New book edited by Christian Bason: “Design for Policy is the first publication to chart the emergence of collaborative design approaches to innovation in public policy. Drawing on contributions from a range of the world’s leading academics, design practitioners and public managers, it provides a rich, detailed analysis of design as a tool for addressing public problems and capturing opportunities for achieving better and more efficient societal outcomes.
In his introduction, Christian Bason suggests that design may offer a fundamental reinvention of the art and craft of policy making for the twenty-first century. From challenging current problem spaces to driving the creative quest for new solutions and shaping the physical and virtual artefacts of policy implementation, design holds a significant yet largely unexplored potential.
The book is structured in three main sections, covering the global context of the rise of design for policy, in-depth case studies of the application of design to policy making, and a guide to concrete design tools for policy intent, insight, ideation and implementation. The summary chapter lays out a future agenda for design in government, suggesting how to position design more firmly on the public policy stage.
Design for Policy is intended as a resource for leaders and scholars in government departments, public service organizations and institutions, schools of design and public management, think tanks and consultancies that wish to understand and use design as a tool for public sector reform and innovation….More: Full contents list; Introduction – The Design for Policy Nexus.”
We’re All Pirates Now
Book Review by Edward Kosner of “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”in the Wall Street Journal: “Do you feel like a thief when you click on a website link and find yourself reading an article or listening to a song you haven’t paid for? Should you? Are you annoyed when you can’t copy a movie you’ve paid for onto your computer’s hard drive? Should you be? Should copyright, conceived in England three centuries ago to protect writers from unscrupulous printers, apply the same way to creators and consumers in the digital age?
The sci-fi writer, blogger and general man-about-the-Web Cory Doctorow tries to answer some of these questions—and introduces others—in “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free.” Billed as a guide for perplexed creators about how to make a living in the Internet Era, the book is actually a populist manifesto for the information revolution.
Mr. Doctorow is a confident and aphoristic writer—his book is like one long TED talk—and his basic advice to creators is easy to grasp: Aspiring novelists, journalists, musicians and other artists and would-be artists should recognize the Web as an unprecedented promotional medium rather than a revenue source. Creators, writes Mr. Doctorow, need to get known before they can expect to profit from their work. So they should welcome having their words, music or images reproduced online without permission to pave the way for a later payoff.
Even if they manage to make a name, he warns, they’re likely to be ripped off by the entertainment-industrial complex—big book publishers, record companies, movie studios, Google , Apple and Microsoft. But they can monetize their creativity by, among other things, selling tickets to public shows, peddling “swag”—T-shirts, ball caps, posters and recordings—and taking commissions for new work.
He cites the example of a painter named Molly Crabapple, who, inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, raised $55,000 on the crowdsourcing site Kickstarter, rented a storefront and created nine huge canvases, seven of which she sold for $8,000 each. Not the easiest way to become the next Jeff Koons, Taylor Swift or Gillian Flynn.
But Mr. Doctorow turns out to be less interested in mentoring unrealized talent than in promulgating a new regime for copyright regulation on the Internet. Copyright has been enshrined in American law since 1790, but computer technology, he argues, has rendered the concept obsolete: “We can’t stop copying on the Internet because the Internet is a copying machine.” And the whole debate, he complains, “is filled with lies, damn lies and piracy statistics.”
There’s lots of technical stuff here about digital locks—he calls devices like the Kindle “roach motels” that allow content to be loaded but never offloaded elsewhere—as well as algorithms, embedded keys and such. And the book is clotted with acronyms: A diligent reader who finishes this slim volume should be able to pass a test on the meaning of ACTA, WIPO, WPPT, WCT, DMCA, DNS, SOPA and PIPA, not to mention NaTD (techspeak for “Notice and Take Down”).
The gist of Mr. Doctorow’s argument is that the bad guys of the content game use copyright protection and antipiracy protocols not to help creators but to enrich themselves at the expense of the talent and the consumers of content. Similarly, he contends that the crusade against “net neutrality”—the principle that Internet carriers must treat all data and users the same way—is actually a ploy to elevate big players in the digital world by turning the rest of us into second-class Netizens.
“The future of the Internet,” he writes, “should not be a fight about whether Google (or Apple or Microsoft) gets to be in charge or whether Hollywood gets to be in charge. Left to their own devices, Big Tech and Big Content are perfectly capable of coming up with a position that keeps both ‘sides’ happy at the expense of everyone else.”…”
Future Crimes
New book by Marc Goodman: “Technological advances have benefited our world in immeasurable ways—but there is an ominous flip side. Criminals are often the earliest, and most innovative, adopters of technology, and modern times have led to modern crimes. Today’s criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank accounts and wiping out computer servers. It’s disturbingly easy to activate baby monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity, and thieves are analyzing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion. Meanwhile, 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones. This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. In Future Crimes, Marc Goodman rips opens his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils. Reading like a sci-fi thriller, but based in startling fact, Future Crimes raises tough questions about the expanding role of technology in our lives. Future Crimes is a call to action for better security measures worldwide, but most importantly, it will empower readers to protect themselves against looming technological threats—before it’s too late.”
