New book edited by Erik W. Johnston:” Policy informatics is addressing governance challenges and their consequences, which span the seeming inability of governments to solve complex problems and the disaffection of people from their governments. Policy informatics seeks approaches that enable our governance systems to address increasingly complex challenges and to meet the rising expectations of people to be full participants in their communities. This book approaches these challenges by applying a combination of the latest American and European approaches in applying complex systems modeling, crowdsourcing, participatory platforms and citizen science to explore complex governance challenges in domains that include education, environment, and health.(More)
Making City Hall Leaner
How do we create services that people actually want to use?
The first change is to start thinking about these services as products. What’s the difference? Well, this is where we can learn something from startups. Products are the tools that we build to deliver value to our users.
Products are typically managed by one or more product managers that watch very carefully how users interact with the product so the startup can determine which features to keep and which to toss. We can contrast this with traditional government services which are developed at some point to solve a problem of some sort, but because they are typically not monitored in a way to understand whether these services are actually adding value, they quickly fall out of sync with the needs of people.
Consider government websites that allow people to access their benefits. These sites are typically clunky to use and hard to navigate. This isn’t a small issue. It can be the difference between people getting and not getting the resources they need to survive.
Case in point: CalFresh.
These are services.
Compare this to a site such as Balance which was designed by watching how people use the CalFresh site, talking to these users about how they would like to access their benefits and then building a tool that actually responds to their needs.This is a product.
So, we need to be thinking about not only what government is building (in terms of tools), but also how it builds them.
The approach to building high-value products used by startups (and other orgs looking to build better products) is called Agile.
There are many flavors of Agile, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. One of the more recent agile methodologies that has garnered support in the startup community is Lean developed by Eric Reiss in his book, “The Lean Startup.”
Now, a word of caution. Any methodology that is used outside of the context in which it was intended runs the risk of simply not working. However, at its core, Lean is about learning what works and what doesn’t, so I’ll focus on the central elements of Lean since they have much to teach those of us who are working to overhaul local government about how to create value….(More)”
So, we need to be thinking about not only what government is building (in terms of tools), but also how it builds them.
The approach to building high-value products used by startups (and other orgs looking to build better products) is called Agile.
There are many flavors of Agile, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. One of the more recent agile methodologies that has garnered support in the startup community is Lean developed by Eric Reiss in his book, “The Lean Startup.”
Now, a word of caution. Any methodology that is used outside of the context in which it was intended runs the risk of simply not working. However, at its core, Lean is about learning what works and what doesn’t, so I’ll focus on the central elements of Lean since they have much to teach those of us who are working to overhaul local government about how to create value….(More)”
Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice
New book by Cass Sunstein: “Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely.
Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost. In modern life the requirement to make active choices can often be overwhelming. So, across broad areas of our lives, from health plans to energy suppliers, many of us choose not to choose. By following our default options, we save ourselves the costs of making active choices. By setting those options, governments and corporations dictate the outcomes for when we decide by default. This is among the most significant ways in which they effect social change, yet we are just beginning to understand the power and impact of default rules. Many central questions remain unanswered: When should governments set such defaults, and when should they insist on active choices? How should such defaults be made? What makes some defaults successful while others fail?….
The onset of big data gives corporations and governments the power to make ever more sophisticated decisions on our behalf, defaulting us to buy the goods we predictably want, or vote for the parties and policies we predictably support. As consumers we are starting to embrace the benefits this can bring. But should we? What will be the long-term effects of limiting our active choices on our agency? And can such personalized defaults be imported from the marketplace to politics and the law? Confronting the challenging future of data-driven decision-making, Sunstein presents a manifesto for how personalized defaults should be used to enhance, rather than restrict, our freedom and well-being. (More)”
The Trouble With Disclosure: It Doesn’t Work
Jesse Eisinger at ProPublica: “Louis Brandeis was wrong. The lawyer and Supreme Court justice famously declared that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and we have unquestioningly embraced that advice ever since.
All this sunlight is blinding. As new scholarship is demonstrating, the value of all this information is unproved. Paradoxically, disclosure can be useless — and sometimes actually harmful or counterproductive.
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
“We are doing disclosure as a regulatory move all over the board,” says Adam J. Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown, “The funny thing is, we are doing this despite very little evidence of its efficacy.”…
Of course, some disclosure works. Professor Levitin cites two examples. The first is an olfactory disclosure. Methane doesn’t have any scent, but a foul smell is added to alert people to a gas leak. The second is ATM. fees. A study in Australia showed that once fees were disclosed, people avoided the high-fee machines and took out more when they had to go to them.
But to Omri Ben-Shahar, co-author of a recent book, ” More Than You Wanted To Know: The Failure of Mandated Disclosure,” these are cherry-picked examples in a world awash in useless disclosures. Of course, information is valuable. But disclosure as a regulatory mechanism doesn’t work nearly well enough, he argues.
