Paper by Dr. Bastiaan Heemsbergen: “Innovation is a key driver in organizational sustainability, and yes, openness and transparency are a recipe for innovation. But, according to Tapscott and Williams, “when it comes to innovation, competitive advantage and organizational success, ‘openness’ is rarely the first word one would use to describe companies and other societal organizations like government agencies or medical institutions. For many, words like ‘insular,’ ‘bureaucratic,’ ‘hierarchical,’ ‘secretive’ and ‘closed’ come to mind instead.”1 And yet a few months ago, The Tesla Model S just became the world’s first open-source car. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motor Vehicles, shared all the patents on Tesla’s electric car technology, allowing anyone — including competitors — to use them without fear of litigation. Elon wrote in his post “Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.”2
In the public sector, terms such as open government, citizen sourcing, and wiki government are also akin to the notion of open innovation and transparency. As Hilgers and Ihl report, “a good example of this approach is the success of the Future Melbourne program, a Wiki and blog-based approach to shaping the future urban landscape of Australia’s second largest city. The program allowed citizens to directly edit and comment on the plans for the future development of the city. It attracted more than 30,000 individuals, who submitted hundreds of comments and suggestions (futuremelbourne.com.au). Basically, problems concerning design and creativity, future strategy and local culture, and even questions of management and service innovation can be broadcasted on such web-platforms.”3 The authors suggest that there are three dimensions to applying the concept of open innovation to the public sector: citizen ideation and innovation (tapping knowledge and creativity), collaborative administration (user generated new tasks and processes), and collaborative democracy (improve public participation in the policy process)….(More)”.
Computer-based personality judgments are more accurate than those made by humans
Paper by Wu Youyou, Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell at PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences): “Judging others’ personalities is an essential skill in successful social living, as personality is a key driver behind people’s interactions, behaviors, and emotions. Although accurate personality judgments stem from social-cognitive skills, developments in machine learning show that computer models can also make valid judgments. This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49); (ii) computer models show higher interjudge agreement; and (iii) computer personality judgments have higher external validity when predicting life outcomes such as substance use, political attitudes, and physical health; for some outcomes, they even outperform the self-rated personality scores. Computers outpacing humans in personality judgment presents significant opportunities and challenges in the areas of psychological assessment, marketing, and privacy…(More)”.
Motivations for sustained participation in crowdsourcing: The role of talk in a citizen science case study
Paper by CB. Jackson, C. Østerlund, G. Mugar, KDV. Hassman for the Proceedings of the Forty-eighth Hawai’i International Conference on System Science (HICSS-48): “The paper explores the motivations of volunteers in a large crowdsourcing project and contributes to our understanding of the motivational factors that lead to deeper engagement beyond initial participation. Drawing on the theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and the literature on motivation in crowdsourcing, we analyze interview and trace data from a large citizen science project. The analyses identify ways in which the technical features of the projects may serve as motivational factors leading participants towards sustained participation. The results suggest volunteers first engage in activities to support knowledge acquisition and later share knowledge with other volunteers and finally increase participation in Talk through a punctuated process of role discovery…(More)”
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Exploring the Factors Influencing the Adoption of Open Government Data by Private Organisations
Article by Maaike Kaasenbrood et al in the International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA): “Governments are increasingly opening their datasets, allowing use. Drawing on a multi-method approach, this paper develops a framework for identifying factors influencing the adoption of Open Government Data (OGD) by private organisations. Subsequently the framework was used to analyse five cases. The findings reveal that for private organizations to use OGD, the content and source of the data needs to be clear, a usable open data license must be present and continuity of data updates needs to be ensured. For none of the investigated private organisations OGD was key to their existence. Organisations use OGD in addition to, or as an enhancement of their core activities. As the official OGD-channels are bypassed trustworthy relationships between the data user and data provider were found to play an important role in finding and using OGD. The findings of this study can help government agencies in developing OGD-policies and stimulating OGD-use….(More).”
Does Real-Time Feedback On Electricity Use Really Change Our Behavior?
Jessica Leber at Co.Exist: “Is information power? Or more to the point, does information about our energy usage help us consume less power?
Even though there are a growing number of smart devices and systems on the market designed to give feedback about energy and water usage, in hopes of nudging us to cut back, studies have shown mixed evidence as to whether they actually work in changing long-term behavior.
In September 2010, the developer of a new LEED Gold apartment building in Manhattan approached Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions with the idea of studying whether they could reduce energy use by giving occupants devices that gave them real-time feedback on their electricity demand. They chose the Modlet, a device made by ThinkEco, that monitors energy use at each outlet, appliance by appliance.
The results of the study, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, show that getting people to change their behavior is more complicated than it seems….(More).”
Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem
New paper by Stefaan G. Verhulst, Beth S. Noveck, Jillian Raines, and Antony Declercq as part of the Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper Series: “The growth and globalization of the Internet over the past 40 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Virtually all sectors, from development to healthcare to education to politics, have been transformed. Yet developments in how the Internet is governed have not kept pace with this rapid technological innovation. Figuring out how to evolve the Internet’s governance in ways that are effective and legitimate is essential to ensure its continued potential. Flexible and innovative decision-making mechanisms are needed in order to enable disparate governance actors to address and respond effectively as changes in the network occur. This paper seeks to address the need to develop an effective and legitimate Internet governance ecosystem by proposing a distributed yet coordinated framework that can accommodate a plurality of existing and emerging decision-making approaches. It draws on the lessons of open governance, adopting innovative techniques to facilitate coordination, information sharing, and evidence generation by and across increasingly diverse and global groups of Internet actors, and calls for creating practical tools to support such an effective, legitimate and evolving Internet governance ecosystem. Although no right answer or single model for how to manage all issues of relevance to the Internet is suggested within this paper, the proposed framework intends to allow for diverse experiments in distributed governance approaches to learn what works and what does not. (More)“
An Open Government Index: From Democracy to Efficiency to Innovation
New Report by Lindgren, Tony; Ekenberg, Love; Nouri, Jalal and Hansson, Karin: “Most research in research areas like E-government, E-participation and Open government assume a democratic norm. The concept of Open government, recently promoted by, e.g., The Obama administration and the European Commission is to a large extent based on a general liberal and deliberative ideology emphasizing transparency, participation and collaboration. The concept has also become of interest for states like China and Singapore. In this position paper we outline how to study the concept under different political discourses and suggest an Open government index that can be used to analyze the concept of open government under various settings. (More)”
Governments and Citizens Getting to Know Each Other? Open, Closed, and Big Data in Public Management Reform
New paper by Amanda Clarke and Helen Margetts in Policy and Internet: “Citizens and governments live increasingly digital lives, leaving trails of digital data that have the potential to support unprecedented levels of mutual government–citizen understanding, and in turn, vast improvements to public policies and services. Open data and open government initiatives promise to “open up” government operations to citizens. New forms of “big data” analysis can be used by government itself to understand citizens’ behavior and reveal the strengths and weaknesses of policy and service delivery. In practice, however, open data emerges as a reform development directed to a range of goals, including the stimulation of economic development, and not strictly transparency or public service improvement. Meanwhile, governments have been slow to capitalize on the potential of big data, while the largest data they do collect remain “closed” and under-exploited within the confines of intelligence agencies. Drawing on interviews with civil servants and researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States between 2011 and 2014, this article argues that a big data approach could offer the greatest potential as a vehicle for improving mutual government–citizen understanding, thus embodying the core tenets of Digital Era Governance, argued by some authors to be the most viable public management model for the digital age (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler, 2005, 2006; Margetts & Dunleavy, 2013).”
People around you control your mind: The latest evidence
in the Washington Post: “…That’s the power of peer pressure.In a recent working paper, Pedro Gardete looked at 65,525 transactions across 1,966 flights and more than 257,000 passengers. He parsed the data into thousands of mini-experiments such as this:
If someone beside you ordered a snack or a film, Gardete was able to see whether later you did, too. In this natural experiment, the person sitting directly in front of you was the control subject. Purchases were made on a touchscreen; that person wouldn’t have been able to see anything. If you bought something, and the person in front of you didn’t, peer pressure may have been the reason.
Because he had reservation data, Gardete could exclude people flying together, and he controlled for all kinds of other factors such as seat choice. This is purely the effect of a stranger’s choice — not just that, but a stranger whom you might be resenting because he is sitting next to you, and this is a plane.
By adding up thousands of these little experiments, Gardete, an assistant professor of marketing at Stanford, came up with an estimate. On average, people bought stuff 15 to 16 percent of the time. But if you saw someone next to you order something, your chances of buying something, too, jumped by 30 percent, or about four percentage points…
The beauty of this paper is that it looks at social influences in a controlled situation. (What’s more of a trap than an airplane seat?) These natural experiments are hard to come by.
Economists and social scientists have long wondered about the power of peer pressure, but it’s one of the trickiest research problems….(More)”.
Will Organization Design Be Affected By Big Data?
Paper by Giles Slinger and Rupert Morrison in the Journal of Organization Design: “Computing power and analytical methods allow us to create, collate, and analyze more data than ever before. When datasets are unusually large in volume, velocity, and variety, they are referred to as “big data.” Some observers have suggested that in order to cope with big data (a) organizational structures will need to change and (b) the processes used to design organizations will be different. In this article, we differentiate big data from relatively slow-moving, linked people data. We argue that big data will change organizational structures as organizations pursue the opportunities presented by big data. The processes by which organizations are designed, however, will be relatively unaffected by big data. Instead, organization design processes will be more affected by the complex links found in people data.”