Advancing Open and Citizen-Centered Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The White House: “Today, the United States released our third Open Government National Action Plan, announcing more than 40 new or expanded initiatives to advance the President’s commitment to an open and citizen-centered government….In the third Open Government National Action Plan, the Administration both broadens and deepens efforts to help government become more open and more citizen-centered. The plan includes new and impactful steps the Administration is taking to openly and collaboratively deliver government services and to support open government efforts across the country. These efforts prioritize a citizen-centric approach to government, including improved access to publicly available data to provide everyday Americans with the knowledge and tools necessary to make informed decisions.

One example is the College Scorecard, which shares data through application programming interfaces (APIs) to help students and families make informed choices about education. Open APIs help create an ecosystem around government data in which civil society can provide useful visual tools, making this data more accessible and commercial developers can enable even more value to be extracted to further empower students and their families. In addition to these newer approaches, the plan also highlights significant longstanding open government priorities such as access to information, fiscal transparency, and records management, and continues to push for greater progress in that work.

The plan also focuses on supporting implementation of the landmark 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which sets out a vision and priorities for global development over the next 15 years and was adopted last month by 193 world leaders including President Obama. The plan includes commitments to harness open government and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) both in the United States and globally, including in the areas of education, health, food security, climate resilience, science and innovation, justice and law enforcement. It also includes a commitment to take stock of existing U.S. government data that relates to the 17 SDGs, and to creating and using data to support progress toward the SDGs.

Some examples of open government efforts newly included in the plan:

  • Promoting employment by unlocking workforce data, including training, skill, job, and wage listings.
  • Enhancing transparency and participation by expanding available Federal services to theOpen311 platform currently available to cities, giving the public a seamless way to report problems and request assistance.
  • Releasing public information from the electronically filed tax forms of nonprofit and charitable organizations (990 forms) as open, machine-readable data.
  • Expanding access to justice through the White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable.
  • Promoting open and accountable implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals….(More)”

Can Mobile Phone Surveys Identify People’s Development Priorities?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Ben Leo and Robert Morello at the Center for Global Development: “Mobile phone surveys are fast, flexible, and cheap. But, can they be used to engage citizens on how billions of dollars in donor and government resources are spent? Over the last decade, donor governments and multilateral organizations have repeatedly committed to support local priorities and programs. Yet, how are they supposed to identify these priorities on a timely, regular basis? Consistent discussions with the local government are clearly essential, but so are feeding ordinary people’s views into those discussions. However, traditional tools, such as household surveys or consultative roundtables, present a range of challenges for high-frequency citizen engagement. That’s where mobile phone surveys could come in, enabled by the exponential rise in mobile coverage throughout the developing world.

Despite this potential, there have been only a handful of studies into whether mobile surveys are a reliable and representative tool across a broad range of developing-country contexts. Moreover, there have been almost none that specifically look at collecting information about people’s development priorities. Along with Tiago Peixoto,Steve Davenport, and Jonathan Mellon, who focus on promoting citizen engagement and open government practices at the World Bank, we sought to address this policy research gap. Through a study focused on four low-income countries (Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe), we rigorously tested the feasibility of interactive voice recognition (IVR) surveys for gauging citizens’ development priorities.

Specifically, we wanted to know whether respondents’ answers are sensitive to a range of different factors, such as (i) the specified executing actor (national government or external partners); (ii) time horizons; or (iii) question formats. In other words, can we be sufficiently confident that surveys about people’s priorities can be applied more generally to a range of development actors and across a range of country contexts?

Several of these potential sensitivity concerns were raised in response to an earlier CGD working paper, which found that US foreign aid is only modestly aligned with Africans’ and Latin Americans’ most pressing concerns. This analysis relied upon Afrobarometer and Latinobarometro survey data (see explanatory note below). For instance, some argued that people’s priorities for their own government might be far less relevant for donor organizations. Put differently, the World Bank or USAID shouldn’t prioritize job creation in Nigeria simply because ordinary Nigerians cite it as a pressing government priority. Our hypothesis was that development priorities would likely transcend all development actors, and possibly different timeframes and question formats as well. But, we first needed to test these assumptions.

