
“We didn’t just ‘angry tweet,’ we actually did something,” Soto, a 28-year-old IT engineer and social entrepreneur, said at the time. “Citizens need to understand democracy beyond voting every few years, and government needs to understand that we’re willing to participate.”
Seven months later, Mexico’s president appears to have heard them, hiring Soto and nine others to launch one of the world’s first federal civic innovation offices, part of a broader national digital agenda to be formally unveiled today. Building on a model pioneered in a handful of U.S. cities since 2010, Mexico’s civic innovation team aims to integrate so-called “civic hackers” with policy experts already inside government — to not only build better technology, but to seed a more tech-minded approach to problem-solving across federal processes and policy. What began as outside activism is slowly starting to creep into government….Mexico’s app incident reflects a common problem in that process: wasteful spending by non-techie bureaucrats who don’t seem to know what they’re buying — at best, out-of-touch; at worst, party to crony contracting; and overseen, if at all, by officials even less tech-savvy than themselves. Citizens, in contrast, are adopting new technologies faster than much of the public sector, growing the gap between the efficiency and accountability that they expect as private consumers, and the bureaucratic, buggy experience that government still provides.
To break that cycle, a movement of community-minded “civic hackers” like Soto has stepped into the void, offering their own low-cost tools to make government more efficient, collaborative and transparent….The platform, named Codeando Mexico, has since hosted more than 30 civic-themed challenges.
With Soto as an advisor, the team seized on the scandal surrounding the “millionare’s app” to formally launch in March, calling for help “taking down the Mexican tech mafia” – a play on the big, slow software makers that dominate public contracting around the world. In that, Codeando Mexico tackled a central civic-tech target: procurement, widely considered one of the public spheres ripest for reform. Its goal, according to Wilhelmy, was to replace clueless or “compadrismo” crony contracting with micro-procurement, swapping traditional suppliers for leaner teams of open-source coders who can release and revise what they build in near real-time. “It’s like the Robin Hood of procurement: You take money that’s being spent on big projects and bring it to the developer community, giving them an opportunity to work on stuff that matters,” he said. “There’s a whole taboo around software: government thinks it has to be expensive. We’re sending a message that there are different ways to do this; it shouldn’t cost so much.”
The maker of the costly congressional app in question, Mexico City consultancy Pulso Legislativo, insisted last spring that its hefty price tag didn’t reflect its software as much as the aggregated data and analysis behind it. But critics were quick to note that Mexican lawmakers already had access to similar data compiled by at least five publicly-funded research centers – not to mention from INFOPAL, a congressional stats system with its own mobile application. With Mexico then in the midst of a contentious telecom reform, the public may’ve been especially primed to pounce on any hint of corruption or wasteful IT spending. Codeando Mexico saw an opening.
So it was that a crew of young coders, almost all under 23-years-old, traipsed into the legislature, a motley mix of suits and skinny jeans, one-by-one pitching a panel of judges that included the head of the congressional Science and Technology Committee. Drawing on public data culled by local transparency groups, their Android and iOS apps – including the winner, “Diputados” — allowed citizens to track and opine on pending bills and to map and contact their representatives — still a relatively new concept in Mexico’s young democracy.”

Towards a 21st Century Parliament

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Speech by the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Rt Hon John Bercow MP: “…Despite this, there is an enormous challenge out there not only for the House of Commons and Parliament as a whole but for all legislatures in the 21st century. That challenge is how we reconcile traditional concepts and institutions of representative democracy with the technological revolution which we have witnessed over the past decade or two which has created both a demand for and an opportunity to establish a digital democracy. Quietly, over past decades, a radically different world has emerged which in time will make the industrial revolution seem minor.
There has been much research conducted in to this at the academic level and in individual initiatives and publications, not least those with which the Hansard Society has had the wisdom to become involved. But it is hard to see exactly where we are and hard to understand the notion of ‘trust’ in this brave new world, uncertain as it is. Indeed, there has not been one single overarching strategy for how we might move from where we are now to what a parliament in a digital democracy may look like, nor is there one role model from whom we can all take inspiration. That said, Estonia, where a quarter of the votes cast at its last national election in 2011 and perhaps half of those which will be recorded at its 2015 elections, were delivered online is something of a market leader in this regard and well worth investigation.
I am convinced that we need an innovation of our own to create such a map and a compass and to invite outside expertise in to assist us in this endeavour.
That is why I am announcing today the creation of a Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy, the core membership of which will be assembled in the next few weeks, supplemented by a circle of around 30 expert Commissioners and reinforced I hope by up to 60 million members of the public. This exercise will start in early 2014 and report in early 2015, a special year for Parliament as it will be the 750th anniversary of the de Montfort Parliament along with the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, the document that set the scene for the 1265 Parliament to come later.
Digital democracy will have some universal features but others which vary nation by nation. It is yet another change which pushes against formality and for flexibility. Its elements might include online voting, e-dialogue between representatives and those represented, increased interconnectedness between the functions of representation, scrutiny and legislation, multiple concepts of what is a constituency, flexibility about what is debated when and how, and a much more intense pace for invention and adaptation. What we are talking about here is nothing less than a Parliament version 2.0….”