Digital Sociology
New book by Deborah Lupton: “We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not.
The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics.”
The Governance Of Socio-Technical Systems
New book edited by Susana Borrás and Jakob Edler: “Why are so few electric cars in our streets today? Why is it difficult to introduce electronic patient records in our hospitals? To answer these questions we need to understand how state and non-state actors interact with the purpose of transforming socio-technical systems.
Examining the “who” (agents), “how” (policy instruments) and “why” (societal legitimacy) of the governance process, this book presents a conceptual framework for the governance of change in socio-technical systems. Bridging the gap between disciplinary fields, expert contributions provide innovative empirical cases of different modes of governing change. The Governance of Socio-Technical Systems offers a stepping-stone towards building a theory of governance of change and presents a new research agenda on the interaction between science, technology and society.”
Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Webcast of Book release by G. Thomas Kingsley Claudia J. Coulton, and Kathryn L. S. Pettit: “Efforts to address the problems of distressed urban neighborhoods stretch back to the 1800s, but until relatively recently, data played little role in forming policy solutions. Published by the Urban Institute with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the new book Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data documents how government and nonprofit institutions have used information about neighborhood conditions to change the way we think about community and local governance in America.”
Get a free copy of Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
Politics, Policy and Privatisation in the Everyday Experience of Big Data in the NHS
Chapter by Andrew Goffey ; Lynne Pettinger and Ewen Speed in Martin Hand , Sam Hillyard (ed.) Big Data? Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research (Studies in Qualitative Methodology, Volume 13) : “This chapter explains how fundamental organisational change in the UK National Health Service (NHS) is being effected by new practices of digitised information gathering and use. It analyses the taken-for-granted IT infrastructures that lie behind digitisation and considers the relationship between digitisation and big data.
Design/methodology/approach
Qualitative research methods including discourse analysis, ethnography of software and key informant interviews were used. Actor-network theories, as developed by Science and technology Studies (STS) researchers were used to inform the research questions, data gathering and analysis. The chapter focuses on the aftermath of legislation to change the organisation of the NHS.
Findings
The chapter shows the benefits of qualitative research into specific manifestations information technology. It explains how apparently ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ quantitative data gathering and analysis is mediated by complex software practices. It considers the political power of claims that data is neutral.
Originality/value
The chapter provides insight into a specific case of healthcare data and. It makes explicit the role of politics and the State in digitisation and shows how STS approaches can be used to understand political and technological practice.”
Logged On: Smart Government Solutions from South Asia
Book by Zubair K. Bhatti, Jody Zall Kusek and Tony Verheijen: “Logged On looks at mobile and smart phone technology through the lens of good government management. How will developing governments deliver goods and services that citizens care about? How will government in these countries leapfrog over traditional public management reforms to help reach out to and collaborate directly with the citizen? This book provides example after example where this has happened and how mobile technology has helped provide solutions to old problems. Our astounding revelation that mobile technology is helping to fight corruption in Pakistan, improve health delivery in Bangladesh, provide access to government by the ordinary citizen in India, and help monitor elections in Afghanistan. If this Is possible in some place in poor South Asian countries considered the most poor in the world, then how can these examples be spread to further in these counties or in other countries? Logged on Government provides a look back on conventional solutions that have mostly not worked and why mobile solutions are taking hold. The book offers a model called Smart Proactive Government based on a Feedback model being used in Punjab, Pakistan. The book also offers five solutions that are present in every successful mobile and smart phone example that the authors reviewed. (Book PDF (20.18 MB) | View Chapters).”
The future of intelligence is distributed – and so is the future of government
Craig Thomler at eGovAU: “…Now we can do much better. Rather than focusing on electing and appointing individual experts – the ‘nodes’ in our governance system, governments need to focus on the network that interconnects citizens, government, business, not-for-profits and other entities.
Rather than limiting decision making to a small core of elected officials (supported by appointed and self-nominated ‘experts’), we need to design decision-making systems which empower broad groups of citizens to self-inform and involve themselves at appropriate steps of decision-making processes.
This isn’t quite direct democracy – where the population weighs in on every issue, but it certainly is a few steps removed from the alienating ‘representative democracy’ that many countries use today.
What this model of governance allows for is far more agile and iterative policy debates, rapid testing and improvement of programs and managed distributed community support – where anyone in a community can offer to help others within a framework which values, supports and rewards their involvement, rather than looks at it with suspicion and places many barriers in the way.
Of course we need the mechanisms designed to support this model of government, and the notion that they will simply evolve out of our existing system is quite naive.
