blog post

Blockchains, personal data and the challenge of governance

Curated on June 22, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Theo Bass at NESTA: “…There are a number of dominant internet platforms (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.) that hoard, analyse and sell information about their users in the name of a more personalised and efficient service. This has become a problem.

People feel they are losing control over how their data is used and reused on the web. 500 million adblocker downloads is a symptom of a market which isn’t working well for people. As Irene Ng mentions in a recent guest blog on the Nesta website, the secondary data market is thriving (online advertising is a major player), as companies benefit from the opacity and lack of transparency about where profit is made from personal data.

It’s said that blockchain’s key characteristics could provide a foundational protocol for a fairer digital identity system on the web. Beyond its application as digital currency, blockchain could provide a new set of technical standards for transparency, openness, and user consent, on top of which a whole new generation of services might be built.

While the aim is ambitious, a handful of projects are rising to the challenge.

Blockstack is creating a global system of digital IDs, which are written into the bitcoin blockchain. Nobody can touch them other than the owner of that ID. Blockstack are building a new generation of applications on top of this infrastructure which promises to provide “a new decentralized internet where users own their data and apps run locally”.

Sovrin attempts to provide users with “self-sovereign identity”. The argument is that “centralized” systems for storing personal data make it a “treasure chest for attackers”. Sovrin argues that users should more easily be able to have “ownership” over their data, and the exchange of data should be made possible through a decentralised, tamper-proof ledger of transactions between users.

Our own DECODE project is piloting a set of collaboratively owned, local sharing economy platforms in Barcelona and Amsterdam. The blockchain aims to provide a public record of entitlements over where people’s data is stored, who can access it and for what purpose (with some additional help from new techniques in zero-knowledge cryptography to preserve people’s privacy).

There’s no doubt this is an exciting field of innovation. But the debate is characterised by a lot of hype. The following sections therefore discuss some of the challenges thrown up when we start thinking about implementations beyond bitcoin.

Blockchains and the challenge of governance

As mentioned above, bitcoin is a “bearer asset”. This is a necessary feature of decentralisation — all users maintain sole ownership over the digital money they hold on the network. If users get hacked (digital wallets sometimes do), or if a password gets lost, the money is irretrievable.

While the example of losing a password might seem trivial, it highlights some difficult questions for proponents of blockchain’s wider uses. What happens if there’s a dispute over an online transaction, but no intermediary to settle it? What happens if a someone’s digital assets or their digital identity is breached and sensitive data falls into the wrong hands? It might be necessary to assign responsibility to a governing actor to help resolve the issue, but of course this would require the introduction of a trusted middleman.

Bitcoin doesn’t try to answer these questions; its anonymous creators deliberately tried to avoid implementing a clear model of governance over the network, probably because they knew that bitcoin would be used by people as a method for subverting the law. Bitcoin still sees a lot of use in gray economies, including for the sale of drugs and gambling.

But if blockchains are set to enter the mainstream, providing for businesses, governments and nonprofits, then they won’t be able to function irrespective of the law. They will need to find use-cases that can operate alongside legal frameworks and jurisdictional boundaries. They will need to demonstrate regulatory compliance, create systems of rules and provide accountability when things go awry. This cannot just be solved through increasingly sophisticated coding.

All of this raises a potential paradox recently elaborated in a post by Vili Lehdonvirta of the Oxford Internet Institute: is it possible to successfully govern blockchains without undermining their entire purpose?….

If blockchain advocates only work towards purely technical solutions and ignore real-world challenges of trying to implement decentralisation, then we’ll only ever see flawed implementations of the technology. This is already happening in the form of centrally administered, proprietary or ‘half-baked’ blockchains, which don’t offer much more value than traditional databases….(More)”.

