book – Page 152 – The Living Library

Selected Readings on Smart Disclosure

Curated on December 5, 2013December 13, 2018 by Andrew Young

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

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

Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

Mark L. Braunstein — Empowering the Patient — a book exploring how computing and patients’ access to information can improve healthcare.
Elisa Brodi — “Product-Attribute Information” and “Product-Use Information”: Smart Disclosure and New Policy Implications for Consumers’ Protection — a paper exploring smart disclosure in Italy, with a particular focus on compelling private companies to release useful information to the public.
Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — Policies in Practice: The Download Capability — a set of guidelines and strategies for releasing health information to the public from the originators of the Blue Button initiative.
National Science and Technology Council — Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure — a comprehensive, inter-agency report on the use of smart disclosure in the United States Federal Government.
Djoko Sigit Sayogo and Theresa A. Pardo — Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button — a paper exploring the implementation and impact of the Green Button initiative.
Richard H. Thaler and Will Tucker — Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers — an article describing many aspects of targeted information release for consumers, with a particular focus on challenges to success.
United Kingdom: Department for Business Innovation & Skills — Better Choices: Better Deals Report on Progress in the Consumer Empowerment Strategy — a report detailing the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy.

Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)

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

The report details the progress made through the United Kingdom’s consumer empowerment strategy, Better Choices: Better Deals. The plan seeks to mitigate knowledge imbalances through information disclosure programs and targeted nudges.

The empowerment strategy’s four sections demonstrate the potential benefits of Smart Disclosure: 1. The power of information; 2. The power of the crowd; 3. Helping the vulnerable; and 4. A new approach to Government working with business.

Braunstein, Mark L.,. “Empowering the Patient.” In Health Informatics in the Cloud, 67–79. Springer Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York Heidelberg Dordrecht London, 2013. https://bit.ly/2UB4jTU.

This book discusses the application of computing to healthcare delivery, public health and community based clinical research.

Braunstein asks and seeks to answer critical questions such as: Who should make the case for smart disclosure when the needs of consumers are not being met? What role do non-profits play in the conversation on smart disclosure especially when existing systems (or lack thereof) of information provision do not work or are unsafe?

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

This paper from the Research Area of the Bank of Italy’s Law and Economics Department “surveys the literature on product use information and analyzes whether and to what extent Italian regulator is trying to ensure consumers’ awareness as to their use pattern.” Rather than focusing on the type of information governments can release to citizens, Brodi proposes that governments require private companies to provide valuable use pattern information to citizens to inform decision-making.

The form of regulation proposed by Brodi and other proponents “is based on a basic concept: consumers can be protected if companies are forced to disclose data on the customers’ consumption history through electronic files.”

National Science and Technology Council. Smart Disclosure and Consumer Decision Making: Report of the Task Force on Smart Disclosure. Task Force on Smart Disclosure: Information and Efficiency in Consumer Markets. Washington, DC: United States Government: Executive Office of the President, May 30, 2013. http://1.usa.gov/1aamyoT.

- This inter-agency report is a comprehensive description of smart disclosure approaches being used across the Federal Government. The report not only highlights the importance of making data available to consumers but also to innovators to build better options for consumers.

In addition to providing context about government policies that guide smart disclosure initiatives, the report raises questions about what parties have influence in this space.

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

This report from the Markle Connecting for Health Work Group on Consumer Engagement — the creator of the Blue Button system for downloading personal health records — features a “set of privacy and security practices to help people download their electronic health records.”

To help make health information easily accessible for all citizens, the report lists a number of important steps:
- Make the download capability a common practice
- Implement sound policies and practices to protect individuals and their information
- Collaborate on sample data sets
- Support the download capability as part of Meaningful Use and qualified or certified health IT
- Include the download capability in procurement requirements.

The report also describes the rationale for the development of the Blue Button — perhaps the best known example of Smart Disclosure currently in existence — and the targeted release of health information in general:
- Individual access to information is rooted in fair information principles and law
- Patients need and want the information
- The download capability would encourage innovation
- A download capability frees data sources from having to make many decisions about the user interface
- A download capability would hasten the path to standards and interoperability.

Sayogo, Djoko Sigit, and Theresa A. Pardo. “Understanding Smart Data Disclosure Policy Success: The Case of Green Button.” In Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 72–81. New York: ACM New York, NY, USA, 2013. http://bit.ly/1aanf1A.

This paper from the Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research explores the implementation of the Green Button Initiative, analyzing qualitative data from interviews with experts involved in Green Button development and implementation.

