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.”
How Government Can Unlock Economic Benefits from Open Data
Zillow is a prime example of how open data creates economic value. The Seattle-based company has grown rapidly since its launch in 2006, generating more than $78 million in revenue in its last financial quarter and employing more than 500 workers. But real estate firms aren’t the only businesses benefiting from data collected and published by government.
GovLab, a research laboratory run by New York University, publishes the Open Data 500, a list of companies that benefit from open data produced by the federal government. The list contains more than 15 categories of businesses, ranging from health care and education to energy, finance, legal and the environment. And the data flows from all the major agencies, including NASA, Defense, Transportation, Homeland Security and Labor….
Zillow’s road to success underscores the challenges that lie ahead if local government is going to grab its share of open data’s economic bonanza. One of the company’s biggest hurdles was to create a system that could integrate government data from thousands of databases in county government. “There’s no standard format, which is very frustrating,” Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, told Computerworld.com. “It’s up to us to figure out 3,000 different ways to ingest data and make sense of it…. More at GovTech”
Transparency is not just television
Beth Noveck at the SunLight Foundation Blog: “In 2009, Larry Lessig published a headline-grabbing piece in the New Republic entitled “Against Transparency,” arguing that the “naked transparency movement” might inspire disgust in, rather than reform of, our political system. In their recent Brookings Institution paper, “Why Critics of Transparency Are Wrong,” Gary Bass, Danielle Brian and Norm Eisen rightly critique the latest generation of naysayers who contend that transparency has contributed to our political ills, and that efforts to reduce transparency will cause government to work better. The problem with suggesting that transparency is the root of extreme partisan gridlock, the absence of dealmaking, and the lowest rates of trust by the American people in Congress, however, is that there is no real transparency in that institution.
If there is any shortcoming in Bass, Brian and Eisen’s robust defense of transparency, it is that they should be even tougher in rapping these other writers across the knuckles, including for some critics’ unsophisticated equation of television cameras in the chamber with transparency.
Even in our media-savvy age, televising congressional deliberations (if you can call them that) – what we might call political transparency – surely contributes too little to policy transparency. It lays bare the spectacle but does not provide access to the kinds of information disclosures about the workings of Congress in a way that also affords people an opportunity to participate in changing those workings and that Bass, Brian and Eisen also support. Done right, transparency provides an empirical foundation for developing solutions together. If the Brits can have a 21st Century parliament initiative, we are long overdue for a 21st century Congress….”
Open Government and Democracy
New paper by Karin Hansson, Kheira Belkacem, and Love Ekenberg at the Social Sciences Computer Review: “The concept of open government, having been promoted widely in the past 5 years, has promised a broader notion than e-government, as supposed to fundamentally transform governments to become more open and participative and collaborative. Unfortunately, this has not significantly enhanced a set of fundamental problems regarding e-government. One of the problems is that the underlying democratic ideology is rarely clearly expressed. In this paper, we have therefore constructed a framework for the analysis of open government from a democratic perspective, to explore the research foundation of open government and the types of research missing. We have looked closely at the notion of democracy in peer-reviewed journals on open government from 2009 to 2013, focusing on discussions of some fundamental issues regarding democracy and the type of solutions suggested. We have found that despite seemingly good intentions and an extensive rhetoric, there is still an apparent lack of adequate tools in which public deliberation and representation are addressed in any meaningful sense. There are two main important observations herein: (i) the rhetoric in the dominant discourse supports the concept of open government formulated by the Obama administration as transparency, participation, and collaboration, but in practice, the focus is predominantly on transparency and information exchange, while ignoring fundamental democratic issues regarding participation and collaboration, and (ii) the concept of the public is inadequately considered as a homogenous entity rather than a diversified group with different interests, preferences, and abilities.”