How to increase public support for policy: understanding citizens’ perspectives

Curated on May 22, 2017October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Peter van Wijck and Bert Niemeijer at LSE Blog: “To increase public support, it is essential to anticipate what reactions they will have to policy. But how to do that? Our framework combines insights from scenario planning and frame analysis. Scenario planning starts from the premise that we cannot predict the future. We can, however, imagine different plausible scenarios, different plausible future developments. Scenarios can be used to ask a ‘what if’ question. If a certain scenario were to develop, what policy measures would be required? By the same token, scenarios may be used as test-conditions for policy-measures. Kees van der Heijden calls this ‘wind tunnelling’.

Frame-analysis is about how we interpret the world around us. Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. Based on a frame, an individual perceives societal problems, attributes these problems to causes, and forms ideas on instruments to address the problems. Our central idea is that policy-makers may use citizens’ frames to reflect on their policy frame. Citizens’ frames may, in other words, be used to test conditions in a wind tunnel. The line of reasoning is summarized in the figure.

Policy frames versus citizens’ frames

The starting-points of the figure are the policy frame and the citizens’ frames. Arrow 1 and 2 indicate that citizens’ reactions depend on both frames. A citizen can be expected to respond positively in case of frame alignment. Negative responses can be expected if policy-makers do not address “the real problems”, do not attribute problems to “the real causes”, or do not select “adequate instruments”. If frames do not align, policy-makers are faced with the question of how to deal with it (arrow 3). First, they may reconsider the policy frame (arrow 4). That is, are there reasons to reconsider the definition of problems, the attribution to causes, and/or the selection of instruments? Such a “reframing” effectively amounts to the formulation of a new (or adjusted) policy-frame. Second, policy-makers may try to influence citizens’ frames (arrow 5). This may lead to a change in what citizens define as problems, what they consider to be the causes of problems and what they consider to be adequate instruments to deal with the problems.

Two cases: support for victims and confidence in the judiciary

To apply our framework in practice, we developed a three-step method. Firstly, we reconstruct the policy frame. Here we investigate what policy-makers see as social problems, what they assume to be the causes of these problems, and what they consider to be appropriate instruments to address these problems. Secondly, we reconstruct contrasting citizens’ frames. Here we use focus groups, where contrasting groups are selected based on a segmentation model. Finally, we engage in a “wind tunnelling exercise”. We present the citizens’ frames to policy-makers. And we ask them to reflect on the question of how the different groups can be expected to react on the policy measures selected by the policy-makers. In fact, this step is what Schön and Rein called “frame reflection”….(More)”.

Going Digital: Restoring Trust In Government In Latin American Cities

Curated on May 13, 2017October 10, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Carlos Santiso at The Rockefeller Foundation Blog: “Driven by fast-paced technological innovations, an exponential growth of smartphones, and a daily stream of big data, the “digital revolution” is changing the way we live our lives. Nowhere are the changes more sweeping than in cities. In Latin America, almost 80 percent of the population lives in cities, where massive adoption of social media is enabling new forms of digital engagement. Technology is ubiquitous in cities. The expectations of Latin American “digital citizens” have grown exponentially as a result of a rising middle class and an increasingly connected youth.

This digital transformation is recasting the relation between states and citizens. Digital citizens are asking for better services, more transparency, and meaningful participation. Their rising expectations concern the quality of the services city governments ought to provide, but also the standards of integrity, responsiveness, and fairness of the bureaucracy in their daily dealings. A recent study shows that citizens’ satisfaction with public services is not only determined by the objective quality of the service, but also their subjective expectations and how fairly they consider being treated….

New technologies and data analytics are transforming the governance of cities. Digital-intensive and data-driven innovations are changing how city governments function and deliver services, and also enabling new forms of social participation and co-creation. New technologies help improve efficiency and further transparency through new modes of open innovation. Tech-enabled and citizen-driven innovations also facilitate participation through feedback loops from citizens to local authorities to identify and resolve failures in the delivery of public services.

Three structural trends are driving the digital revolution in governments.

