The Economist: “In 1904 a young American named Elizabeth Magie received a patent for a board game in which players used tokens to move around a four-sided board buying properties, avoiding taxes and jail, and collecting $100 every time they passed the board’s starting-point. Three decades later Charles Darrow, a struggling salesman in Pennsylvania, patented a tweaked version of the game as “Monopoly”. Now owned by Hasbro, a big toymaker, it has become one of the world’s most popular board games, available in dozens of languages and innumerable variations.
Magie was a devotee of Henry George, an economist who believed in common ownership of land; her game was designed to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences.” And so it has become, though players snatch properties more in zeal than sadness. In “Monopoly” as in life, it is better to be rich than poor, children gleefully bankrupt their parents and nobody uses a flat iron any more.
Board-game makers have had to find their footing in a digital age. Hasbro’s game-and-puzzle sales fell by 4% in 2010—the year the iPad came to market—and 10% in 2011. Since then, however, its game-and-puzzle sales have rebounded, rising by 2% in 2012 and 10% in 2013. Stephanie Wissink, a youth-market analyst with Piper Jaffray, an investment bank, says that Hasbro has learned to become “co-creative…They’re infusing more social-generated content into their marketing and product development.”
Some of that content comes from Facebook. Last year, “Monopoly” fans voted on Hasbro’s Facebook page to jettison the poor old flat iron in favour of a new cat token. “Scrabble” players are voting on which word to add to the new dictionary (at press time, 16 remain, including “booyah”, “adorbs” and “cosplay”). “Monopoly” fans, meanwhile, are voting on which of ten house rules—among them collecting $400 rather than $200 for landing on “Go”, requiring players to make a full circuit of the board before buying property and “Mom always gets out of jail free. Always. No questions asked”—to make official…”
Public interest labs to test open governance solutions
Kathleen Hickey in GCN: “The Governance Lab at New York University (GovLab) and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network have formed a new network, Open Governance, to study how to enhance collaboration and decision-making in the public interest.
The MacArthur Foundation provided a three-year grant of $5 million for the project; Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, also contributed. Google.org’s technology will be used to develop platforms to solve problems more openly and to run agile, real-world experiments with governments and NGOs to discover ways to enhance decision-making in the public interest, according to the GovLab announcement.
Network members include 12 experts in computer science, political science, policy informatics, social psychology and philosophy, law, and communications. This group is supported by an advisory network of academics, technologists, and current and former government officials. The network will assess existing government programs and experiment with ways to improve decision-making at the local, national and international government levels.
The Network’s efforts focus on three areas that members say have the potential to make governance more effective and legitimate: getting expertise in, pushing data out and distributing responsibility.
Through smarter governance, they say, institutions can seek input from lay and expert citizens via expert networking, crowdsourcing or challenges. With open data governance, institutions can publish machine-readable data so that citizens can easily analyze and use this information to detect and solve problems. And by shared governance, institutions can help citizens develop solutions through participatory budgeting, peer production or digital commons.
“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,” said MacArthur Foundation President Robert Gallucci.
GovLab’s mission is to study and launch “experimental, technology-enabled solutions that advance a collaborative, networked approach to re-invent existing institutions and processes of governance to improve people’s lives.” Earlier this year GovLab released a preview of its Open Data 500 study of 500 companies using open government data as a key business resource.”
Coke Creates Volunteering App For Local Do-Gooders
PSFK: “If you’ve ever wanted to volunteer some time but didn’t know where to look, Coke Romania has the app for you. After teaming up with digital marketing company McCann Bucharest, Coke just created a new app that shows good Samaritans local volunteer opportunities. ‘Radar For Good‘ scans your location and brings up NGO’s, soup kitchens, orphanages, or libraries that want help right now.
Any opportunity that “Radar For Good’ discovers is a site that is definitely looking for volunteers at that moment. The app shows company names, websites, and contact information, as well as directions from where you are. It even allows you to save your favorite organizations for future reference, and has options to receive notifications from those companies.
Coca-Cola has numerous iOS apps, most of which deal with their soda products, but ‘Radar For Good’ is the first of its kind. While the app currently only works in Romania, Coke’s innovative creation has opened doors for similar mobile apps to get started in the United States.”
“Government Entrepreneur” is Not an Oxymoron
Mitchell Weiss in Harvard Business Review Blog: “Entrepreneurship almost always involves pushing against the status quo to capture opportunities and create value. So it shouldn’t be surprising when a new business model, such as ridesharing, disrupts existing systems and causes friction between entrepreneurs and local government officials, right?
