Report by the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development: “The Broadband Commission Working Group on AI Capacity Building has leveraged a multi-stakeholder leadership model to assess the critical capacity needs for public sector digital transformation, including from a developing country perspective. From interviews with policymakers, global and regional expert consultations and evaluation of current international practices, the Working Group has developed three competency domains and nine recommendations. The output is a competency framework for civil servants, spelling out the Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation Competencies needed today…(More)”
Using real-time indicators for economic decision-making in government: Lessons from the Covid-19 crisis in the UK
Paper by David Rosenfeld: “When the UK went into lockdown in mid-March 2020, government was faced with the dual challenge of managing the impact of closing down large parts of the economy and responding effectively to the pandemic. Policy-makers needed to make rapid decisions regarding, on the one hand, the extent of restrictions on movement and economic activity to limit the spread of the virus, and on the other, the amount of support that would be provided to individuals and businesses affected by the crisis. Traditional, official statistics, such as gross domestic product (GDP) or unemployment, which get released on a monthly basis and with a lag, could not be relied upon to monitor the situation and guide policy decisions.
In response, teams of data scientists and statisticians pivoted to develop alternative indicators, leading to an unprecedented amount of innovation in how statistics and data were used in government. This ranged from monitoring sewage water for signs of Covid-19 infection to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) developing a new range of ‘faster indicators’ of economic activity using online job vacancies and data on debit and credit card expenditure from the Clearing House Automated Payment System (CHAPS).
The ONS received generally positive reviews for its performance during the crisis (The Economist, 2022), in contrast to the 2008 financial crisis when policy-makers did not realise the extent of the recession until subsequent revisions to GDP estimates were made. Partly in response to this, the Independent Review of UK Economic Statistics (HM Treasury, 2016) recommended improvements to the use of administrative data and alternative indicators as well as to data science capability to exploit both the extra granularity and the timeliness of new data sources.
This paper reviews the elements that contributed to successes in using real-time data during the pandemic as well as the challenges faced during this period, with a view to distilling some lessons for future use in government. Section 2 provides an overview of real-time indicators (RTIs) and how they were used in the UK during the Covid-19 crisis. The next sections analyse the factors that underpinned the successes (or lack thereof) in using such indicators: section 3 addresses skills, section 4 infrastructure, and section 5 legal frameworks and processes. Section 6 concludes with a summary of the main lessons for governments that hope to make greater use of RTIs…(More)”.
Accelerating Government Innovation With Leadership and Stimulus Funding
Paper by Jane Wiseman: “With the evolving maturity of innovation offices and digital teams comes the imperative for leaders and managers to provide pathways for these organizations to succeed and work together effectively, in terms of embracing new ideas and scaling those that prove effective beyond a prototype or pilot. The availability of a large, one-time infusion of federal funds to support state and local services and programs through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Infrastructure law, and other recent laws provides State and local leaders with a unique opportunity to collaborate with their federal partners and promote innovation that improves the lives of their people. Data and innovation teams can help government be more efficient and effective in spending stimulus funds at the state and local level in the coming years.
In this new report, Jane Wiseman explores various ways that executives can leverage stimulus funding to incentivize success across multiple innovation and data roles, drive forward work from those roles into digital service development and delivery. Through close examination of multiple cases in the field, the author develops a framework with specific recommendations for how leaders can drive opportunities for innovators to complement each other to the benefit of public good, including key skills or characteristics that correlate to success.
This report is intended to help leaders of current government innovation groups, including chief data officers, chief digital officers, innovation team leaders, and similar groups, to learn from successful models that they can apply directly to their operations to be more effective. The report also provides lessons and recommendation for senior executives in government, such as a cabinet secretary, governor, county executive or mayor, to help them think through the possible models of effective practices to support the range of innovation roles, define success…(More)”.
Global Digital Governance Through the Back Door of Corporate Regulation
Paper by Orit Fischman Afori: “Today, societal life is increasingly conducted in the digital sphere, in which two core attributes are prominent: this sphere is entirely controlled by enormous technology companies, and these companies are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This reality generates a severe threat to democratic principles and human rights. Therefore, regulating the conduct of the companies ruling the digital sphere is an urgent agenda worldwide. Policymakers and legislatures around the world are taking their first steps in establishing a digital governance regime, with leading proposals in the EU. Although it is understood that there is a necessity to adopt a comprehensive framework for imposing accountability standards on technology companies and on the operation of AI technologies, traditional perceptions regarding the limits of intervention in the private sector and contemporary perceptions regarding the limits of antitrust tools hinder such legal moves.