The digital transformation of the machinery of government. National and city governments in the region are developing digital strategies to increase connectivity, improve services, and enhance accountability. According to a recent report, 75 percent of the 23 countries surveyed have developed comprehensive digital strategies, such as Uruguay Digital, Colombia’s Vive Digital or Mexico’s Agenda Digital, that include legally recognized digital identification mechanisms. “Smart cities” are intensifying the use of modern technologies and improve the interoperability of government systems, the backbone of government, to ensure that public services are inter-connected and thus avoid having citizens provide the same information to different entities. An important driver of this transformation is citizens’ demands for greater transparency and accountability in the delivery of public services. Sixteen countries in the region have developed open government strategies, and cities such as Buenos Aires in Argentina, La Libertad in Peru, and Sao Paolo in Brazil have also committed to opening up government to public scrutiny and new forms of social participation. This second wave of active transparency reforms follows a first, more passive wave that focused on facilitating access to information.

The digital transformation of the interface with citizens. Sixty percent of the countries surveyed by the aforementioned report have established integrated service portals through which citizens can access online public services. Online portals allow for a single point of access to public services. Cities, such as Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro, are developing their own online service platforms to access municipal services. These innovations improve access to public services and contribute to simplifying bureaucratic processes and cutting red-tape, as a recent study shows. Governments are resorting to crowdsourcing solutions, open intelligence initiatives, and digital apps to encourage active citizen participation in the improvement of public services and the prevention of corruption. Colombia’s Transparency Secretariat has developed an app that allows citizens to report “white elephants” — incomplete or overbilled public works. By the end of 2015, it identified 83 such white elephants, mainly in the capital Bogotá, for a total value of almost $500 million, which led to the initiation of criminal proceedings by law enforcement authorities. While many of these initiatives emerge from civic initiatives, local governments are increasingly encouraging them and adopting their own open innovation models to rethink public services.

The gradual mainstreaming of social innovation in local government. Governments are increasingly resorting to public innovation labs to tackle difficult problems for citizens and businesses. Governments innovation labs are helping address “wicked problems” by combining design thinking, crowdsourcing techniques, and data analytics tools. Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Uruguay, have developed such social innovation labs within government structures. As a recent report notes, these mechanisms come in different forms and shapes. Large cities, such as Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Quito, Rio de Janeiro, and Montevideo, are at the forefront of testing such laboratory mechanisms and institutionalizing tech-driven and citizen-centered approaches through innovation labs. For example, in 2013, Mexico City created its Laboratorio para la Ciudad, as a hub for civic innovation and urban creativity, relying on small-case experiments and interventions to improve specific government services and make local government more transparent, responsive, and receptive. It spearheaded an open government law for the city that encourages residents to participate in the design of public policies and requires city agencies to consider those suggestions…..(More)”.

The NGO-Academia interface: obstacles to collaboration, lessons from systems thinking and suggested ways forward

Curated on April 29, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Duncan Green at LSE Impact Blog: “The case for partnership between international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) and academia to advance development knowledge is strong. INGOs bring presence on the ground – through their own operations or long-term local partnerships – and communication and advocacy skills (not always academics’ strong point). Academia contributes research skills and credibility, and a long-term reflective perspective that the more frenetic forms of operational work and activism often lack.

In practice, however, such partnerships have proven remarkably difficult, partly because INGOs and academia are too complementary – there is so little overlap between their respective worlds that it is often difficult to find ways to work together.

Obstacles to collaboration

Impact vs publication:…
Urgency vs “wait and see”: …
Status quo vs originality: …
Thinking vs talking: ….

Systems thinking approaches

Some of the problems that arise in the academic–INGO interface stem from overly linear approaches to what is, in effect, an ideas and knowledge ecosystem. In such contexts, systems thinking can help identify bottlenecks and suggest possible ways forward.

Getting beyond supply and demand to convening and brokering

Supply-driven is the norm in development research – “experts” churning out policy papers, briefings, books, blogs, etc. Being truly demand-driven is hard even to imagine – an NGO or university department submitting themselves to a public poll on what should be researched? But increasingly in areas such as governance or value chains, we try and move beyond both supply and demand to a convening/brokering role, bringing together different “unusual suspects”. What would that look like in research? Action research, with an agenda that emerges from an interaction between communities and researchers? Natural science seems further ahead on this point: when the Dutch National Research Agenda ran a nationwide citizen survey of research questions they wanted science to look at, 12,000 questions were submitted and clustered into 140 questions, under seven or eight themes. To the organisers’ surprise, many citizens asked quite deep questions.