But imagine if the road that led to the Seattle City Council ridesharing hearings this month — with rulings that sharply curtail UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar’s operations there — had been a vastly different one. Imagine that public leaders had conceived and built a platform to provide this new, shared model of transit. Or at the very least, that instead of having a revolution of the current transit regime done to Seattle public leaders, it was done with them. Amidst the acrimony, it seems hard to imagine that public leaders could envision and operate such a platform, or that private innovators could work with them more collaboratively on it — but it’s not impossible. What would it take? Answer: more public entrepreneurs.
The idea of ”public entrepreneurship” may sound to you like it belongs on a list of oxymorons right alongside “government intelligence.” But it doesn’t. Public entrepreneurs around the world are improving our lives, inventing entirely new ways to serve the public. They are using sensors to detect potholes; word pedometers to help students learn; harnessing behavioral economics to encourage organ donation; crowdsourcing patent review; and transforming Medellin, Colombia with cable cars. They are coding in civic hackathons and competing in the Bloomberg challenge. They are partnering with an Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston or in Philadelphia, co-developing products in San Francisco’s Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program, or deploying some of the more than $430 million invested into civic-tech in the last two years.
There is, however, a big problem with public entrepreneurs: there just aren’t enough of them. Without more public entrepreneurship, it’s hard to imagine meeting our public challenges or making the most of private innovation. One might argue that bungled healthcare website roll-outs or internet spying are evidence of too much activity on the part of public leaders, but I would argue that what they really show is too little entrepreneurial skill and judgment.
The solution to creating more public entrepreneurs is straightforward: train them. But, by and large, we don’t. Consider Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship: “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” We could teach that approach to people heading towards the public sector. But now consider the following list of terms: “acknowledgement of multiple constituencies,” “risk reduction,” “formal planning,” “coordination,” “efficiency measures,” “clearly defined responsibility,” and “organizational culture.” It reads like a list of the kinds of concepts we would want a new public official to know; like it might be drawn from an interview evaluation form or graduate school syllabus. In fact, it’s from Stevenson’s list of pressures that pull managers away from entrepreneurship and towards administration. Of course, that’s not all bad. We must have more great public administrators. But with all our challenges and amidst all the dynamism, we are going to need more than analysts and strategists in the public sector, we need inventors and builders, too.
Public entrepreneurship is not simply innovation in the public sector (though it makes use of innovation), and it’s not just policy reform (though it can help drive reform). Public entrepreneurs build something from nothing with resources — be they financial capital or human talent or new rules — they didn’t command. In Boston, I worked with many amazing public managers and a handful of outstanding public entrepreneurs. Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob brought the country’s first major-city mobile 311 app to life, and they are public entrepreneurs. They created Citizens Connect in 2009 by bringing together iPhones on loan together with a local coder and the most under-tapped resource in the public sector: the public. They transformed the way basic neighborhood issues are reported and responded to (20% of all constituent cases in Boston are reported over smartphones now), and their model is now accessible to 40 towns in Massachusetts and cities across the country. The Mayor’s team in Boston that started-up the One Fund in the days after the Marathon bombings were public entrepreneurs. We built the organization from PayPal and a Post Office Box, and it went on to channel $61 million from donors to victims and survivors in just 75 days. It still operates today….
It’s worth noting that public entrepreneurship, perhaps newly buzzworthy, is not actually new. Elinor Ostrom (44 years before her Nobel Prize) observed public entrepreneurs inventing new models in the 1960s. Back when Ronald Reagan was president, Peter Drucker wrote that it was entrepreneurship that would keep public service “flexible and self-renewing.” And almost two decades have passed since David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s “Reinventing Government” (the then handbook for public officials) carried the promising subtitle: “How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector”. Public entrepreneurship, though not nearly as widespread as its private complement, or perhaps as fashionable as its “social” counterpart (focussed on non-profits and their ecosystem), has been around for a while and so have those who practiced it.
But still today, we mostly train future public leaders to be public administrators. We school them in performance management and leave them too inclined to run from risk instead of managing it. And we communicate often, explicitly or not, to private entrepreneurs that government officials are failures and dinosaurs. It’s easy to see how that road led to Seattle this month, but hard see how it empowers public officials to take on the enormous challenges that still lie ahead of us, or how it enables the public to help them.”
