Can the crowd deliver more open government?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

  at GovernmentNews: “…Crowdsourcing and policy making was the subject of a lecture by visiting academic Dr Tanja Aitamurto at Victoria’s Swinburne University of Technology earlier this month. Dr Aitamurto wrote “Crowdsourcing for Democracy: New Era in Policy-Making” and led the design and implementation of the Finnish Experiment, a pioneering case study in crowdsourcing policy making.

She spoke about how Scandinavian countries have used crowdsourcing to “tap into the collective intelligence of a large and diverse crowd” in an “open ended knowledge information search process” in an open call for anybody to participate online and complete a task.

It has already been used widely and effectively by companies  such as Proctor and Gamble who offer a financial reward for solutions to their R&D problems.

The Finnish government recently used crowdsourcing when it came to reform the country’s Traffic Act following a rash of complaints to the Minister of the Environment about it. The Act, which regulates issues such as off-road traffic, is an emotive issue in Finland where snow mobiles are used six months of the year and many people live in remote areas.

The idea was for people to submit problems and solutions online, covering areas such as safety, noise, environmental protection, the rights of snowmobile owners and landowners’ rights. Everyone could see what was written and could comment on it.

Dr Aitamurto said crowdsourcing had four stages:

• The problem mapping space, where people were asked to outline the issues that needed solving
• An appeal for solutions
• An expert panel evaluated the comments received based on the criteria of: effectiveness, cost efficiency, ease of implementation and fairness. The crowd also had the chance to evaluate and rank solutions online
• The findings were then handed over to the government for the law writing process

Dr Aitamurto said active participation seemed to create a strong sense of empowerment for those involved.

She said some people reported that it was the first time in their lives they felt they were really participating in democracy and influencing decision making in society. They said it felt much more real than voting in an election, which felt alien and remote.

“Participation becomes a channel for advocacy, not just for self-interest but a channel to hear what others are saying and then also to make yourself heard. People expected a compromise at the end,” Dr Aitamurto said.

Being able to participate online was ideal for people who lived remotely and turned crowdsourcing into a democratic innovation which brought citizens closer to policy and decision making between elections.

Other benefits included reaching out to tap into new pools of knowledge, rather than relying on a small group of homogenous experts to solve the problem.

“When we use crowdsourcing we actually extend our knowledge search to multiple, hundreds of thousands of distant neighbourhoods online and that can be the power of crowdsourcing: to find solutions and information that we wouldn’t find otherwise. We find also unexpected information because it’s a self-selecting crowd … people that we might not have in our networks already,” Dr Aitamurto said.

The process can increase transparency as people interact on online platforms and where the government keeps feedback loops going.

Dr Aitamurto is also a pains to highlight what crowdsourcing is not and cannot be, because participants are self-selecting and not statistically representative.

“The crowd doesn’t make decisions, it provides information. It’s not a method or tool for direct democracy and it’s not a public opinion poll either”.

Crowdsourcing has fed into policy in other countries too, for example, during Iceland’s constitutional reform and in the United States where the federal Emergency Management Agency overhauled its strategy after a string of natural disasters.

Australian government has been getting in on the act using cloud-based software Citizen Space to gain input into a huge range of topics. While much of it is technically consultation, rather than feeding into actual policy design, it is certainly a step towards more open government.

British company Delib, which is behind the software, bills it as “managing, publicising and archiving all of your organisation’s consultation activity”.

One council who has used Citizens Space is Wyong Shire on the NSW Central Coast. The council has used the consultation hub to elicit ratepayers’ views on a number of topics, including a special rate variation, community precinct forums, strategic plans and planning decisions.

One of Citizen Space’s most valuable features is the section ‘we asked, you said, we did’….(More)”

Open Data Intermediaries: Their Crucial Role

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Web Foundation: “….data intermediaries are undertaking a wide range of functions.  As well as connecting data providers (for example, governments) with those who can benefit by using data or data-driven products, intermediaries are helping to articulate demand for data, creating and repackaging data, and creating novel applications. In Nepal for instance, intermediaries play a range of roles, from running the government open data portal, to translating complex data sets into formats that are easily understood by a population that is largely offline and suffers from low literacy levels.

How are intermediaries connecting data providers to end-users?