First, it really works only when things are simple. As soon as transactions become complex, disclosure starts to stumble. Buying a car, for instance, turns out to be several transactions: the purchase itself, the financing, maybe the trade-in of old car and various insurance and warranty decisions. These are all subject to various disclosure rules, but making the choices clear and useful has proved nigh impossible.
In complex transactions, we then must rely on intermediaries to give us advice. Because they are often conflicted, they, too, become subject to disclosure obligations. Ah, even more boilerplate to puzzle over!
And then there’s the harm. Over the years, banks that sold complex securities often stuck impossible-to-understand clauses deep in prospectuses that “disclosed” what was really going on. When the securities blew up, as they often did, banks then fended off lawsuits by arguing they had done everything the law required and were therefore not liable.
“That’s the harm of disclosure,” Professor Ben-Shahar said. “It provides a safe harbor for practices that smell bad. It sanitizes every bad practice.”
The anti-disclosure movement is taking on the ” Nudge” school, embraced by the Obama administration and promoted most prominently by Cass R. Sunstein, a scholar at Harvard, and Richard H. Thaler, an economist at the University of Chicago. These nudgers believe that small policies will prod people to do what’s in their best interests.
The real-world evidence in favor of nudging is thin. …
The ever-alluring notion is that we are just one or two changes away from having meaningful disclosure. If we could only have annual Securities and Exchange Commission filings in plain English, we could finally understand what’s going on at corporations. A University of San Diego Law School professor, Frank Partnoy, and I called for better bank disclosure in an article in The Atlantic a few years ago.
Professor Ben-Shahar mocks it. ” ‘Plain English!’ ‘Make it simple.’ That is the deus ex machina, the god that will solve everything,” he said.
Complex things are, sadly, complex. A mortgage is not an easy transaction to understand. People are not good at predicting their future behavior and so don’t know what options are best for them. “The project of simplification is facing a very poor empirical track record and very powerful theoretical problem,” he said.
What to do instead? Hard and fast rules. If lawmakers want to end a bad practice, ban it. Having them admit it is not enough. (More)”
The Future of Open and How To Stop It
Blogpost by Steve Song: “In 2008, Jonathan Zittrain wrote a book called The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It. In it he argued that the runaway success of the Internet is also the cause of it being undermined, that vested interests were in the process of locking down the potential for innovation by creating walled gardens. He wrote that book because he loved the Internet and the potential it represents and was concerned about it going down a path that would diminish its potential. It is in that spirit that I borrow his title to talk about the open movement. By the term open movement, I am referring broadly to the group of initiatives inspired by the success of Open Source software that led to initiatives as varied as the Creative Commons, Open Data, Open Science, Open Access, Open Corporates, Open Government, the list goes on. I write this because I love open initiatives but I fear that openness is in danger of becoming its own enemy as it becomes an orthodoxy difficult to question.
In June of last year, I wrote an article called The Morality of Openness which attempted to unpack my complicated feelings about openness. Towards the end the essay, I wondered whether the word trust might not be a more important word than open for our current world. I am now convinced of this. Which is not to say that I have stopped believing in openness but openness; I believe openness is a means to an end, it is not the endgame. Trust is the endgame. Higher trust environments, whether in families or corporations or economies, tend to be both more effective and happier. There is no similar body of evidence for open and yet open practices can be a critical element on the road to trust. Equally, when mis-applied, openness can achieve the opposite….
Openness can be a means of building trust. Ironically though, if openness as behaviour is mandated, it stops building trust. Listen to Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith talk about why that happens. What Smith argues (building on the work of an earlier Smith, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) is that intent matters. That as human beings, we signal our intentions to each other with our behaviour and that influences how others behave. When intention is removed by regulating or enforcing good behaviour, that signal is lost as well.
I watched this happen nearly ten years ago in South Africa when the government decided to embrace the success of Open Source software and make it mandatory for government departments to use Open Source software. No one did. It is choosing to share that make open initiatives work. When you remove choice, you don’t inspire others to share and you don’t build trust. Looking at the problem from the perspective of trust rather than from the perspective of open makes this problem much easier to see.
Lateral thinker Jerry Michalski gave a great talk last year entitled What If We Trusted You? in which he talked about how the architecture of systems either build or destroy trust. He give a great example of wikipedia as an open, trust enabling architecture. We don’t often think about what a giant leap of trust wikipedia makes in allowing anyone to edit it and what an enormous achievement it became…(More).”
Data Driven: Creating a Data Culture
New book by Hilary Mason and DJ Patil: “Succeeding with data isn’t just a matter of putting Hadoop in your machine room, or hiring some physicists with crazy math skills. It requires you to develop a data culture that involves people throughout the organization. In this O’Reilly report, DJ Patil and Hilary Mason outline the steps you need to take if your company is to be truly data-driven—including the questions you should ask and the methods you should adopt.
You’ll not only learn examples of how Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook use their data, but also how Walmart, UPS, and other organizations took advantage of this resource long before the advent of Big Data. No matter how you approach it, building a data culture is the key to success in the 21st century.