But imagine if the road that led to the Seattle City Council ridesharing hearings this month — with rulings that sharply curtail UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar’s operations there — had been a vastly different one. Imagine that public leaders had conceived and built a platform to provide this new, shared model of transit. Or at the very least, that instead of having a revolution of the current transit regime done to Seattle public leaders, it was done with them. Amidst the acrimony, it seems hard to imagine that public leaders could envision and operate such a platform, or that private innovators could work with them more collaboratively on it — but it’s not impossible. What would it take? Answer: more public entrepreneurs.
The idea of ”public entrepreneurship” may sound to you like it belongs on a list of oxymorons right alongside “government intelligence.” But it doesn’t. Public entrepreneurs around the world are improving our lives, inventing entirely new ways to serve the public. They are using sensors to detect potholes; word pedometers to help students learn; harnessing behavioral economics to encourage organ donation; crowdsourcing patent review; and transforming Medellin, Colombia with cable cars. They are coding in civic hackathons and competing in the Bloomberg challenge. They are partnering with an Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston or in Philadelphia, co-developing products in San Francisco’s Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program, or deploying some of the more than $430 million invested into civic-tech in the last two years.
There is, however, a big problem with public entrepreneurs: there just aren’t enough of them. Without more public entrepreneurship, it’s hard to imagine meeting our public challenges or making the most of private innovation. One might argue that bungled healthcare website roll-outs or internet spying are evidence of too much activity on the part of public leaders, but I would argue that what they really show is too little entrepreneurial skill and judgment.
The solution to creating more public entrepreneurs is straightforward: train them. But, by and large, we don’t. Consider Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship: “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” We could teach that approach to people heading towards the public sector. But now consider the following list of terms: “acknowledgement of multiple constituencies,” “risk reduction,” “formal planning,” “coordination,” “efficiency measures,” “clearly defined responsibility,” and “organizational culture.” It reads like a list of the kinds of concepts we would want a new public official to know; like it might be drawn from an interview evaluation form or graduate school syllabus. In fact, it’s from Stevenson’s list of pressures that pull managers away from entrepreneurship and towards administration. Of course, that’s not all bad. We must have more great public administrators. But with all our challenges and amidst all the dynamism, we are going to need more than analysts and strategists in the public sector, we need inventors and builders, too.
Public entrepreneurship is not simply innovation in the public sector (though it makes use of innovation), and it’s not just policy reform (though it can help drive reform). Public entrepreneurs build something from nothing with resources — be they financial capital or human talent or new rules — they didn’t command. In Boston, I worked with many amazing public managers and a handful of outstanding public entrepreneurs. Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob brought the country’s first major-city mobile 311 app to life, and they are public entrepreneurs. They created Citizens Connect in 2009 by bringing together iPhones on loan together with a local coder and the most under-tapped resource in the public sector: the public. They transformed the way basic neighborhood issues are reported and responded to (20% of all constituent cases in Boston are reported over smartphones now), and their model is now accessible to 40 towns in Massachusetts and cities across the country. The Mayor’s team in Boston that started-up the One Fund in the days after the Marathon bombings were public entrepreneurs. We built the organization from PayPal and a Post Office Box, and it went on to channel $61 million from donors to victims and survivors in just 75 days. It still operates today….
It’s worth noting that public entrepreneurship, perhaps newly buzzworthy, is not actually new. Elinor Ostrom (44 years before her Nobel Prize) observed public entrepreneurs inventing new models in the 1960s. Back when Ronald Reagan was president, Peter Drucker wrote that it was entrepreneurship that would keep public service “flexible and self-renewing.” And almost two decades have passed since David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s “Reinventing Government” (the then handbook for public officials) carried the promising subtitle: “How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector”. Public entrepreneurship, though not nearly as widespread as its private complement, or perhaps as fashionable as its “social” counterpart (focussed on non-profits and their ecosystem), has been around for a while and so have those who practiced it.
But still today, we mostly train future public leaders to be public administrators. We school them in performance management and leave them too inclined to run from risk instead of managing it. And we communicate often, explicitly or not, to private entrepreneurs that government officials are failures and dinosaurs. It’s easy to see how that road led to Seattle this month, but hard see how it empowers public officials to take on the enormous challenges that still lie ahead of us, or how it enables the public to help them.”