Moving beyond the specifics of the Green Button initiative, the authors raise questions on the motivations and success factors facilitating successful collaboration between public and private organizations to support smart disclosure policy.

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

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

Social movements and their technologies. wiring social change

Curated on December 5, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stefania Milan: “Social Movements and Their Technologies. Wiring Social Change explores the interplay between social movements and their “liberated technologies”. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio stations and radical internet projects (“emancipatory communication practices”) as a political subject, focusing on the sociological and cultural processes at play. It provides an overview of the relationship between social movements and technology and investigates what is behind the communication infrastructure that made possible the main protest events of the past 15 years. In doing so, Stefania Milan illustrates how contemporary social movements organize in order to create autonomous alternatives to communication systems and networks and how they contribute to change the way people communicate in daily life, as well as try to change communication policy from the grassroots….
Read an excerpt from the book
“The question of infrastructure might sound trivial in times of abundance of “free” social media, microblogging platforms and apps allowing people to voice their opinions and share pictures and videos at will, and at virtually no cost. But we often forget that these platforms are owned and controlled by media and telecoms corporations whose agenda focuses on profit and corporate interests rather than participation, empowerment, and social justice. With this in mind, in recent decades activist groups have increasingly challenged media corporations and state-owned broadcasters on their own terrain. They have created alternatives to existing communication infrastructure by setting up community radio and television stations, and alternative websites for self-produced information. Such grassroots media have allowed broader swathes of the citizenry to access media production and secure communication channels. They have become what DeeDee Halleck calls “infrastructures of resistance” (2002, p. 191) to the neoliberal order in the media realm.”

Accountability Technologies – Tools for Asking Hard Questions

Curated on December 3, 2013October 9, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Dietmar Offenhuber and Katja Schechtner: “A growing part of the public is concerned about cities being designed and governed in a responsible way. In the contemporary information society, however, the democratic obligation of the citizens to inform themselves thoroughly, so that they can participate in public affairs has become impossible to fulfill. Rather than submitting to the opinions of self-proclaimed experts, citizens need new ways to make sense of what is going on around them. Accountability technologies stand for new innovative approaches to bottom-up governance: technologies to monitor those in power and hold them accountable for their actions. Accountability technologies are designed to coordinate citizen-led data collection, visualization and analysis in order to achieve social change. This book takes a close look at initiatives that have succeeded in making an impact on the reality of the city, as well as the motivations, strategies and tactics of the people who create and use these technologies. How can data generated by citizens be put into action?”
See also https://web.archive.org/web/http://accountabilitytech.net/

Digital Government @ Work: A Social Informatics Perspective

Curated on November 28, 2013July 18, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Book Review by Chi Onwurah: “In the 1990s and 2000s, tech cynics would often quote Robert Solow’s 1987 quip, ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.’ Now that value chains have been disintermediated and dependent business models trashed, it is less common to hear that. However it would still be appropriate to say ‘You can see the digital age everywhere but in Government.’ Certainly in a recent Policy Exchange report, the Prime Minister’s former digital advisor Rohan Silva did his best to portray the public sector as a digitally backward captured client of ICT oligarchs now being reluctantly dragged into the 21st Century.That makes the timing of Digital Government @ Work by Ian McLoughlin, Rob Wilson, and Mike Martin all the more fortuitous. The book seeks to give the reader a broad evidence-based understanding of what digital Government can be, what it is, and the challenges it faces. It is largely successful. Steve Halliday, President of Society of Information Technology Management describes the book as ‘a rigorous and thought-provoking analysis of the history and the future of digital government,’ and I would agree with that analysis. Despite lengthy definitional discussions and dense referencing, the book is also very readable and what is more, should be read….
The social informatics perspective of the book means its outlook is neither entirely technology-driven – whatever the problem the right system can solve it – nor purely qualitative, but combines understanding of the technology and its social and organisational impact with an analysis of the interdependencies at play in the context of public service delivery. These are illustrated by detailed case studies from Children’s Services, the National Programme for Local e-Government (FAME) and telecare, which highlight failings in current approaches to what they call ‘technology enactment’ as well as the – possibly systemic – challenges to real organisational and service innovation….
Most important is the recognition that technology only empowers when we feel ownership of it, not controlled by it. If digital government is to be about empowering and improving that critical relationship at the frontline, then the ‘street bureaucrats’ the book refers to, as well as the citizen-user and the IT manager, must all be involved in an on-going co-production of the service. Rather than traditional integration we must ‘seek alternative means of coordination such as through federation and federability.’ If this is achieved, we may look to ‘digital government maturity characterised by partnership working across a mixed economy of public, private and third sectors and supported by an infrastructure of federated information and identity management systems and shared service environments’….”