So, what did we find? We’ve included some of the key highlights below. For a more detailed description of the study and the underlying analysis, please see our new working paper. Along with our World Bank colleagues, we also published an accompanying paper that considers a range of survey method issues, including survey representativeness….(More)”

The multiple meanings of open government data: Understanding different stakeholders and their perspectives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Felipe Gonzalez-Zapata, and Richard Heeks in Government Information Quarterly: “As a field of practice and research that is fast-growing and a locus for much attention and activity, open government data (OGD) has attracted stakeholders from a variety of origins. They bring with them a variety of meanings for OGD. The purpose of this paper is to show how the different stakeholders and their different perspectives on OGD can be analyzed in a given context. Taking Chile as an OGD exemplar, stakeholder analysis is used to identify and categorize stakeholder groups in terms of their relative power and interest as either primary (in this case, politicians, public officials, public sector practitioners, international organizations) or secondary (civil society activists, funding donors, ICT providers, academics). Stakeholder groups sometimes associated with OGD but absent from significant involvement in Chile – such as private sector- and citizen-users – are also identified.

Four different perspectives on open government data – bureaucratic, political, technological, and economic – are identified from a literature review. Template analysis is used to analyze text – OGD-related reports, conference presentations, and interviews in Chile – in terms of those perspectives. This shows bureaucratic and political perspectives to be more dominant than the other two, and also some presence for a politico-economic perspective not identified from the original literature review. The information value chain is used to identify a “missing middle” in current Chilean OGD perspectives: a lack of connection between a reality of data provision and an aspiration of developmental results. This pattern of perspectives can be explained by the capacities and interests of key stakeholders, with those in turn being shaped by Chile’s history, politics, and institutions….(More)”

Open Data Charter

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

International Open Data Charter: “Open data sits at the heart of a global movement with the potential to generate significant social and economic benefits around the world. Through the articulation and adoption of common principles in support of open data, governments can work towards enabling more just, and prosperous societies.

In July 2013, G8 leaders signed the G8 Open Data Charter, which outlined a set of five core open data principles. Many nations and open government advocates welcomed the G8 Charter, but there was a general sense that the principles could be refined and improved to support broader global adoption of open data principles. In the months following, a number of multinational groups initiated their own activities to establish more inclusive and representative open data principles, including the Open Government Partnership’s (OGP) Open Data Working Group….

During 2015, open data experts from governments, multilateral organizations, civil society and private sector, worked together to develop an international Open Data Charter, with six principles for the release of data:

  1. Open by Default;
  2. Timely and Comprehensive;
  3. Accessible and Useable;
  4. Comparable and Interoperable;
  5. For Improved Governance and Citizen Engagement; and
  6. For Inclusive Development and Innovation….

Next Steps

  1. Promote adoption of the Charter.
  2. Continue to bring together a diverse, inclusive group of stakeholders to engage in the process of adoption of the international Open Data Charter.
  3. Develop a governance model for the ongoing management of the Charter, setting out the roles and responsibilities of a Charter partnership, and its working groups in the process of developing supporting resources, consultations, promotion, adoption, and oversight.
  4. Continue development of and consultation on supporting Charter guides, documents and tools, which will be brought together in a searchable, online Resource Centre. ..(More)”

 

Accelerating Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing to Address Societal and Scientific Challenges

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Tom Kalil et al at the White House Blog: “Citizen science encourages members of the public to voluntarily participate in the scientific process. Whether by asking questions, making observations, conducting experiments, collecting data, or developing low-cost technologies and open-source code, members of the public can help advance scientific knowledge and benefit society.

Through crowdsourcing – an open call for voluntary assistance from a large group of individuals – Americans can study and tackle complex challenges by conducting research at large geographic scales and over long periods of time in ways that professional scientists working alone cannot easily duplicate. These challenges include understanding the structure of proteins related viruses in order to support development of new medications, or preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters.