Given the obstacles inherent in the use of existing legal means for introducing a digital governance regime, this article proposes a new path of corporate governance regulations. The proposal, belonging to a “second wave” of regulatory models for the digital sphere, is based on the understanding that the current complex technological reality requires sophisticated and pragmatic legal measures for establishing an effective framework for digital governance norms. Corporate governance is a system of rules and practices by which companies are guided and controlled. Because the digital sphere is governed by private corporations, it seems reasonable to introduce the desired digital governance principles through a framework that regulates corporations. The bedrock of corporate governance is promoting principles of corporate accountability, which are translated into a wide array of obligations. In the last two decades, corporate accountability has evolved into a new domain of corporate social responsibility (CSR), promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) purposes not aimed at maximizing profits in the short term. The various benefits of the complex corporate governance mechanisms may be used to promote the desired digital governance regime that would be applied by the technology companies. A key advantage of the corporate governance mechanism is its potential to serve as a vehicle to promulgate norms in the era of multinational corporations. Because the digital sphere is governed by a few giant US companies, corporate governance may be leveraged to promote digital governance principles with a global reach in a uniform manner…(More)”
Superhuman science: How artificial intelligence may impact innovation
Working paper by Ajay Agrawal, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl: “New product innovation in fields like drug discovery and material science can be characterized as combinatorial search over a vast range of possibilities. Modeling innovation as a costly multi-stage search process, we explore how improvements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) could affect the productivity of the discovery pipeline in allowing improved prioritization of innovations that flow through that pipeline. We show how AI-aided prediction can increase the expected value of innovation and can increase or decrease the demand for downstream testing, depending on the type of innovation, and examine how AI can reduce costs associated with well-defined bottlenecks in the discovery pipeline. Finally, we discuss the critical role that policy can play to mitigate potential market failures associated with access to and provision of data as well as the provision of training necessary to more closely approach the socially optimal level of productivity enhancing innovations enabled by this technology…(More)”.
A rough guide to being a public entrepreneur in practice
Report by the RSA: “Our health and social care systems have been working to meet people’s needs for over 70 years. Yet the approach to change is often incremental rather than radical or transformational. This means we sometimes ‘muddle through’ with the resources we have. Given the pace of change and long-term trends and challenges on the horizon this approach is no longer sufficient.
There are, however, people, processes and practices that are demonstrating a new kind of public entrepreneurship – responding fast, taking risks and experimenting to meet challenges head on. We’ve seen incredible responses to the pandemic and whilst it’s hit society hard, it’s also accelerated changes that might have otherwise taken decades to implement.
We need to harness the collective potential of creative people more systematically, working across the system to build resilience and support transformational change efforts. Staff commitment and energy is fundamental to spotting the challenges and the opportunities for change, taking action to not only meet the needs of today, but those of tomorrow. Together NHS Lothian and the RSA designed and ran a programme in an attempt to do just that.
This rough guide presents a summary of the insights gained by 12 members of NHS Lothian’s staff who came together to explore how they can support each other to challenge the status quo and find new ways of addressing challenges they face in their work…(More)”.
Overcoming Data Graveyards in Official Statistics: Catalyzing Uptake and Use
Report by Trends and Open Data Watch: “The world is awash in information. Every day, an estimated 1.1 billion gigabytes of data are produced, and this number will increase as mobile connections continue to expand and new ways of gathering data are incorporated by the private and public sectors to improve their products and services. The volume of statistics published by government agencies such as National Statistics Offices (NSOs) has also grown. New technologies offer new ways of gathering, storing, and disseminating data and producers of official statistics are releasing more information in more detailed ways through data portals and other mechanisms than ever before.
Once produced, data may live forever, but far too often, the data produced are not what data users are looking for or users lack the awareness or technical skill to use the data. As a result, data fall into data graveyards (Custer, 2017) where they go unutilized and prevent evidence-informed policies from being made. This is dangerous particularly at a time when intersecting crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and energy and food insecurity put a premium on decision-making that incorporates the best data. In addition, public sector producers of data, who do so using public funds, need evidence of the use of their data to justify investments in data.
