Design in public and social innovation

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Geoff Mulgan (Nesta): “What’s going right and what’s going wrong? Is design a key to more efficient and effective public services, or a costly luxury, good for conferences and consultants but not for the public?
This paper looks at the elements of the design method; the strengths of current models; some of their weaknesses and the common criticisms made of them; and what might be the way forward.

Contents:

  • Strengths of the design method in social innovation and public service
  • Social design tools table
  • Weaknesses of design projects and methods
  • The challenge
  • Design in the context of innovation”

Social media in crisis events: Open networks and collaboration supporting disaster response and recovery

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper for the IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security (HST): “Large-scale crises challenge the ability of public safety and security organisations to respond efficient and effectively. Meanwhile, citizens’ adoption of mobile technology and rich social media services is dramatically changing the way crisis responses develop. Empowered by new communication media (smartphones, text messaging, internet-based applications and social media), citizens are the in situ first sensors. However, this entire social media arena is unchartered territory to most public safety and security organisations. In this paper, we analyse crisis events to draw narratives on social media relevance and describe how public safety and security organisations are increasingly aware of social media’s added value proposition in times of crisis. A set of critical success indicators to address the process of adopting social media is identified, so that social media information is rapidly transformed into actionable intelligence, thus enhancing the effectiveness of public safety and security organisations — saving time, money and lives.”

E-government research in the United States

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by JT Snead, E Wright in Government Information Quarterly: “The purpose of this exploratory study is to review scholarly publications and assess egovernment research efforts as a field of study specific to the United States e-government environment. Study results reveal that researchers who focus on the U.S. e-government environment assess specific e-government topics at the federal, state, and local levels; however, there are gaps in the research efforts by topic areas and across different levels of government, which indicate opportunities for future areas of research. Results also find that a multitude of methodology approaches are used to assess e-government. Issues, however, exist that include lack of or weak presentations of methodologies in publications, few studies include multi-method evaluation approaches for data collection and analysis efforts, and few studies take a theory-based approach to understanding the U.S. e-government environment.”

Protecting personal data in E-government: A cross-country study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Yuehua Wu in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper presents the findings of a comparative study of laws and policies employed to protect personal data processed in the context of e-government in three countries (the United States, Germany, and China) with rather different approaches. Drawing on governance theory, the paper seeks to document the mechanisms utilized and to understand the factors that shape the governance modes adopted. The cases reveal that national government regulations have not kept pace with technological change and with the current information practices of the public sector. Nonetheless, traditional government regulation remains the major governance mode for the issue under discussion. Self-regulation and code-based regulation serve supplementary roles to traditional government regulation. National context is found to impact the form and level of data protection and the choice of governance modes.”

Introduction to Linked Open Data (LOD)

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Ivan Herman, presented at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2013: “The goal of the tutorial is to introduce the audience into the basics of the technologies used for Linked Data. This includes RDF, RDFS, main elements of SPARQL, SKOS, and OWL. Some general guidelines on publishing data as Linked Data will also be provided, as well as real-life usage examples of the various technologies.”

Full Text: PDF (Description)  |  PDF (Presentation)

A World Of Wikipedia And Bitcoin: Is That The Promise Of Open Collaboration?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Science 2.0: “Open Collaboration, defined in a new paper as “any system of innovation or production that relies on goal-oriented yet loosely coordinated participants who interact to create a product (or service) of economic value, which they make available to contributors and non-contributors alike” brought the world Wikipedia, Bitcoin and, yes, even Science 2.0.
But what does that mean, really? That’s the first problem with vague terms in an open environment. It is anything people want it to be and sometimes what people want it to be is money, but hidden behind a guise of public weal.
TED’s lesser cousin TEDx is a result of open collaboration but there is no doubt it has successfully leveraged the marketing of TED to sell seats in auditoriums, just as it was designed to do. Generally, Open Collaboration now is less like its early days, where a group of like-minded people got together to create an Open Source tool, and more like corporations. Only they avoid the label, they are not quite non-profits and not quite corporations.
And because they are neither they can operate free of the cultural stigma. Despite efforts to claim that Wikipedia is a hotbed of misogyny and blocks out minorities, the online encyclopedia has endured just fine. Their defense is a simple one; they have no idea what gender or race or religion anyone is and anyone can contribute – it is a true open collaboration. Open Collaboration is goal-oriented, they lack the infrastructure to obey demands that they become about social justice, so the environments can be less touchy-feely than corporations and avoid the social authoritarianism of academia.
Many open collaborations perform well even in ‘harsh’ environments, where some minorities are underrepresented and diversity is lacking or when products by different groups rival one another. It’s a real puzzle for sociologists. The authors conclude that open collaboration is likely to expand into new domains, displacing traditional organizations, because it is so mission-oriented. Business executives and civic leaders should take heed – the future could look a lot more like the 1940s.”
See also: Sheen S. Levine, Michael J. Prietula, ‘Open Collaboration for Innovation: Principles and Performance’, Organization Science December 30, 2014 DOI:10.1287/orsc.2013.0872

