Paper by Anne Lundgren in “Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy”: “In the networked information and knowledge-based economy and society, the notions of ‘open’ and ‘openness’ are used in a variety of contexts; open source, open access, open economy, open government, open innovation – just to name a few. This paper aims at discussing openness and developing a taxonomy that may be used to analyse the concept of openness. Are there different qualities of openness? How are these qualities interrelated? What analytical tools may be used to understand openness? In this paper four qualities of openness recurrent in literature and debate are explored: accessibility, transparency, participation and sharing. To further analyse openness new institutional theory as interpreted by Williamson (2000) is used, encompassing four different institutional levels; cultural embeddedness, institutional environment, governance structure and resource allocations. At what institutional levels is openness supported and/or constrained? Accessibility as a quality of openness seems to have a particularly strong relation to the other qualities of openness, whereas the notions of sharing and collaborative economics seem to be the most complex and contested quality of openness in the knowledge-based economy. This research contributes to academia, policy and governance, as handling of challenges with regard to openness vs. closure in different contexts, territorial, institutional and/or organizational, demand not only a better understanding of the concept, but also tools for analysis….(More)”
Reframing Data Transparency
“Recently, the Centre for Information Policy Leadership (“CIPL”) at Hunton & Williams LLP, a privacy and information policy think tank based in Brussels, London and Washington, D.C., and Telefónica, one of the largest telecommunications company in the world, issued a joint white paper on Reframing Data Transparency (the “white paper”). The white paper was the outcome of a June 2016 roundtable held by the two organizations in London, in which senior business leaders, Data Privacy Officers, lawyers and academics discussed the importance of user-centric transparency to the data driven economy….The issues explored during the roundtable and in the white paper include the following:
- The transparency deficit in the digital age. There is a growing gap between traditional, legal privacy notices and user-centric transparency that is capable of delivering understandable and actionable information concerning an organization’s data use policies and practices, including why it processes data, what the benefits are to individuals and society, how it protects the data and how users can manage and control the use of their data.
- The impact of the transparency deficit. The transparency deficit undermines customer trust and customers’ ability to participate more effectively in the digital economy.
- Challenges of delivering user-centric transparency. In a connected world where there may be no direct relationship between companies and their end users, both transparency and consent as a basis for processing are particularly challenging.
- Transparency as a multistakeholder challenge. Transparency is not solely a legal issue, but a multistakeholder challenge, which requires engagement of regulators, companies, individuals, behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists.
- The role of data protection authorities (“DPAs”). DPAs play a key role in promoting and incentivizing effective data transparency approaches and tools.
- The role of companies. Data transparency is a critical business issue because transparency drives digital trust as well as business opportunities. Organizations must innovate on how to deliver user-centric transparency. Data driven companies must research and develop new approaches to transparency that explain the value exchange between customers and companies and the companies’ data practices, and create tools that enable their customers to exercise effective engagement and control.
- The importance of empowering individuals. It is crucial to support and enhance individuals’ digital literacy, which includes an understanding of the uses of personal data and the benefits of data processing, as well as knowledge of relevant privacy rights and the data management tools that are available to them. Government bodies, regulators and industry should be involved in educating the public regarding digital literacy. Such education should take place in schools and universities, and through consumer education campaigns. Transparency is the foundation and sine qua non of individual empowerment.
- The role of behavioral economists, social scientists, psychologists and user experience specialists. Experts from these disciplines will be crucial in developing user-centric transparency and controls….(More)”.
Innovando para una mejor gestión: La contribución de los laboratorios de innovación pública
Paper by Acevedo, Sebastián; and Dassen, Nicolás for IDB: “Los cambios tecnológicos, económicos y sociales de los últimos años exigen gobiernos capaces de adaptarse a nuevos desafíos y a las crecientes demandas de la ciudadanía. En muchos países y en distintos niveles de gobierno, esto ha llevado a la creación de laboratorios de innovación, unidades cuyo objetivo es promover de diversos modos la innovación en el sector público. En este trabajo se analizan los roles y desafíos de los laboratorios latinoamericanos, contrastándolos con buenas prácticas y características que la literatura ha asociado a mayores niveles de innovación en el sector público y en otras organizaciones.
A partir de una encuesta a directores de laboratorios y dos estudios de casos, se describe el panorama de los laboratorios latinoamericanos y se discuten sus desafíos para: i) trabajar sobre temas centrales de la gestión, ii) conseguir la adopción de innovaciones y el escalamiento de las mismas y iii) asegurar la sostenibilidad de estas.