…OSTP is today announcing two new actions that the Administration is taking to encourage and support the appropriate use of citizen science and crowdsourcing at Federal agencies:

  1. OSTP Director John Holdren, is issuing a memorandum entitled Addressing Societal and Scientific Challenges through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing. This memo articulates principles that Federal agencies should embrace to derive the greatest value and impact from citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. The memo also directs agencies to take specific actions to advance citizen science and crowdsourcing, including designating an agency-specific coordinator for citizen science and crowdsourcing projects, and cataloguing citizen science and crowdsourcing projects that are open for public participation on a new, centralized website to be created by the General Services Administration: making it easy for people to find out about and join in these projects.
  2. Fulfilling a commitment made in the 2013 Open Government National Action Plan, the U.S. government is releasing the first-ever Federal Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Toolkit to help Federal agencies design, carry out, and manage citizen science and crowdsourcing projects. The toolkit, which was developed by OSTP in partnership with the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science and GSA’s Open Opportunities Program, reflects the input of more than 125 Federal employees from over 25 agencies on ideas, case studies, best management practices, and other lessons to facilitate the successful use of citizen science and crowdsourcing in a Federal context….(More)”

 

Can Open Data Drive Innovative Healthcare?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Will Greene at Huffington Post: “As healthcare systems worldwide become increasingly digitized, medical scientists and health researchers have more data than ever. Yet much valuable health information remains locked in proprietary or hidden databases. A growing number of open data initiatives aim to change this, but it won’t be easy….

To overcome these challenges, a growing array of stakeholders — including healthcare and tech companies, research institutions, NGOs, universities, governments, patient groups, and individuals — are banding together to develop new regulations and guidelines, and generally promote open data in healthcare.

Some of these initiatives focus on improving transparency in clinical trials. Among those pushing for researchers to share more clinical trials data are groups like AllTrials and the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project, donor organizations like the Gates Foundation, and biomedical journals like The BMJ. Private healthcare companies, including some that resisted data sharing in the past, are increasingly seeing value in open collaboration as well.

Other initiatives focus on empowering patients to share their own health data. Consumer genomics companies, personal health records providers, disease management apps, online patient communities and other healthcare services give patients greater access to personal health data than ever before. Some also allow consumers to share it with researchers, enroll in clinical trials, or find other ways to leverage it for the benefit of others.

Another group of initiatives seek to improve the quality and availability of public health data, such as that pertaining to epidemiological trends, health financing, and human behavior.

Governments often play a key role in collecting this kind of data, but some are more open and effective than others. “Open government is about more than a mere commitment to share data,” says Peter Speyer, Chief Data and Technology Officer at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), a health research center at the University of Washington. “It’s also about supporting a whole ecosystem for using these data and tapping into creativity and resources that are not available within any single organization.”

Open data may be particularly important in managing infectious disease outbreaks and other public health emergencies. Following the recent Ebola crisis, the World Health Organization issued a statement on the need for rapid data sharing in emergency situations. It laid out guidelines that could help save lives when the next pandemic strikes.

But on its own, open data does not lead to healthcare innovation. “Simply making large amounts of data accessible is good for transparency and trust,” says Craig Lipset, Head of Clinical Innovation at Pfizer, “but it does not inherently improve R&D or health research. We still need important collaborations and partnerships that make full use of these vast data stores.”

Many such collaborations and partnerships are already underway. They may help drive a new era of healthcare innovation ..(More)”

Openness an Essential Building Block for Inclusive Societies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

 (Mexico) in the Huffington Post: “The international community faces a complex environment that requires transforming the way we govern. In that sense, 2015 marks a historic milestone, as 193 Member States of the United Nations will come together to agree on the adoption of the 2030 Agenda. With the definition of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we will set an ambitious course toward a better and more inclusive world for the next 15 years.

The SDGs will be established just when governments deal with new and more defiant challenges, which require increased collaboration with multiple stakeholders to deliver innovative solutions. For that reason, cutting-edge technologies, fueled by vast amounts of data, provide an efficient platform to foster a global transformation and consolidate more responsive, collaborative and open governments.

Goal 16 seeks to promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies by ensuring access to public information, strengthening the rule of law, as well as building stronger and more accountable institutions. By doing so, we will contribute to successfully achieve the rest of the 2030 Agenda objectives.

During the 70th United Nations General Assembly, the 11 countries of the Steering Committee of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), along with civil-society leaders, will gather to acknowledge Goal 16 as a common target through a Joint Declaration: Open Government for the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As the Global Summit of OGP convenes this year in Mexico City, on October 28th and 29th, my government will call on all 65 members to subscribe to this fundamental declaration.

The SDGs will be reached only through trustworthy, effective and inclusive institutions. This is why Mexico, as current chair of the OGP, has committed to promote citizen participation, innovative policies, transparency and accountability.

