Our digital journey: moving to electronic questionnaires

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Bradbury at the Office for National Statistics (UK): “Earlier this year we shared news about the Retail Sales Inquiry (RSI) – the monthly national survey of shops and shopping –  moving to digital data collection. ONS is transforming the way it collects data, improving the speed and quality of the information while reducing the burden on respondents. The past six months has seen a significant expansion of our digital survey availability. In January 5,000 retailers were invited to sign-up for an account giving them the option to send us their data  for one of our business surveys digitally.

Electronic questionnaires

The take-up of the electronic questionnaire (eQ) was incredible with over 80% of respondents choosing to supply their information for the RSI online. Overt the last six months, we have continued to see the appetite for online completion grow. Each month, an average of 300 new businesses opt to return their Retail Sales data digitally with many eager to move to digital methods for the other surveys they are required to complete….

Moving data collection from the phone and paper to online has been a huge success delivering improved quality, an ‘easy  to access’ online experience and when thinking about the impact this change could  have had on our core function as a statistical body, I am delighted to share that we have not witnessed any statistical issues and all of outputs have been compiled and produced as normal.

Put simply, the easier it is for someone to complete our surveys, the more likely they are to take the time to provide more detailed accurate data. It is worth noting that once a business has an account with ONS they often send back data to us quicker. The earlier and more detailed responses allow us more time to quality assure (QA) the information and reduce the need to re-contact the businesses.

Our digital journey

The digital world is a fast paced and an ever changing environment. We have found it challenging to match this pace in both our team’s skill base and our digital service. We are in the process of up-skilling our teams and updating our data collection service and infrastructure. This will enable us to improve our data collection service and move even more surveys online….(More)”

Crowd Research: Open and Scalable University Laboratories

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rajan Vaish et al: “Research experiences today are limited to a privileged few at select universities. Providing open access to research experiences would enable global upward mobility and increased diversity in the scientific workforce. How can we coordinate a crowd of diverse volunteers on open-ended research? How could a PI have enough visibility into each person’s contributions to recommend them for further study? We present Crowd Research, a crowdsourcing technique that coordinates open-ended research through an iterative cycle of open contribution, synchronous collaboration, and peer assessment. To aid upward mobility and recognize contributions in publications, we introduce a decentralized credit system: participants allocate credits to each other, which a graph centrality algorithm translates into a collectively-created author order. Over 1,500 people from 62 countries have participated, 74% from institutions with low access to research. Over two years and three projects, this crowd has produced articles at top-tier Computer Science venues, and participants have gone on to leading graduate programs….(More)”.

The Implementation of Open Data in Indonesia

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Dani Gunawan and Amalia Amalia: “Nowadays, public demands easy access to nonconfidential government data, such as public digital information on health, industry, and culture that can be accessed on the Internet. This will lead departments within government to be efficient and more transparent. As the results, rapid development of applications will solve citizens’ problems in many sectors. One Data Initiatives is the prove that the Government of Indonesia supports data transparency. This research investigates the implementation of open data in Indonesia based on Tim BernersLee five-star rating and open stage model by Kalampokis. The result shows that mostly data in Indonesia is freely available in the Internet, but most of them are not machine-readable and do not support non-proprietary format. The drawback of Indonesia’s open data is lack of ability to link the existing data with other data sources. Therefore, Indonesia is still making initial steps with data inventories and beginning to publish key datasets of public interest…(More)”

Nudges in a post-truth world

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Neil Levy at the Journal of Medical Ethics: “Nudges—policy proposals informed by work in behavioural economics and psychology that are designed to lead to better decision-making or better behaviour—are controversial. Critics allege that they bypass our deliberative capacities, thereby undermining autonomy and responsible agency. In this paper, I identify a kind of nudge I call a nudge to reason, which make us more responsive to genuine evidence. I argue that at least some nudges to reason do not bypass our deliberative capacities. Instead, use of these nudges should be seen as appeals to mechanisms partially constitutive of these capacities, and therefore as benign (so far as autonomy and responsible agency are concerned). I sketch some concrete proposals for nudges to reason which are especially important given the apparent widespread resistance to evidence seen in recent political events….(More)”.

Contests as innovation policy instruments: Lessons from the US federal agencies’ experience

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 

Isabelle Liotard and Valérie Revest in Technological Forecasting and Social Change: “An increase of the innovation contests and their associated prizes have been observed since the 90s especially in the US through the sponsorship of the American Federal Agencies. The purpose of this article is to shed light on some of the direct and indirect effects of US federal agency contests not only on economic dynamics but also on social dynamics. Based on recent case studies, this paper describes the various positive impacts that federal agency contests may have: i) contests may display a strong incentive effect ex-ante and during the contest; ii) they may produce favourable spillovers after the contests, at innovation and economic levels in specified economic/industry sectors and iii) they may also play a beneficial social role, contributing to citizens’ education and awareness. Nevertheless, as a contest remains a sophisticated device, public decision makers must comply with certain requirements if they wish to benefit from this particular policy tool in order to spur innovation….(More)”

 

The Cost(s) of Open Geospatial Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Johnson PA, Sieber RE, Scassa T, Stephens M, Robinson PJ. in Transactions in GIS: “The provision of open data by governments at all levels has rapidly increased over recent years. Given that one of the dominant motivations for the provision of open data is to generate ‘value’, both economic and civic, there are valid concerns over the costs incurred in this pursuit. Typically, costs of open data are framed as costs that are internal to the data providing government. Building on the strong history of GIScience research on data provision via spatial data infrastructures, this paper considers both the direct and indirect costs of open data provision, framing four main areas of indirect costs; citizen participation challenges, uneven provision across geography and user types, subsidy of private sector activities, and the creation of inroads for corporate influence on government. These areas of indirect cost lead to the development of critical questions, including constituency, purpose, enablement, protection, and priorities. These questions are proposed as a guide to governments that provide open data in addressing the indirect costs of open data….(More)”.