En particular, hay cuatro factores clave para su desempeño en esos aspectos: dos factores político-institucionales –el apoyo del liderazgo y las redes de política– y dos factores metodológicos –la adecuación técnica de las innovaciones y la construcción de un significado compartido sobre ellas–.
Además, se identifican dos diferencias principales entre la mayoría de los laboratorios relevados aquí y la experiencia de otras regiones, descripta por la literatura existente: un foco más intenso en temas de gobierno abierto y menos actividades para el testeo controlado de innovaciones, como experimentos aleatorios y evaluaciones de impacto. Finalmente, se presentan conclusiones y recomendaciones para la consolidación de los laboratorios como canales efectivos para gestionar innovaciones, manejando los riesgos inherentes, y modernizar la gestión… (More Español)
The well-informed city: A decentralized, bottom-up model for a smart city service using information and self-organization
Smart Cities, a concept widely growing in popularity, describes cities that use digital technology, data analysis and connectivity to create value. The basic abstraction of a Smart City service includes collecting data about an urban issue, transmitting it to a central decision making process and “improving” the city with the insights generated. This model has spurred much critique, claiming Smart Cities are undemocratic, discriminatory and cannot significantly improve citizen’s quality of life. But what if the citizens were active in the process? It was Jane Jacobs who said “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” In this paper we lay a conceptual groundwork to envision “The Well-Informed City” — a decentralized, self-organizing Smart City service, where the value is created by everybody. The agents, who are the citizens of the city, are the ones who use the data to create value. We base the model on the cities’ feature of Self-Organization as described in the domain of Complexity Theory of Cities. We demonstrate its theoretical possibility, describe a short case study and finish with suggestions for future empirical research. This work is highly significant due to the ubiquitous nature of contemporary mobile based information services and growing open data sets….(More)”
Data Revolutionaries: Routine Administrative Data Can Be Sexy Too
Sebastian Bauhoff at Center for Global Development: “Routine operational data on government programs lack sexiness, and are generally not trendy withData Revolutionaries. But unlike censuses and household surveys, routine administrative data are readily available at low cost, cover key populations and service providers, and are generally at the right level of disaggregation for decision-making on payment and service delivery. Despite their potential utility, these data remain an under-appreciated asset for generating evidence and informing policy—a particularly egregious omission given that developing countries can leapfrog old, inefficient approaches for more modern methods to collect and manage data. Verifying receipt of service via biometric ID and beneficiary fingerprint at the point of service? India’s already doing it.
To better make the case for routine data, two questions need to be answered—what exactly can be learned from these data and how difficult are they to use?
In a paper just published in Health Affairs with collaborators from the World Bank and the Government of India, we probed these questions using claims data from India’s National Health Insurance Program, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). Using the US Medicare program as a comparison, we wondered whether reimbursement claims data that RSBY receives from participating hospitals could be used to study the quality of care provided. The main goal was to see how far we could push on an example dataset of hospital claims from Puri, a district in Orissa state.
Here’s what we learned…(More)”
Evaluating World Bank Support to Budget Analysis and Transparency
Report by Linnea Mills and Clay G. Wescott: “BOOST is a new resource launched in 2010 to facilitate improved quality, classification, and access to budget data and promote effective use for improved government decision making, transparency and accountability. Using the Government’s own data from public expenditure accounts held in the Government’s Financial Management Information System, and benefiting from a consistent methodology, the BOOST data platform makes highly granular fiscal data accessible and ready-for-use. National authorities can significantly enhance fiscal transparency by publishing summary data and analysis or by providing open access to the underlying dataset. This paper addresses four research questions: Did BOOST help improve the quality of expenditure analysis available to government decision makers? Did it help to develop capacity in central finance and selected spending agencies to sustain expenditure analysis? Did it help to improve public access to expenditure analysis anddata? Did it help to increase awareness of the opportunities for BOOST and expenditure analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa as well as countries outside this region where BOOST has been used (Georgia, Haiti and Tunisia).
Evidence has been drawn from various sources. Survey questionnaires were sent to all World Bank task team leaders for Gates Trust Fund supported countries. Completed questionnaires were received from 18 predominantly African countries (Annex 4). These 18 countries constitute the majority but not all of the countries implementing BOOST with financial support from the Trust Fund. Information has also been gathered through a BOOST stakeholder questionnaire targeting government officials, civil society representatives and representatives from parliaments at country level, field visits to Kenya, Mozambique and Uganda, interviews with stakeholders at the Bank and at country level, participation at regional conferences on BOOST in South Africa and Senegal, and document review. Interviews covered participants from some countries that did not complete questionnaires, such as Haiti.