Furthermore, we have worked with a global community of key players to develop the international Open Data Charter (ODC), which sets the founding principles for a greater coherence and increased use of open data across the world. We seek to recognize the value of having timely, comprehensive, accessible, and comparable data to improve governance and citizen engagement, as well as to foster inclusive development and innovation….(More)”

Sustainable Value of Open Government Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Phd Thesis from Thorhildur Jetzek: “The impact of the digital revolution on our societies can be compared to the ripples caused by a stone thrown in water: spreading outwards and affecting a larger and larger part of our lives with every year that passes. One of the many effects of this revolution is the emergence of an already unprecedented amount of digital data that is accumulating exponentially. Moreover, a central affordance of digitization is the ability to distribute, share and collaborate, and we have thus seen an “open theme” gaining currency in recent years. These trends are reflected in the explosion of Open Data Initiatives (ODIs) around the world. However, while hundreds of national and local governments have established open data portals, there is a general feeling that these ODIs have not yet lived up to their true potential. This feeling is not without good reason; the recent Open Data Barometer report highlights that strong evidence on the impacts of open government data is almost universally lacking (Davies, 2013). This lack of evidence is disconcerting for government organizations that have already expended money on opening data, and might even result in the termination of some ODIs. This lack of evidence also raises some relevant questions regarding the nature of value generation in the context of free data and sharing of information over networks. Do we have the right methods, the right intellectual tools, to understand and reflect the value that is generated in such ecosystems?

This PhD study addresses the question of How is value generated from open data? through a mixed methods, macro-level approach. For the qualitative analysis, I have conducted two longitudinal case studies in two different contexts. The first is the case of the Basic Data Program (BDP), which is a Danish ODI. For this case, I studied the supply-side of open data publication, from the creation of open data strategy towards the dissemination and use of data. The second case is a demand-side study on the energy tech company Opower. Opower has been an open data user for many years and have used open data to create and disseminate personalized information on energy use. This information has already contributed to a measurable world-wide reduction in CO2 emissions as well as monetary savings. Furthermore, to complement the insights from these two cases I analyzed quantitative data from 76 countries over the years 2012 and 2013. I have used these diverse sources of data to uncover the most important relationships or mechanisms, that can explain how open data are used to generate sustainable value….(More)”

Open governance systems: Doing more with more

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Jeremy Millard in Government Information Quarterly: “This paper tackles many of the important issues and discussions taking place in Europe and globally about the future of the public sector and how it can use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to respond innovatively and effectively to some of the acute societal challenges arising from the financial crisis as well as other deeper rooted global problems. These include inequality, poverty, corruption and migration, as well as climate change, loss of habitat and the ageing society. A conceptual framework for open governance systems enabled by ICT is proposed, drawing on evidence and examples from around the world as well as a critical appraisal of both academic and grey literature. The framework constructs a system of open assets, open services and open engagement, and this is used to move the e-government debate forward from a preoccupation with lean and small governments which ‘do more with less’ to examine the potential for open governance systems to also ‘do more with more’. This is achieved by enabling an open government and open public sector, as part of this open governance system, to ‘do more by leveraging more’ of the existing assets and resources across the whole of society, and not just within the public sector, many of which are unrealised and untapped, so in effect are ‘wasted’. The paper argues that efficiencies and productivity improvements are essential at all levels and across all actors, as is maximising both public and private value, but that they must also be seen at the societal level where trade-offs and interactions are required, and not only at the individual actor level….(More)”

Towards decision support for disclosing data: Closed or open data?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Zuiderwijk , Anneke and Janssen , Marijn in Information Polity: “The disclosure of open government data is a complex activity that may create public value yet might also encounter risks, such as the misinterpretation and misuse of data. While politicians support data release and assume that the positive value of open data will dominate, many governmental organizations are reluctant to open their data, as they are afraid of the dark side. The objective of this paper is to provide a decision-making model that assists in trade-offs between the pros and cons of open data. Data disclosure is dependent on the type of data (e.g. its sensitivity, structure and quality) and the context (e.g. organizational policies, legislation and the political influences). Based on the literature and fifteen in-depth interviews with public sector officials and data archivists, this paper identifies contextual and dataset-related variables which influence a trade-off. A decision-making model is presented capturing trade-offs, and in this way providing guidance for weighing the creation of public value and the risks. The model can be used for decision-making to open or not to open data. It is likely that the decision regarding which data should be opened or closed will shift over time….(More)”