To answer this question, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s social model, in particular his concept of species of capital, was used as a lens. According to Bourdieu, capital is not only economic or material. We use other symbolic forms of capital like social capital (e.g. friends and memberships) or cultural capital (e.g. competencies and qualifications) in our social interactions.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that most open data intermediaries use their technical capital to connect to data providers (97%). However, to fulfil their role of not only connecting to data providers but of facilitating the use of open data, open data intermediaries require multiple forms of capital. And because no single intermediary necessarily has all the types of capital to link effectively to users, multiple intermediaries with complementary configurations of capital are more likely to connect data providers and users.

Intermediaries ModelA model of layers of intermediaries connecting a data source with users  

 

….Of the 32 intermediaries studied, 72% can be described as not-for profit and, as a consequence, rely on donor funding to sustain their operations. This has significant implications for future sustainability.

What are some of the key conclusions and implications of the study?

  • Intermediaries are playing a critical role in making data truly useful.
  • The presence of multiple intermediaries in an ecosystem may increase the probability of use (and impact) because no single intermediary is likely to possess all the types of capital required to unlock the full value of the transaction between the provider and the end user.
  • Working either alone or in collaboration with others, intermediaries must go beyond technical capital to unlock the benefits of open data – using social, political or economic capital too.
  • Governments would do well to engage with a broad spectrum of intermediaries, and not simply focus on intermediaries who possess only the technical capital required to interpret and repackage open government data.
  • Given that intermediaries are presently largely donor funded, in the short term, funders should ask whether possible grantees possess all the types of capital required not only to re-use open data but to connect open data to specific user groups in order to ensure the use and impact of open data.
  • In the medium term, different funding models for intermediaries may need to be explored, or the sustainability of civically-minded open data initiatives could be at risk….

ACCESS THE FULL REPORT:

ODintermediariesOpen Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries

By François van Schalkwyk, Michael Caňares, Sumandro Chattapadhyay & Alexander Andrason

A systematic review of open government data initiatives

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by J. Attard, F. Orlandi, S. Scerri, and S. Auer in Government Information Quarterly: “We conduct a systematic survey with the aim of assessing open government data initiatives, that is; any attempt, by a government or otherwise, to open data that is produced by a governmental entity. We describe the open government data life-cycle and we focus our discussion on publishing and consuming processes required within open government data initiatives. We cover current approaches undertaken for such initiatives, and classify them. A number of evaluations found within related literature are discussed, and from them we extract challenges and issues that hinder open government initiatives from reaching their full potential. In a bid to overcome these challenges, we also extract guidelines for publishing data and provide an integrated overview. This will enable stakeholders to start with a firm foot in a new open government data initiative. We also identify the impacts on the stakeholders involved in such initiatives….(More)”

One way traffic: The open data initiative project and the need for an effective demand side initiative in Ghana

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Frank L. K. Ohemeng and Kwaku Ofosu-Adarkwa in the Government Information Quarterly: “In recent years the necessity for governments to develop new public values of openness and transparency, and thereby increase their citizenries’ sense of inclusiveness, and their trust in and confidence about their governments, has risen to the point of urgency. The decline of trust in governments, especially in developing countries, has been unprecedented and continuous. A new paradigm that signifies a shift to citizen-driven initiatives over and above state- and market-centric ones calls for innovative thinking that requires openness in government. The need for this new synergy notwithstanding, Open Government cannot be considered truly open unless it also enhances citizen participation and engagement. The Ghana Open Data Initiative (GODI) project strives to create an open data community that will enable government (supply side) and civil society in general (demand side) to exchange data and information. We argue that the GODI is too narrowly focused on the supply side of the project, and suggest that it should generate an even platform to improve interaction between government and citizens to ensure a balance in knowledge sharing with and among all constituencies….(More)”

Push, Pull, and Spill: A Transdisciplinary Case Study in Municipal Open Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

New paper by Jan Whittington et al: “Cities hold considerable information, including details about the daily lives of residents and employees, maps of critical infrastructure, and records of the officials’ internal deliberations. Cities are beginning to realize that this data has economic and other value: If done wisely, the responsible release of city information can also release greater efficiency and innovation in the public and private sector. New services are cropping up that leverage open city data to great effect.

Meanwhile, activist groups and individual residents are placing increasing pressure on state and local government to be more transparent and accountable, even as others sound an alarm over the privacy issues that inevitably attend greater data promiscuity. This takes the form of political pressure to release more information, as well as increased requests for information under the many public records acts across the country.