Our current governance structures are evolutionary – based on the principle that better approaches will beat out ineffective and inefficient ones. Both history and animal evolution have shown that inefficient organisms can survive for extremely long times, and can require radical environmental change (such as mass extinction events) for new forms to be successful.
On top of this the evolution of government is particularly slow as there’s far fewer connections between the 200-odd national governments in the world than between the 200+ Watson artificial intelligences in the world.
While every Watson learns what other Watsons learn rapidly, governments have stilted and formal mechanisms for connection that mean that it can take decades – or even longer – for them to recognise successes and failures in others.
In other words, while we have a diverse group of governments all attempting to solve many of the same basic problems, the network effect isn’t working as they are all too inward focused and have focused on developing expertise ‘nodes’ (individuals) rather than expert networks (connections).
This isn’t something that can be fixed by one, or even a group of ten or more governments – thereby leaving humanity in the position of having to repeat the same errors time and time again, approving the same drugs, testing the same welfare systems, trialing the same legal regimes, even when we have examples of their failures and successes we could be learning from.
So therefore the best solution – perhaps the only workable solution for the likely duration of human civilisation on this planet – is to do what some of our forefather did and design new forms of government in a planned way.
Rather than letting governments slowly and haphazardly evolve through trial and error, we should take a leaf out of the book of engineers, and place a concerted effort into designing governance systems that meet human needs.
These systems should involve and nurture strong networks, focusing on the connections rather than the nodes – allowing us to both leverage the full capabilities of society in its own betterment and to rapidly adjust settings when environments and needs change….”
Governing the Smart, Connected City
Blog by Susan Crawford at HBR: “As politics at the federal level becomes increasingly corrosive and polarized, with trust in Congress and the President at historic lows, Americans still celebrate their cities. And cities are where the action is when it comes to using technology to thicken the mesh of civic goods — more and more cities are using data to animate and inform interactions between government and citizens to improve wellbeing.
Every day, I learn about some new civic improvement that will become possible when we can assume the presence of ubiquitous, cheap, and unlimited data connectivity in cities. Some of these are made possible by the proliferation of smartphones; others rely on the increasing number of internet-connected sensors embedded in the built environment. In both cases, the constant is data. (My new book, The Responsive City, written with co-author Stephen Goldsmith, tells stories from Chicago, Boston, New York City and elsewhere about recent developments along these lines.)
For example, with open fiber networks in place, sending video messages will become as accessible and routine as sending email is now. Take a look at rhinobird.tv, a free lightweight, open-source video service that works in browsers (no special download needed) and allows anyone to create a hashtag-driven “channel” for particular events and places. A debate or protest could be viewed from a thousand perspectives. Elected officials and public employees could easily hold streaming, virtual town hall meetings.
Given all that video and all those livestreams, we’ll need curation and aggregation to make sense of the flow. That’s why visualization norms, still in their infancy, will become a greater part of literacy. When the Internet Archive attempted late last year to “map” 400,000 hours of television news, against worldwide locations, it came up with pulsing blobs of attention. Although visionary Kevin Kelly has been talking about data visualization as a new form of literacy for years, city governments still struggle with presenting complex and changing information in standard, easy-to-consume ways.
Plenar.io is one attempt to resolve this. It’s a platform developed by former Chicago Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein that allows public datasets to be combined and mapped with easy-to-see relationships among weather and crime, for example, on a single city block. (A sample question anyone can ask of Plenar.io: “Tell me the story of 700 Howard Street in San Francisco.”) Right now, Plenar.io’s visual norm is a map, but it’s easy to imagine other forms of presentation that could become standard. All the city has to do is open up its widely varying datasets…”
For example, with open fiber networks in place, sending video messages will become as accessible and routine as sending email is now. Take a look at rhinobird.tv, a free lightweight, open-source video service that works in browsers (no special download needed) and allows anyone to create a hashtag-driven “channel” for particular events and places. A debate or protest could be viewed from a thousand perspectives. Elected officials and public employees could easily hold streaming, virtual town hall meetings.
Given all that video and all those livestreams, we’ll need curation and aggregation to make sense of the flow. That’s why visualization norms, still in their infancy, will become a greater part of literacy. When the Internet Archive attempted late last year to “map” 400,000 hours of television news, against worldwide locations, it came up with pulsing blobs of attention. Although visionary Kevin Kelly has been talking about data visualization as a new form of literacy for years, city governments still struggle with presenting complex and changing information in standard, easy-to-consume ways.
Plenar.io is one attempt to resolve this. It’s a platform developed by former Chicago Chief Data Officer Brett Goldstein that allows public datasets to be combined and mapped with easy-to-see relationships among weather and crime, for example, on a single city block. (A sample question anyone can ask of Plenar.io: “Tell me the story of 700 Howard Street in San Francisco.”) Right now, Plenar.io’s visual norm is a map, but it’s easy to imagine other forms of presentation that could become standard. All the city has to do is open up its widely varying datasets…”