The Effective Use of Crowdsourcing in E-Governance

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Paper by Jayakumar Sowmya and Hussain Shafiq Pyarali: “The rise of Web 2.0 paradigm has empowered the Internet users to share information and generate content on social networking and media sharing platforms such as wikis and blogs. The trend of harnessing the wisdom of public using Web 2.0 distributed networks through open calls is termed as ‘Crowdsourcing’. In addition to businesses, this powerful idea of using collective intelligence or the ‘wisdom of crowd’ applies to different situations, such as in governments and non-profit organizations which have started utilizing crowdsourcing as an essential problem -solving tool. In addition, the widespread and easy access to technologies such as the Internet, mobile phones and other communication devices has resulted in an exponential growth in the use of crowdsourcing for government policy advocacy, e-democracy and e-governance during the past decade. However, utilizing collective intelligence and efforts of public to find solutions to real life problems using web 2.0 tools does come with its share of associated challenges and limitations. This paper aims at identifying and examining the value-adding strategies which contribute to the success of crowdsourcing in e-governance. The qualitative case study analysis and emphatic design methodology are employed to evaluate the effectiveness of the identified strategic and functional components, by analyzing the characteristics of some of the notable cases of crowdsourcing in e-governance and the findings are tabulated and discussed. The paper concludes with the limitations and the implications for future research”.

Open data policies, their implementation and impact: A framework for comparison

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by A Zuiderwijk, M Janssen in the Government Information Quarterly: “In developing open data policies, governments aim to stimulate and guide the publication of government data and to gain advantages from its use. Currently there is a multiplicity of open data policies at various levels of government, whereas very little systematic and structured research has been done on the issues that are covered by open data policies, their intent and actual impact. Furthermore, no suitable framework for comparing open data policies is available, as open data is a recent phenomenon and is thus in an early stage of development. In order to help bring about a better understanding of the common and differentiating elements in the policies and to identify the factors affecting the variation in policies, this paper develops a framework for comparing open data policies. The framework includes the factors of environment and context, policy content, performance indicators and public values. Using this framework, seven Dutch governmental policies at different government levels are compared. The comparison shows both similarities and differences among open data policies, providing opportunities to learn from each other’s policies. The findings suggest that current policies are rather inward looking, open data policies can be improved by collaborating with other organizations, focusing on the impact of the policy, stimulating the use of open data and looking at the need to create a culture in which publicizing data is incorporated in daily working processes. The findings could contribute to the development of new open data policies and the improvement of existing open data policies.”

People Powered Social Innovation: The Need for Citizen Engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper for the Lien Centre for Social Innovation (Singapore): “the Citizen engagement is widely regarded as critical to the development and implementation of social innovation. What is citizen engagement? What does it mean in the context of social innovation? Julie Simon and Anna Davies discuss the importance as well as the implications of engaging the ground…”

Using Social Media in Rulemaking: Possibilities and Barriers

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Michael Herz (Cardozo Legal Studies Research Paper No. 417): “Web 2.0” is characterized by interaction, collaboration, non-static web sites, use of social media, and creation of user-generated content. In theory, these Web 2.0 tools can be harnessed not only in the private sphere but as tools for an e-topia of citizen engagement and participatory democracy. Notice-and-comment rulemaking is the pre-digital government process that most approached (while still falling far short of) the e-topian vision of public participation in deliberative governance. The notice-and-comment process for federal agency rulemaking has now changed from a paper process to an electronic one. Expectations for this switch were high; many anticipated a revolution that would make rulemaking not just more efficient, but also more broadly participatory, democratic, and dialogic. In the event, the move online has not produced a fundamental shift in the nature of notice-and-comment rulemaking. At the same time, the online world in general has come to be increasingly characterized by participatory and dialogic activities, with a move from static, text-based websites to dynamic, multi-media platforms with large amounts of user-generated content. This shift has not left agencies untouched. To the contrary, agencies at all levels of government have embraced social media – by late 2013 there were over 1000 registered federal agency twitter feeds and over 1000 registered federal agency Facebook pages, for example – but these have been used much more as tools for broadcasting the agency’s message than for dialogue or obtaining input. All of which invites the questions whether agencies could or should directly rely on social media in the rulemaking process.
This study reviews how federal agencies have been using social media to date and considers the practical and legal barriers to using social media in rulemaking, not just to raise the visibility of rulemakings, which is certainly happening, but to gather relevant input and help formulate the content of rules.
The study was undertaken for the Administrative Conference of the United States and is the basis for a set of recommendations adopted by ACUS in December 2013. Those recommendations overlap with but are not identical to the recommendations set out herein.”