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).”
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.”
The Global Open Data Index 2014
Open Knowledge Foundation: “The Global Open Data Index ranks countries based on the availability and accessibility of information in ten key areas, including government spending, election results, transport timetables, and pollution levels.
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
The UK tops the 2014 Index retaining its pole position with an overall score of 96%, closely followed by Denmark and then France at number 3 up from 12th last year. Finland comes in 4th while Australia and New Zealand share the 5th place. Impressive results were seen from India at #10 (up from #27) and Latin American countries like Colombia and Uruguay who came in joint 12th .
Sierra Leone, Mali, Haiti and Guinea rank lowest of the countries assessed, but there are many countries where the governments are less open but that were not assessed because of lack of openness or a sufficiently engaged civil society.
Overall, whilst there is meaningful improvement in the number of open datasets (from 87 to 105), the percentage of open datasets across all the surveyed countries remained low at only 11%.
Even amongst the leaders on open government data there is still room for improvement: the US and Germany, for example, do not provide a consolidated, open register of corporations. There was also a disappointing degree of openness around the details of government spending with most countries either failing to provide information at all or limiting the information available – only two countries out of 97 (the UK and Greece) got full marks here. This is noteworthy as in a period of sluggish growth and continuing austerity in many countries, giving citizens and businesses free and open access to this sort of data would seem to be an effective means of saving money and improving government efficiency.
Explore the Global Open Data Index 2014 for yourself!”
Opening Government: Designing Open Innovation Processes to Collaborate With External Problem Solvers
New paper by Ines Mergel in Social Science Computer Review: “Open government initiatives in the U.S. government focus on three main aspects: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Especially the collaboration mandate is relatively unexplored in the literature. In practice, government organizations recognize the need to include external problem solvers into their internal innovation creation processes. This is partly derived from a sense of urgency to improve the efficiency and quality of government service delivery. Another formal driver is the America Competes Act that instructs agencies to search for opportunities to meaningfully promote excellence in technology, education, and science. Government agencies are responding to these requirements by using open innovation (OI) approaches to invite citizens to crowdsource and peer produce solutions to public management problems. These distributed innovation processes occur at all levels of the U.S. government and it is important to understand what design elements are used to create innovative public management ideas. This article systematically reviews existing government crowdsourcing and peer production initiatives and shows that after agencies have defined their public management problem, they go through four different phases of the OI process: (1) idea generation through crowdsourcing, (2) incubation of submitted ideas with peer voting and collaborative improvements of favorite solutions, (3) validation with a proof of concept of implementation possibilities, and (4) reveal of the selected solution and the (internal) implementation of the winning idea. Participation and engagement are incentivized both with monetary and nonmonetary rewards, which lead to tangible solutions as well as intangible innovation outcomes, such as increased public awareness.”
How do we improve open data for police accountability?
Emily Shaw at the SunLight Foundation: “This is a challenging time for people who worry about the fairness of American governmental institutions. In quick succession, grand juries declined to indict two police officers accused of killing black men. In the case of Ferguson, Mo. officer Darren Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury’s decision appeared to center on uncertainty about whether Wilson’s action was legal and whether he killed under threat. In the case of New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner, however, a bystander recorded and made public a video of the police officer causing Garner’s death through an illegal chokehold. In Pantaleo’s case, the availability of video data has made the question about institutional fairness even more urgent, as people can see for themselves the context in which the officer exercised power. The data has given us a common set of facts to use in judging police behavior.
We grant law enforcement and corrections departments the right to exercise more physical power over the public than we do to any other part of our government. But do we generally have the data we need to evaluate how they’re using it?….
The time to find good solutions to these problems is now. Responding to widespread frustration, President Obama has just announced a three-part initiative to “strengthen community policing”: an increased focus on transparency and oversight for federal-to-local transfers of military equipment, a proposal to provide matching funding to local police departments to buy body cameras, and a “Task Force on 21st Century Policing” that will make recommendations for how to implement community-oriented policing practices.
While each element of Obama’s initiative corresponds to a distinct set of concerns about policing, one element they share in common is the need to increase access to information about police work. Each of the three approaches will rely on mechanisms to increase the flow of public information about what police officers are doing in their official roles and how they are doing it. How are police officers going about fulfilling their responsibility to ensure public safety? Are they working in ways that appropriately respect individual rights? Are they responsive to public concerns, when concerns are raised?
By encouraging the collection and publication of more data about how government is working, Obama’s initiative has the potential to support precisely the kind of increase in data availability that can transform public outcomes. When applied with the intent to improve transparency and accountability and to increase public engagement, open data — and the civic tech that uses this data — can bridge the often too-large gap between the public and government.
However, because Obama’s initiatives depend on the effective collection, publication, and communication of information, open data advocates have a particular contribution to make. It’s important to think about what lessons we can apply from our experiences with open data — and with data collected and used for police accountability — in order to ensure that this initiative has the greatest possible impact. As an open data and open government community, can we make recommendations that can help improve the data we’re collecting for police transparency and accountability?
I’m going to begin a list, but it’s just a beginning – I am certain that you have many more recommendations to make. I’ll categorize them first by Obama’s “Strengthening Community Policing” initiatives and then keep thinking about what additional data is needed. Please think along with me about what kind of datasets we will need, what potential issues with data availability and quality we’re likely to see, what kind of laws may need to be changed to improve access to the data necessary for police accountability, then make your recommendations in the Google Doc embedded at the end of this post. If you’ve seen any great projects you’ve seen which improve police transparency and accountability, be sure to share those as well….”
Designing a Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit for the Federal Government
In the 2013 Second Open Government National Action Plan, President Obama called on Federal agencies to harness the ingenuity of the public by accelerating and scaling the use of open innovation methods, such as citizen science and crowdsourcing, to help address a wide range of scientific and societal problems.