Most studies identify a need for “knowledge brokers” not only to bridge the gap between the realms of science and policy, but also to synthesise and transform evidence into an effective and usable form for policy and practice. An essential feature of knowledge brokers is that they understand the cultures of both worlds. Often, this role is performed by third-sector organisations of various types (from lobbyists to thinktanks to respected research funders). Some academics can transcend this divide. A few universities employ specialist knowledge brokers but their long-term effectiveness is often constrained by low status, insecure contracts and lack of career pathways. Whoever plays this crucial intermediary role, it appears that it is currently under-resourced within and beyond the university system. In the development sector, the nearest thing to an embedded gateway is the Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC), run by Birmingham University and the IDS and largely funded by the Department for International Development. It conducts literature and evidence reviews on a range of topics, drawing evidence from both academic literature and non-academic institutions….

Ways forward

Based on all of the above, a number of ideas emerge for consideration by academics, INGOs and funders of research.

Suggestions for academics

Comments on previous blog posts provided a wealth of practical advice to academics on how to work more productively with INGOs. These include the following:

Create research ideas and proposals collaboratively. This means talking to each other early on, rather than academics looking for NGOs to help their dissemination, or NGOs commissioning academics to undertake policy-based evidence making.
Don’t just criticise and point to gaps – understand the reasons for them (gaps in both NGO programmes and their research capacity) and propose solutions. Work to recognise practitioners’ strengths and knowledge.
Make research relevant to real people in communities. This means proper discussions and dialogue at design, research and analysis stages, disseminated drafts and discussing findings locally on publication.
Set up reflection spaces in universities where NGO practitioners can go to take time out and be supported to reflect on and write up their experiences, network with others, and gain new insights on their work.
Catalyse more exchange of personnel in both directions. Universities could replicate my own Professor in Practice position at the London School of Economics and Political Science, while INGOs could appoint honorary fellows, who could help guide their thinking in return for access to their work….(More)”.

Measuring results from open contracting in Ukraine

Curated on April 19, 2017May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Kathrin Frauscher, Karolis Granickas and Leigh Manasco at the Open Contracting Partnership: “…Ukraine is one of our Showcase and Learning (S&L) projects, and we’ve already shared several stories about the success of Prozorro. Each S&L project tests specific theories of change and use cases. Through the Prozorro platform, Ukraine is revolutionizing procurement by digitizing the process and unlocking data to make it available to citizens, CSOs, government, and business. The theory of change for this S&L project hypothesizes that transparency and the implementation of the Open Contracting Data Standard (OCDS), combined with multi-stakeholder collaboration in the design, promotion and monitoring of the procurement system, is having an impact on value for money, fairness and integrity.

The reform introduced other innovations, including electronic reverse auctions and a centralized procurement database that integrates with private commercial platforms. We co-created a monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) plan with our project partners to quantify and measure specific progress and impact indicators, while understanding that it is hard to attribute impacts to distinct aspects of the reform. The indicators featured in this blog are particularly related to our theory of change.

We are at a crucial moment in this S&L project as our first round of comprehensive MEL baseline and progress data are coming in. It’s a good time to reflect on key takeaways and challenges that arose when defining and analyzing these data, and how we are using them to inform the Prozorro reform.

Openness can result in more competition and competition saves money.

One of the benefits of open contracting appears to be improving market opportunity and efficiency. Market opportunity focuses on companies being able to compete for business on a level playing field.

From January 2015 to March 2017, the average number of bids per tender lot rose by 15%, demonstrating an increase in competition. Even more notable, the average number of unique suppliers during that same time grew by 45% for each procuring entity, meaning that agencies are now procuring from more and more diverse suppliers….

High levels of responsiveness can benefit procuring entities.