The research will help to inform the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the World Bank, the administrator of the trust fund on the achievements of the program, and the value of continuing support. It will inform client country Governments, and non-Government actors interested in improved dissemination and analysis of quality public financial data. The research should also be useful for vendors of similar products like OpenGov; and to international scholars and experts working to better understand public expenditure management in developing countries….(More)”
The challenges and limits of big data algorithms in technocratic governance
Paper by Marijn Janssen and George Kuk in Government Information Quarterly: “Big data is driving the use of algorithm in governing mundane but mission-critical tasks. Algorithms seldom operate on their own and their (dis)utilities are dependent on the everyday aspects of data capture, processing and utilization. However, as algorithms become increasingly autonomous and invisible, they become harder for the public to detect and scrutinize their impartiality status. Algorithms can systematically introduce inadvertent bias, reinforce historical discrimination, favor a political orientation or reinforce undesired practices. Yet it is difficult to hold algorithms accountable as they continuously evolve with technologies, systems, data and people, the ebb and flow of policy priorities, and the clashes between new and old institutional logics. Greater openness and transparency do not necessarily improve understanding. In this editorial we argue that through unraveling the imperceptibility, materiality and governmentality of how algorithms work, we can better tackle the inherent challenges in the curatorial practice of data and algorithm. Fruitful avenues for further research on using algorithm to harness the merits and utilities of a computational form of technocratic governance are presented….(More)”
Living labs: Implementing open innovation in the public sector
Paper by Mila Gascó in Government Information Quarterly: “Public sector innovation is an important issue in the agenda of policymakers and academics but there is a need for a change of perspective, one that promotes a more open model of innovating, which takes advantage of the possibilities offered by collaboration between citizens, entrepreneurs and civil society as well as of new emerging technologies. Living labs are environments that can support public open innovation processes.
This article makes a practical contribution to understand the role of living labs as intermediaries of public open innovation. The analysis focuses on the dynamics of these innovation intermediaries, their outcomes, and their main challenges. In particular, it adopts a qualitative approach (fourteen semi-structured interviews and one focus group were conducted) in order to analyze two living labs: Citilab in the city of Cornellà and the network of fab athenaeums (public fab labs) in the city of Barcelona, both in Spain. After a thorough analysis of the attributes of these living labs, the article concludes that 1) living labs provide the opportunity for public agencies to meet with private sector organizations and thus function as innovation intermediaries, 2) implementing an open innovation perspective is considered more important than obtaining specific innovation results, and 3) scalability and sustainability are the main problems living labs encounter as open innovation intermediaries….(More)”
Citizen engagement in rulemaking — evidence on regulatory practices in 185 countries
Paper by Johns,Melissa Marie and Saltane,Valentina for the World Bank: “… presents a new database of indicators measuring the extent to which rulemaking processes are transparent and participatory across 185 countries. The data look at how citizen engagement happens in practice, including when and how governments open the policy-making process to public input. The data also capture the use of ex ante assessments to determine the possible cost of compliance with a proposed new regulation, the likely administrative burden of enforcing the regulation, and its potential environmental and social impacts. The data show that citizens have more opportunities to participate directly in the rulemaking process in developed economies than in developing ones. Differences are also apparent among regions: rulemaking processes are significantly less transparent and inclusive in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia on average than in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development high-income countries, Europe and Central Asia, and East Asia and the Pacific. In addition, ex ante impact assessments are much more common among higher-income economies than among lower-income ones. And greater citizen engagement in rulemaking is associated with higher-quality regulation, stronger democratic regimes, and less corrupt institutions….(More)”
Playful Cities: Crowdsourcing Urban Happiness with Web Games
Daniele Quercia in Built Environment: “It is well known that the layout and configuration of urban space plugs directly into our sense of community wellbeing. The twentieth-century city planner Kevin Lynch showed that a city’s dwellers create their own personal ‘mental maps’ of the city based on features such as the routes they use and the areas they visit. Maps that are easy to remember and navigate bring comfort and ultimately contribute to people’s wellbeing. Unfortunately, traditional social science experiments (including those used to capture mental maps) take time, are costly, and cannot be conducted at city scale. This paper describes how, starting in mid-2012, a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines set about tackling these issues. They were able to translate a few traditional experiments into 1-minute ‘web games with a purpose’. This article describes those games, the main insights they offer, their theoretical implications for urban planning, and their practical implications for improvements in navigation technologies….(More)”