Designing for Behavior Change: Applying Psychology and Behavioral Economics

Curated on November 28, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New book by Stephen Wendel :” A new wave of products is helping people change their behavior and daily routines, whether it’s exercising more (Jawbone Up), taking control of their finances (HelloWallet), or organizing their email (Mailbox). This practical guide shows you how to design these types of products for users seeking to take action and achieve specific goals.
Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes.

Learn the three main strategies to help people change behavior
Identify your target audience and the behaviors they seek to change
Extract user stories and identify obstacles to behavior change
Develop effective interface designs that are enjoyable to use
Measure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve it
Use practical examples from products like Nest, Fitbit, and Opower”

Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving – A Handbook and a Call to Action

Curated on November 14, 2013August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

“This book was started with the intent of changing design and social entrepreneurship education. As these disciplines converge, it becomes evident that existing pedagogy doesn’t support either students or practicioners attempting to design for impact. This text is a reaction to that convergence, and will ideally be used by various students, educators, and practicioners:
One audience is professors and educators of design, who are challenged with reinventing their educational curriculum in the face of a changing world. For them, this book should act as both a starting point for curriculum development and a justification for why this development is necessary—it should answer the question “what should design and social entrepreneurship education look like?”
Another audience is made up of fresh-out-of-school designers, who are bored and uninspired by their jobs. For them, this book should answer the question “how can I redirect my design efforts to something meaningful?”
Finally, a last audience is made up of practicing designers and entrepreneurs, who are looking to achieve social impact in their work. For them, the book should answer the question “what tools and techniques can I use in my work to drive impact through design?”
The entire text of the book is available online for free as HTML, and provided for reuse and adaptation under a creative commons license. We hope you find this a useful resource in your practice, education, and in your day to day life.
Read Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving“

Transparency in Politics and the Media: Accountability and Open Government

Curated on November 13, 2013August 15, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New report from The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism by Nigel Bowles, James T. Hamilton, and David A. L. Levy: “Increasingly governments around the world are experimenting with initiatives in transparency or ‘open government’.
These involve a variety of measures including the announcement of more user-friendly government websites, greater access to government data, the extension of freedom of information legislation and broader attempts to involve the public in government decision making.
However, the role of the media in these initiatives has not hitherto been examined. This new RISJ edited volume analyses the challenges and opportunities presented to journalists as they attempt to hold governments accountable in an era of professed transparency.
In examining how transparency and open government initiatives have affected the accountability role of the press in the US and the UK, it also explores how policies in these two countries could change in the future to help journalists hold governments more accountable.
This volume will be essential reading for all practising journalists, for students of journalism or politics, and for policymakers. This publication can be bought from I. B. Tauris
Download the Executive Summary and First Chapter”

From Crowdsourcing to Crowdseeding: The Cutting Edge of Empowerment?

Curated on November 12, 2013December 6, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

New chapter by Peter van der Windt in the book Bits and Atoms: Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood: “In 2009 Columbia University launched a pilot project in the Kivus region of the Democratic Republic of Congo called Voix des Kivus. The point of the project was to examine the potential for using SMS technology to gather conflict event data in real-time. Given previous experiences in Eastern Congo, the research team expected that collecting high-quality event data in Eastern Congo in the traditional way (sending out enumerator teams) would be challenging, while using traditional approaches to collect event information in real-time would be impossible. As a result the team launched an SMS-based pilot project called Voix des Kivus. Parts of the Kivus have cellphone coverage, and cellphones are relatively inexpensive. Moreover, while enumerator teams have problems crossing bad roads or washed-away bridges, phone-signals do not. Finally, an SMS-message sent is received

instantaneously.

The Voix des Kivus project used a “crowdseeding” approach which combines the innovations of crowdsourcing with standard principles of survey research and

statistical analysis. It used a sampling frame, selected sites through systematic random sampling, and identified specific reporters in each site. Researchers then

“seeded” mobile phones to select “phoneholders” and trained them on how to use the system and what to report. Only these pre-selected reporters could contribute

into the system, rather than anyone with a mobile phone or connection of some sort, as it the case with standard crowdsourcing platforms.

This chapter draws on this experience to discuss how such ICT projects might empower populations by enabling the collection and distribution of information as an alternative mechanism of governance…”