HarassMap: Using Crowdsourced Data to Map Sexual Harassment in Egypt
Chelsea Young in Technology Innovation Management Review: “Through a case study of HarassMap, an advocacy, prevention, and response tool that uses crowdsourced data to map incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt, this article examines the application of crowdsourcing technology to drive innovation in the field of social policy. This article applies a framework that explores the potential, limitations, and future applications of crowdsourcing technology in this sector to reveal how crowdsourcing technology can be applied to overcome cultural and environmental constraints that have traditionally impeded the collection of data. Many of the lessons emerging from this case study hold relevance beyond the field of social policy. Applied to specific problems, this technology can be used to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of mitigation strategies, while facilitating rapid and informed decision making based on “good enough” data. However, this case also illustrates a number of challenges arising from the integrity of crowdsourced data and the potential for ethical conflict when using this data to inform policy formulation.”
The Potential of Crowdsourcing to Improve Patient-Centered Care
Michael Weiner in the Journal The Patient – Patient-Centered Outcomes Research: “Crowdsourcing (CS) is the outsourcing of a problem or task to a crowd. Although patient-centered care (PCC) may aim to be tailored to an individual’s needs, the uses of CS for generating ideas, identifying values, solving problems, facilitating research, and educating an audience represent powerful roles that can shape both allocation of shared resources and delivery of personalized care and treatment. CS can often be conducted quickly and at relatively low cost. Pitfalls include bias, risks of research ethics, inadequate quality of data, inadequate metrics, and observer-expectancy effect. Health professionals and consumers in the US should increase their attention to CS for the benefit of PCC. Patients’ participation in CS to shape health policy and decisions is one way to pursue PCC itself and may help to improve clinical outcomes through a better understanding of patients’ perspectives. CS should especially be used to traverse the quality-cost curve, or decrease costs while preserving or improving quality of care.”
Potholes and Big Data: Crowdsourcing Our Way to Better Government
Phil Simon in Wired: “Big Data is transforming many industries and functions within organizations with relatively limited budgets.
Consider Thomas M. Menino, up until recently Boston’s longest-serving mayor. At some point in the past few years, Menino realized that it was no longer 1950. Perhaps he was hobnobbing with some techies from MIT at dinner one night. Whatever his motivation, he decided that there just had to be a better, more cost-effective way to maintain and fix the city’s roads. Maybe smartphones could help the city take a more proactive approach to road maintenance.
To that end, in July 2012, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics launched a new project called Street Bump, an app that allows drivers to automatically report the road hazards to the city as soon as they hear that unfortunate “thud,” with their smartphones doing all the work.
The app’s developers say their work has already sparked interest from other cities in the U.S., Europe, Africa and elsewhere that are imagining other ways to harness the technology.
Before they even start their trip, drivers using Street Bump fire up the app, then set their smartphones either on the dashboard or in a cup holder. The app takes care of the rest, using the phone’s accelerometer — a motion detector — to sense when a bump is hit. GPS records the location, and the phone transmits it to an AWS remote server.
But that’s not the end of the story. It turned out that the first version of the app reported far too many false positives (i.e., phantom potholes). This finding no doubt gave ammunition to the many naysayers who believe that technology will never be able to do what people can and that things are just fine as they are, thank you. Street Bump 1.0 “collected lots of data but couldn’t differentiate between potholes and other bumps.” After all, your smartphone or cell phone isn’t inert; it moves in the car naturally because the car is moving. And what about the scores of people whose phones “move” because they check their messages at a stoplight?
To their credit, Menino and his motley crew weren’t entirely discouraged by this initial setback. In their gut, they knew that they were on to something. The idea and potential of the Street Bump app were worth pursuing and refining, even if the first version was a bit lacking. Plus, they have plenty of examples from which to learn. It’s not like the iPad, iPod, and iPhone haven’t evolved considerably over time.
Enter InnoCentive, a Massachusetts-based firm specializing in open innovation and crowdsourcing. The City of Boston contracted InnoCentive to improve Street Bump and reduce the amount of tail chasing. The company accepted the challenge and essentially turned it into a contest, a process sometimes called gamification. InnoCentive offered a network of 400,000 experts a share of $25,000 in prize money donated by Liberty Mutual.
Almost immediately, the ideas to improve Street Bump poured in from unexpected places. This crowd had wisdom. Ultimately, the best suggestions came from:
- A group of hackers in Somerville, Massachusetts, that promotes community education and research
- The head of the mathematics department at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, MI.
- An anonymous software engineer
…Crowdsourcing roadside maintenance isn’t just cool. Increasingly, projects like Street Bump are resulting in substantial savings — and better government.”