Data use remains a complex topic, with many policymakers and managers in national statistical system agencies unclear about this issue and how to improve their practices to ensure uptake and use. With conceptual clarity and best practices in hand, these actors can improve their practices and better address the needs of data users, while recognizing that a ‘one size fits all’ approach will not be suitable for countries at various stages of statistical capacity….(More)”
Democratic innovation and digital participation
Nesta Report: “Overcoming barriers in democratic innovations to harness the collective intelligence of citizens for a 21st-century democracy.
This report sets out the need for democratic innovations and digital participation tools to move beyond one-off pilots toward more embedded and inclusive systems of decision-making.
This is the first comprehensive analysis of the barriers experienced by democratic innovators around the world. Alongside the barriers, we have captured the enablers that can help advance these innovations and tools to their full potential.
The report is published alongside the advancing democratic innovation toolkit which supports institutions, practitioners and technologists to diagnose the barriers that they face and identify the enablers they can use to address them.
This report is based on insights from global examples of digital democratic innovation, and in particular, three pilots from the COLDIGIT project: a citizens’ assembly in Trondheim, Norway; participatory budgeting in Gothenburg, Sweden; and participatory budgeting in Helsinki, Finland.
The work is a collaboration between Nesta, Digidem Lab, University of Gothenburg, University of Helsinki and SINTEF funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)….(More)”.
Measuring Small Business Dynamics and Employment with Private-Sector Real-Time Data
Paper by André Kurmann, Étienne Lalé and Lien Ta: “The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an explosion of research using private-sector datasets to measure business dynamics and employment in real-time. Yet questions remain about the representativeness of these datasets and how to distinguish business openings and closings from sample churn – i.e., sample entry of already operating businesses and sample exits of businesses that continue operating. This paper proposes new methods to address these issues and applies them to the case of Homebase, a real-time dataset of mostly small service-sector sector businesses that has been used extensively in the literature to study the effects of the pandemic. We match the Homebase establishment records with information on business activity from Safegraph, Google, and Facebook to assess the representativeness of the data and to estimate the probability of business closings and openings among sample exits and entries. We then exploit the high frequency / geographic detail of the data to study whether small service-sector businesses have been hit harder by the pandemic than larger firms, and the extent to which the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) helped small businesses keep their workforce employed. We find that our real-time estimates of small business dynamics and employment during the pandemic are remarkably representative and closely fit population counterparts from administrative data that have recently become available. Distinguishing business closings and openings from sample churn is critical for these results. We also find that while employment by small businesses contracted more severely in the beginning of the pandemic than employment of larger businesses, it also recovered more strongly thereafter. In turn, our estimates suggests that the rapid rollout of PPP loans significantly mitigated the negative employment effects of the pandemic. Business closings and openings are a key driver for both results, thus underlining the importance of properly correcting for sample churn…(More)”.
A User’s Guide to the Periodic Table of Open Data
Guide by Stefaan Verhulst and Andrew Zahuranec: “Leveraging our research on the variables that determine Open Data’s Impact, The Open Data Policy Lab is pleased to announce the publication of a new report designed to assist organizations in implementing the elements of a successful data collaborative: A User’s Guide to The Periodic Table of Open Data.
The User’s Guide is a fillable document designed to empower data stewards and others seeking to improve data access. It can be used as a checklist and tool to weigh different elements based on their context and priorities. By completing the forms (offline/online), you will be able to take a more comprehensive and strategic view of what resources and interventions may be required.
Download and fill out the User’s Guide to operationalize the elements in your data initiative
In conjunction with the release of our User’s Guide, the Open Data Policy Lab is pleased to present a completely reworked version of our Periodic Table of Open Data Elements, first launched alongside in 2016. We sought to categorize the elements that matter in open data initiatives into five categories: problem and demand definition, capacity and culture, governance and standards, personnel and partnerships, and risk mitigation. More information on each can be found in the attached report or in the interactive table below.
Read more about the Periodic Table of Open Data Elements and how you can use it to support your work…(More)”.