Innovation@DFID: Crowdsourcing New Ideas at the UK’s Department for International Development

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anke Schwittay and Paul Braund: “Over the last decade, traditional development institutions have joined market-based actors in embracing inclusive innovation to ensure the sector’s relevance and impacts. In 2014, the UK’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) Innovation Hub launched Amplify as its own flagship initiative. The programme, which is managed by IDEO, a Silicon Valley-based design consultancy, aims to crowdsource new ideas to various development challenges from a broad and diverse group of actors, including poor people themselves. By examining the direction, diversity and distribution of Amplify’s work, we argue that while development innovation can generate more inclusive practices, its transformative potential is constrained by broader developmental logics and policy regimes….(More)”

America is not a true democracy. But it could be with the help of technology

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Softness at Quartz: “Many Americans aren’t aware they don’t live in a direct democracy. But with a little digital assistance, they could be….Once completely cut off from the global community, Estonia is now considered a world leader for its efforts to integrate technology with government administration. While standing in line for coffee, you could file your tax return, confirm sensitive personal medical information, and register a new company in just a few swipes, all on Estonia’s free wifi.

What makes this possible without the risk of fraud? Digital trust. Using a technology called blockchain, which verifies online communications and transactions at every step (and essentially eliminates the possibility of online fraud), Estonian leadership has moved the majority of citizenship processes online. Startups have now created new channels for democratic participation, like Rahvaalgatus, an online crowdsourcing platform that allows users to discuss and digitally vote on policy proposals submitted to the Estonian parliament.

Brazil has also utilized this trust quite valiantly. The country’s constitution, passed in 1988, legislated that signatures from 1% of a population could force the Brazilian leadership to recognize any signed document as an official draft bill and vote. Until recently, the notion of getting sufficient signatures on paper would have been laughable: that’s just over 2 million physical signatures. However, votes can now be cast online, which makes gathering digital signatures all the more easy. As a result, Brazilians now have more control over the legislature being brought before parliament.

 Blockchain technology creates an immutable record of signatures tied to the identities of voters. Again, blockchain technology is key here, as it creates an immutable record of signatures tied to the identities of voters. The government knows which voters are legitimate citizens, and citizens can be sure their votes remain accurate. When Brazilians are able to participate in this manner, their democracy shifts towards the sort of “direct” democracy that, until now, seemed logistically impossible in modern society.

Australian citizens have engaged in a slightly different experiment, dubbed “Government 2.0.” In March 2016, technology experts convened a new political party called Flux, which they describe as “democracy for the information age.” The party platform argues that bureaucracy stymies key government functions, which cannot process the requisite information required to govern.

If elected to government, members of Flux would vote on bills scheduled to appear before parliament based on the digital ballots of the supporters who voted them in. Voters could choose to participate in casting their vote for that bill themselves, or transfer their votes to trusted experts. Flux representatives in parliament would then cast their votes 100% based on the results of these member participants. (They are yet to win any seats in government, however.)

These solutions show us that bureaucratic boundaries no longer have to limit our access to a true democracy. The technology is here to make direct democracy the reality that the Greeks once imagined.

More so, increasing democratic participation will have positive ripple effects beyond participation in a direct democracy: Informed voting is the gateway to more active civic engagement and a more informed electorate, all of which raises the level of debate in a political environment desperately in need of participation….(More)”

Troops, Trolls and Troublemakers: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Samantha Bradshaw and Philip N. Howard: “Cyber troops are government, military or political party teams committed to manipulating public opinion over social media. In this working paper, we report on specific organizations created, often with public money, to help define and manage what is in the best interest of the public. We compare such organizations across 28 countries, and inventory them according to the kinds of messages, valences and communication strategies used. We catalogue their organizationalforms and evaluate their capacities in terms of budgets and staffing. This working paper summarizes the findings of the first comprehensive inventory of the major organizations behind social media manipulation. We find that cyber troops are a pervasive and global phenomenon. Many different countries employ significant numbers of people and resources to manage and manipulate public opinion online, sometimes targeting domestic audiences and sometimes targeting foreign publics.

  •  The earliest reports of organized social media manipulation emerged in 2010, and by 2017 there are details on such organizations in 28 countries.
  • Looking across the 28 countries, every authoritarian regime has social media campaigns targeting their own populations, while only a few of them target foreign publics. In contrast, almost every democracy in this sample has organized social media campaigns that target foreign publics, while political‐party‐supported campaigns target domestic voters. 
  • Authoritarian regimes are not the only or even the best at organized social media manipulation. The earliest reports of government involvement in nudging public opinion involve democracies, and new innovations in political communication technologies often come from political parties and arise during high‐profile elections.
  • Over time, the primary mode for organizing cyber troops has gone from involving military units that experiment with manipulating public opinion over social media networks to strategic communication firms that take contracts from governments for social media campaigns….(More)”

A New Framework for Free Movement of Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Lisbon Council: “How can we make Europe a leader in the global data economy? How can we make sure that the important advances in data analytics – the diseases that will be cured, the traffic congestions alleviated, the social problems correctly analysed – are there for citizens to enjoy and companies and institutions to develop? In this ground-breaking study, the Lisbon Council explores A New Framework for Free Movement of Data in the Digital Age: Making Europe a Data Economy. The paper analyses an array of state-of-the-art proposals for facilitating data flows and proposes a three-point roadmap for improving the “free movement of data” in Europe: adopt “once-only” at the European level; strengthen European-level cyber security and crack down on unjustified data localisation; and develop more open and transparent policies for data sharing around a new concept of “co-ownership.”…(More)”.