Those agencies that leverage their opportunities to interact with business and citizens throughout the contracting cycle, by actively responding to questions and complaints via the online platform, tend to conduct procurement more smoothly, without high levels of amendments or cancellations, than those who don’t. Tenders with a 100% response rate to feedback have a 66% success rate, while those with no response, show a 52% success rate. The portal provides procuring entities with the resources needed to address questions and problems, saving time, effort and money throughout the contracting process.

People are beginning to trust the public procurement process and data more.

According to a survey of 300 entrepreneurs conducted by USAID, most respondents believed that Prozorro significantly (27%) or partially (53%) reduces corruption. Additionally, fewer respondents who participated in procurement said they faced corruption when using the new platform (29%) compared to the old system (54%). These numbers only tell a part of the story, as we do not know what those outside of the procurement system think, but they are a necessary first step towards measuring increased levels of trust for the public procurement process. We will continue looking at trust as one of the proxies for health of an open procurement process.

Citizens are actively seeking out procurement information.

Google search hits grew from 680 in the month of January 2015 to more than 191,000 in the month of February 2017 (tracking 43 related keywords). This means the environment is shifting to one where people are recognizing that this data has value; that there is interest and demand for it. Implementing open contracting processes is just one part of what we want to see happen. We also strive to nurture an environment where open contracting data is seen as something that is worthwhile and necessary.

The newly established www.dozorro.org monitoring platform also shows promising results…..

The main one is feedback loops. We see that procuring entities’ responsiveness to general questions results in better quality procurement. We also see that only one out of three claims (request to a procuring entity to amend, cancel or modify a tender in question) is successfully resolved. In addition, there are some good individual examples, such as the ones in Dnypro and Kiev. While we do not know if these numbers and instances are sufficient for an effective institutional response mechanism, we do know that business and citizens have to trust redress mechanisms before using them. We will continue trying to identify the ideal level of institutional response to secure trust and develop better metrics to capture that….(More)”.

What do we know about when data does/doesn’t influence policy?

Curated on April 18, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Josh Powell at Oxfam Blog: “While development actors are now creating more data than ever, examples of impactful use are anecdotal and scant. Put bluntly, despite this supply-side push for more data, we are far from realizing an evidence-based utopia filled with data-driven decisions.

One of the key shortcomings of our work on development data has been failing to develop realistic models for how data can fit into existing institutional policy/program processes. The political economy – institutional structures, individual (dis)incentives, policy constraints – of data use in government and development agencies remains largely unknown to “data people” like me, who work on creating tools and methods for using development data.

We’ve documented several preconditions for getting data to be used, which could be thought of in a cycle:
While broadly helpful, I think we also need more specific theories of change (ToCs) to guide data initiatives in different institutional contexts. Borrowing from a host of theories on systems thinking and adaptive learning, I gave this a try with a simple 2×2 model. The x-axis can be thought of as the level of institutional buy-in, while the y-axis reflects whether available data suggest a (reasonably) “clear” policy approach. Different data strategies are likely to be effective in each of these four quadrants.

So what does this look like in the real world? Let’s tackle these with some examples we’ve come across:

.…(More).

With great power comes great responsibility: crowdsourcing raises methodological and ethical questions for academia

Curated on April 5, 2017August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Isabell Stamm and Lina Eklund at LSE Impact Blog: “Social scientists are expanding the landscape of academic knowledge production by adopting online crowdsourcing techniques used by businesses to design, innovate, and produce. Researchers employ crowdsourcing for a number of tasks, such as taking pictures, writing text, recording stories, or digesting web-based data (tweets, posts, links, etc.). In an increasingly competitive academic climate, crowdsourcing offers researchers a cutting-edge tool for engaging with the public. Yet this socio-technical practice emerged as a business procedure rather than a research method and thus contains many hidden assumptions about the world which concretely affect the knowledge produced. With this comes a problematic reduction of research participants into a single, faceless crowd. This requires a critical assessment of crowdsourcing’s methodological assumptions….(More)”