Crowdsourced transit app shows what time the bus will really come
Springwise: “The problem with most transport apps is that they rely on fixed data from transport company schedules and don’t truly reflect exactly what’s going on with the city’s trains and buses at any given moment. Operating like a Waze for public transport, Israel’s Ototo app crowdsources real-time information from passengers to give users the best suggestions for their commute.
The app relies on a community of ‘Riders’, who allow anonymous location data to be sent from their smartphone whenever they’re using public transport. By collating this data together, Ototo offers more realistic information about bus and train routes. While a bus may be due in five minutes, a Rider currently on that bus might be located more than five minutes away, indicating that the bus isn’t on time. Ototo can then suggest a quicker route for users. According to Fast Company, the service currently has a 12,000-strong global Riders community that powers its travel recommendations. On top of this, the app is designed in an easy-to-use infographic format that quickly and efficiently tells users where they need to be going and how long it will take. The app is free to download from the App Store, and the video below offers a demonstration:
Ototo faces competition from similar services such as New York City’s Moovit, which also details how crowded buses are.”
Building a More Open Government
Corinna Zarek at the White House: “It’s Sunshine Week again—a chance to celebrate transparency and participation in government and freedom of information. Every year in mid-March, we take stock of our progress and where we are headed to make our government more open for the benefit of citizens.
In December, 2013, the Administration announced 23 ambitious commitments to further open up government over the next two years in U.S. Government’s second Open Government National Action Plan. Those commitments are now all underway or in development, including:
· Launching an improved Data.gov: The updated Data.gov debuted in January, 2014, and continues to grow with thousands of updated or new government data sets being proactively made available to the public.
· Increasing public collaboration: Through crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other methods, Federal agencies continue to expand the ways they collaborate with the public. For example, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, for instance, recently launched its third Asteroid Grand Challenge, a broad call to action, seeking the best and brightest ideas from non-traditional partners to enhance and accelerate the work NASA is already doing for planetary defense.
· Improving We the People: The online petition platform We the People gives the public a direct way to participate in their government and is currently incorporating improvements to make it easier for the public to submit petitions and signatures.”
The Open Data/Environmental Justice Connection
Jeffrey Warren for Wilson’s Commons Lab: “… Open data initiatives seem to assume that all data is born in the hallowed halls of government, industry and academia, and that open data is primarily about convincing such institutions to share it to the public.
It is laudable when institutions with important datasets — such as campaign finance, pollution or scientific data — see the benefit of opening it to the public. But why do we assume unilateral control over data production?
The revolution in user-generated content shows the public has a great deal to contribute – and to gain—from the open data movement. Likewise, citizen science projects that solicit submissions or “task completion” from the public rarely invite higher-level participation in research –let alone true collaboration.
This has to change. Data isn’t just something you’re given if you ask nicely, or a kind of community service we perform to support experts. Increasingly, new technologies make it possible for local groups to generate and control data themselves — especially in environmental health. Communities on the front line of pollution’s effects have the best opportunities to monitor it and the most to gain by taking an active role in the research process.
DIY Data
Luckily, an emerging alliance between the maker/Do-It-Yourself (DIY) movement and watchdog groups is starting to challenge the conventional model.
The Smart Citizen project, the Air Quality Egg and a variety of projects in the Public Lab network are recasting members of the general public as actors in the framing of new research questions and designers of a new generation of data tools.
The Riffle, a <$100 water quality sensor built inside of hardware-store pipe, can be left in a creek near an industrial site to collect data around the clock for weeks or months. In the near future, when pollution happens – like the ash spill in North Carolina or the chemical spill in West Virginia – the public will be alerted and able to track its effects without depending on expensive equipment or distant labs.
This emerging movement is recasting environmental issues not as intractably large problems, but up-close-and-personal health issues — just what environmental justice (EJ) groups have been arguing for years. The difference is that these new initiatives hybridize such EJ community organizers and the technology hackers of the open hardware movement. Just as the Homebrew Computer Club’s tinkering with early prototypes led to the personal computer, a new generation of tinkerers sees that their affordable, accessible techniques can make an immediate difference in investigating lead in their backyard soil, nitrates in their tap water and particulate pollution in the air they breathe.
These practitioners see that environmental data collection is not a distant problem in a developing country, but an issue that anyone in a major metropolitan area, or an area affected by oil and gas extraction, faces on a daily basis. Though underserved communities are often disproportionally affected, these threats often transcend socioeconomic boundaries…”