The result of these forces is that cities are beginning to open their data as never before. It turns out there is surprisingly little research to date into the important and growing area of municipal open data. This article is among the first sustained, cross-disciplinary assessments of an open municipal government system. We are a team of researchers in law, computer science, information science, and urban studies. We have worked hand-in-hand with the City of Seattle, Washington for the better part of a year to understand its current procedures from each disciplinary perspective. Based on this empirical work, we generate a set of recommendations to help the city manage risk latent in opening its data….(More)”

Open Data and Sub-national Governments: Lessons from Developing Countries

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

WebFoundation: “Open government data (OGD) as a concept is gaining currency globally due to the strong advocacy of global organisations as Open Government Partnership. In recent years, there has been increased commitment on the part of national governments to proactively disclose information. However, much of the discussion on OGD is at the national level, especially in developing countries where commitments of proactive disclosure is conditioned by the commitments of national governments as expressed through the OGP national action plans. However, the local is important in the context of open data. In decentralized contexts, the local is where data is collected and stored, where there is strong feasibility that data will be published, and where data can generate the most impact when used. This synthesis paper wants to refocus the discussion of open government data in sub-national contexts by analysing nine country papers produced through the Open Data in Developing Countries research project.

Using a common research framework that focuses on context, governance setting, and open data initiatives, the study found out that there is substantial effort on the part of sub-national governments to proactively disclose data, however, the design delimits citizen participation, and eventually, use. Second, context demands diff erent roles for intermediaries and diff erent types of initiatives to create an enabling environment for open data. Finally, data quality will remain a critical challenge for sub-national governments in developing countries and it will temper potential impact that open data will be able to generate. Download the full research paper here“

How We’re Changing the Way We Respond to Petitions

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Jason Goldman (White House) at Medium: “…In 2011 (years before I arrived at the White House), the team here developed a petitions platform called We the People. It provided a clear and easy way for the American people to petition their government — along with a threshold for action. Namely — once a petition gains 100,000 signatures.

This was a new system for the United States government, announced as a flagship effort in the first U.S. Open Government National Action Plan. Right now it exists only for the White House (Hey, Congress! We have anopen API! Get in touch!) Some other countries, including Germany and theUnited Kingdom, do online petitions, too. In fact, the European Parliamenthas even started its own online petitioning platform.

For the most part, we’ve been pretty good about responding — before today, the Obama Administration had responded to 255 petitions that had collectively gathered more than 11 million signatures. That’s more than 91 percent of the petitions that have met our threshold requiring a response. Some responses have taken a little longer than others. But now, I’m happy to say, we have caught up.

Today, the White House is responding to every petition in our We the Peoplebacklog — 20 in all.

This means that nearly 2.5 million people who had petitioned us to take action on something heard back today. And it’s our goal to make that response the start of the conversation, not the final page. The White House is made up of offices that research and analyze the kinds of policy issues raised by these petitions, and leaders from those offices will be taking questions today, and in the weeks to come, from petition signers, on topics such as vaccination policy, community policing, and other petition subjects.

Take a look at more We the People stats here.

We’ll start the conversation on Twitter. Follow @WeThePeople, and join the conversation using hashtag #WeThePeople. (I’ll be personally taking your questions on @Goldman44 about how we’re changing the platform specifically at 3:30 p.m. Eastern.)

We the People, Moving Forward

We’re going to be changing a few things about We the People.

  1. First, from now on, if a petition meets the signature goal within a designated period of time, we will aim to respond to it — with an update or policy statement — within 60 days wherever possible. You can read about the details of our policy in the We the People Terms of Participation.
  2. Second, other outside petitions platforms are starting to tap into the We the People platform. We’re excited to announce today that Change.org is choosing to integrate with the We the People platform, meaning the future signatures of its 100 million users will count toward the threshold for getting an official response from the Administration. We’re also opening up the code behind petitions.whitehouse.gov on Drupal.org and GitHub, which empowers other governments and outside organizations to create their own versions of this platform to engage their own citizens and constituencies.
  3. Third, and most importantly, the process of hearing from us about your petition is going to look a little different. We’ve assembled a team of people responsible for taking your questions and requests and bringing them to the right people — whether within the White House or in an agency within the Administration — who may be in a position to say something about your request….(More)

Unpacking Civic Tech – Inside and Outside of Government

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

David Moore at Participatory Politics Foundation: “…I’ll argue it’s important to unpack the big-tent term “civic tech” to at least five major component areas, overlapping in practice & flexible of course – in order to more clearly understand what we have and what we need:

  • Responsive & efficient city services (e.g., SeeClickFix)
  • Open data portals & open government data publishing / visualization (Socrata, OpenGov.com)
  • Engagement platforms for government entities (Mindmixer aka Sidewalk)
  • Community-focused organizing services (Change, NextDoor, Brigade- these could validly be split, as NextDoor is of course place-based IRL)
  • Geo-based services & open mapping data (e.g.. Civic Insight)

More precisely, instead of “civic tech”, the term #GovTech can be productively applied to companies whose primary business model is vending to government entities – some #govtech is #opendata, some is civic #engagement, and that’s healthy & brilliant. But it doesn’t make sense to me to conflate as “civic tech” both government software vendors and the open-data work of good-government watchdogs. Another framework for understanding the inside / outside relationship to government, in company incorporation strategies & priorities, is broadly as follows:

  • tech entirely-outside government (such as OpenCongress or OpenStates);
  • tech mostly-outside government, where some elected officials volunteer to participate (such as AskThem, Councilmatic, DemocracyOS, or Change Decision Makers);
  • tech mostly-inside government, paid-for-by-government (such as Mindmixer or SpeakUp or OpenTownHall) where elected officials or gov’t staff sets the priorities, with the strong expectation of an official response;
  • deep legacy tech inside government, the enterprise vendors of closed-off CRM software to Congressional offices (including major defense contractors!).

These are the websites up and running today in the civic tech ecosystem – surveying them, I see there’s a lot of work still to do on developing advanced metrics towards thicker civic engagement. Towards evaluating whether the existing tools are having the impact we hope and expect them to at their level of capitalization, and to better contextualize the role of very-small non-profit alternatives….

One question to study is whether the highest-capitalized U.S. civic tech companies (Change, NextDoor, Mindmixer, Socrata, possibly Brigade) – which also generally have most users – are meeting ROI on continual engagement within communities.

  • If it’s a priority metric for users of a service to attend a community meeting, for example, are NextDoor or Mindmixer having expected impact?
  • How about metrics on return participation, joining an advocacy group, attending a district meeting with their U.S. reps, organizing peer-to-peer with neighbors?
  • How about writing or annotating their own legislation at the city level, introducing it for an official hearing, and moving it up the chain of government to state and even federal levels for consideration? What actual new popular public policies or systemic reforms are being carefully, collaboratively passed?
  • Do less-capitalized, community-based non-profits (AskThem, 596 Acres, OpenPlans’ much-missed Shareabouts, CKAN data portals, LittleSis, BeNeighbors, PBNYC tools) – with less scale, but with more open-source, open-data tools that can be remixed – improve on the tough metric of ROI on continual engagement or research-impact in the news?…(More)

White House to make public records more public

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Lisa Rein at the Washington Post: “The law that’s supposed to keep citizens in the know about what their government is doing is about to get more robust.

Starting this week, seven agencies — including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence —  launched a new effort to put online the records they distribute to requesters under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

So if a journalist, nonprofit group or corporation asks for the records, what they see, the public also will see. Documents still will be redacted where necessary to protect what the government decides is sensitive information, an area that’s often disputed but won’t change with this policy.

The Obama administration’s new Open Government initiative began quietly on the agencies’ Web sites days after FOIA’s 49th anniversary. It’s a response to years of pressure from open-government groups and lawmakers to boost public access to records of government decisions, deliberations and policies.

The “release to one is release to all” policy will start as a six-month pilot at the EPA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and within some offices at the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department, the Justice Department and the National Archives and Records Administration….(More)”

Improving Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science as a Policy Mechanism for NASA

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Balcom Brittany: “This article examines citizen science projects, defined as “a form of open collaboration where members of the public participate in the scientific process, including identifying research questions, collecting and analyzing the data, interpreting the results, and problem solving,” as an effective and innovative tool for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) science in line with the Obama Administration’s Open Government Directive. Citizen science projects allow volunteers with no technical training to participate in analysis of large sets of data that would otherwise constitute prohibitively tedious and lengthy work for research scientists. Zooniverse.com hosts a multitude of popular space-focused citizen science projects, many of which have been extraordinarily successful and have enabled new research publications and major discoveries. This article takes a multifaceted look at such projects by examining the benefits of citizen science, effective game design, and current desktop computer and mobile device usage trends. It offers suggestions of potential research topics to be studied with emerging technologies, policy considerations, and opportunities for outreach. This analysis includes an overview of other crowdsourced research methods such as distributed computing and contests. New research and data analysis of mobile phone usage, scientific curiosity, and political engagement among Zooniverse.com project participants has been conducted for this study…(More)”