You’ll explore:
You’ll not only learn examples of how Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook use their data, but also how Walmart, UPS, and other organizations took advantage of this resource long before the advent of Big Data. No matter how you approach it, building a data culture is the key to success in the 21st century.
You’ll explore:
- Data scientist skills—and why every company needs a Spock
- How the benefits of giving company-wide access to data outweigh the costs
- Why data-driven organizations use the scientific method to explore and solve data problems
- Key questions to help you develop a research-specific process for tackling important issues
- What to consider when assembling your data team
- Developing processes to keep your data team (and company) engaged
- Choosing technologies that are powerful, support teamwork, and easy to use and learn …(More)”
Participation in Public and Social Media Interactions
New Book edited by Marta Dynel and Jan Chovanec: “This book deals with participation frameworks in modern social and public media. It brings together several cutting-edge research studies that offer exciting new insights into the nature and formats of interpersonal communication in diverse technology-mediated contexts. Some papers introduce new theoretical extensions to participation formats, while others present case studies in various discourse domains spanning public and private genres. Adopting the perspective of the pragmatics of interaction, these contributions discuss data ranging from public, mass-mediated and quasi-authentic texts, fully staged and scripted textual productions, to authentic, non-scripted private messages and comments, both of a permanent and ephemeral nature. The analyses include news interviews, online sports reporting, sitcoms, comedy shows, stand-up comedies, drama series, institutional and personal blogs, tweets, follow-up YouTube video commentaries, and Facebook status updates. All the authors emphasize the role of context and pay attention to how meaning is constructed by participants in interactions in increasingly complex participation frameworks existing in traditional as well as novel technologically mediated interactions….(Table of Contents)”.
Government for a New Age: Managing Public Services in the 21st Century
A new Thinkers50 book by by and Rabih Abouchakra: “What is the role of government in the modern world? The environment that governments operate in today is hugely complex. Governments face difficult challenges on all sides. Global upheavals and geopolitical shifts, climate change, rapidly evolving technologies and socio-economic demographics, resource constraints, an increasingly diverse constituency and citizens more demanding expectations — these are just some of the forces driving societal changes and transforming the context in which governments operate. Around the world governments are responding to these challenges by shifting the way they think, steer, organize, measure and engage with citizens, and the private and third sector. Until now, though, best practice has remained elusive. Intergovernmental collaboration and sharing of innovative policy making is piecemeal. Government for a New Age brings together the latest thinking on modern government. It sheds light on the current trends in governance practices, operating models, processes and tools that leading governments are embracing. Government for a New Age explores the ways in which governments are changing their value proposition to tackle these pressing concerns and provide some answers to these questions…(More).”
Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2014
Book edited O’Hara, K. , Nguyen, M-H.C., Haynes, P.: “Tracking the evolution of digital technology is no easy task; changes happen so fast that keeping pace presents quite a challenge. This is, nevertheless, the aim of the Digital Enlightenment Yearbook.
This book is the third in the series which began in 2012 under the auspices of the Digital Enlightenment Forum. This year, the focus is on the relationship of individuals with their networks, and explores “Social networks and social machines, surveillance and empowerment”. In what is now the well-established tradition of the yearbook, different stakeholders in society and various disciplinary communities (technology, law, philosophy, sociology, economics, policymaking) bring their very different opinions and perspectives to bear on this topic.
The book is divided into four parts: the individual as data manager; the individual, society and the market; big data and open data; and new approaches. These are bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue, which provide illuminating perspectives on the discussions in between. The division of the book is not definitive; it suggests one narrative, but others are clearly possible.
The 2014 Digital Enlightenment Yearbook gathers together the science, social science, law and politics of the digital environment in order to help us reformulate and address the timely and pressing questions which this new environment raises. We are all of us affected by digital technology, and the subjects covered here are consequently of importance to us all. (Contents)”
Moneyball for Government
New book edited by Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle: “A bipartisan group of current and former federal government leaders and advisors have written a new book, titled Moneyball for Government, which encourages government to change how it works so that data, evidence and evaluation drive policy and funding decisions.
The book includes jointly-written chapters by former Obama and George W. Bush administration Budget Directors Peter Orszag and Jim Nussle, U.S. Senators Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) and Mark Warner (D-VA), former Obama and George W. Bush domestic policy advisors Melody Barnes and John Bridgeland; and former spokesmen for the Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns Kevin Madden and Howard Wolfson. It also includes chapters from former Obama and George W. Bush economic advisors Gene Sperling and Glenn Hubbard, and Obama and George W. Bush policy experts Robert Gordon and Ron Haskins.
The book also features profiles of innovative government and nonprofit leaders and organizations across the country that are successfully leveraging data, evidence and evaluation to get better results.
This book is about changing the way government works. By shifting public resources toward solutions that are informed by the best possible data, evidence and evaluation about what works, our government can improve the lives of young people, their families and communities. By brining together leading thinkers from across the political spectrum and highlighting the good work underway across the country, this book makes the case for Moneyball for Government and shows that it’s possible.”