Citizen science is a form of open collaboration in which members of the public participate in the scientific process, including identifying research questions, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting results, and solving problems. Crowdsourcing is a process in which individuals or organizations submit an open call for voluntary contributions from a large group of unknown individuals (“the crowd”) or, in some cases, a bounded group of trusted individuals or experts.
Citizen science and crowdsourcing are powerful tools that can help Federal agencies:
- Advance and accelerate scientific research through group discovery and co-creation of knowledge. For instance, engaging the public in data collection can provide information at resolutions that would be difficult for Federal agencies to obtain due to time, geographic, or resource constraints.
- Increase science literacy and provide students with skills needed to excel in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Volunteers in citizen science or crowdsourcing projects gain hands-on experience doing real science, and take that learning outside of the classroom setting.
- Improve delivery of government services with significantly lower resource investments.
- Connect citizens to the missions of Federal agencies by promoting a spirit of open government and volunteerism.
To enable effective and appropriate use of these new approaches, the Open Government National Action Plan specifically commits the Federal government to “convene an interagency group to develop an Open Innovation Toolkit for Federal agencies that will include best practices, training, policies, and guidance on authorities related to open innovation, including approaches such as incentive prizes, crowdsourcing, and citizen science.”
On November 21, 2014, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) kicked off development of the Toolkit with a human-centered design workshop. Human-centered design is a multi-stage process that requires product designers to engage with different stakeholders in creating, iteratively testing, and refining their product designs. The workshop was planned and executed in partnership with the Office of Personnel Management’s human-centered design practice known as “The Lab” and the Federal Community of Practice on Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (FCPCCS), a growing network of more than 100 employees from more than 20 Federal agencies….
The Toolkit will help further the culture of innovation, learning, sharing, and doing in the Federal citizen science and crowdsourcing community: indeed, the development of the Toolkit is a collaborative and community-building activity in and of itself.
The following successful Federal projects illustrate the variety of possible citizen science and crowdsourcing applications:
- The Citizen Archivist Dashboard (NARA) coordinates crowdsourced archival record tagging and document transcription. Recently, more than 170,000 volunteers indexed 132 million names of the 1940 Census in only five months, which NARA could not have done alone.
- Through Measuring Broadband America (FCC), 2 million volunteers collected and provided the FCC with data on their Internet speeds, data that FCC used to create a National Broadband Map revealing digital divides.
- In 2014, Nature’s Notebook (USGS, NSF) volunteers recorded more than 1 million observations on plants and animals that scientists use to analyze environmental change.
- Did You Feel It? (USGS) has enabled more than 3 million people worldwide to share their experiences during and immediately after earthquakes. This information facilitates rapid damage assessments and scientific research, particularly in areas without dense sensor networks.
- The mPING (NOAA) mobile app has collected more than 600,000 ground-based observations that help verify weather models.
- USAID anonymized and opened its loan guarantee data to volunteer mappers. Volunteers mapped 10,000 data points in only 16 hours, compared to the 60 hours officials expected.
- The Air Sensor Toolbox (EPA), together with training workshops, scientific partners, technology evaluations, and a scientific instrumentation loan program, empowers communities to monitor and report local air pollution.
In early 2015, OSTP, in partnership with the Challenges and Prizes Community of Practice, will convene Federal practitioners to develop the other half of the Open Innovation Toolkit for prizes and challenges. Stay tuned!”
Selected Readings on Cities and Civic Technology
By Julia Root and Stefaan Verhulst
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of civic innovation was originally published in 2014.
The last five years have seen a wave of new organizations, entrepreneurs and investment in cities and the field of civic innovation. Two subfields, Civic Tech and Government Innovation, are particularly aligned with GovLab’s interest in the ways in which technology is and can be deployed to redesign public institutions and re-imagine governance.
The emerging field of civic technology, or “Civic Tech,” champions new digital platforms, open data and collaboration tools for transforming government service delivery and engagement with citizens. Government Innovation, while not a new field, has seen in the last five years a proliferation of new structures (e.g. Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics), roles (e.g. Chief Technology/Innovation Officer) and public/private investment (e.g. Innovation Delivery Teams and Code for America Fellows) that are building a world-wide movement for transforming how government thinks about and designs services for its citizens.
There is no set definition for “civic innovation.” However, broadly speaking, it is about improving our cities through the implementation of tools, ideas and engagement methods that strengthen the relationship between government and citizens. The civic innovation field encompasses diverse actors from across the public, private and nonprofit spectrums. These can include government leaders, nonprofit and foundation professionals, urbanists, technologists, researchers, business leaders and community organizers, each of whom may use the term in a different way, but ultimately are seeking to disrupt how cities and public institutions solve problems and invest in solutions.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work – a report that creates a typology for the new innovation offices cropping up in cities and government agencies across the country.
- Alissa Black and Rachel Burstein – The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow – a white paper on the field of civic innovation and how it is defined by different stakeholders in the field.
- Bloomberg Philanthropies – Transform Your City Through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model For Making It Happen – a playbook for implementing an Innovation Delivery Team in your city.
- Jeremy M. Goldberg – Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation – an article that highlights new forms of public/private partnership in the field of civic innovation.
- Stephen Goldsmith and Susan Crawford – The Responsive City – a comprehensive book of case studies from Boston, Chicago, and New York that document how digital technologies are transforming the relationship between city governments and citizens.
- Jessica Mulholland and Noelle Knell – Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map) – an article that maps the new role for innovation officers in municipal government.
- Open Plans – Field Scan on Civic Technology – a 2012 report from Living Cities that provides one of the first overviews and set of recommendations for the civic tech field.
- Mayur Patel, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley and Daniel Houghton – Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology – a report that maps the field of civic tech, charts overall investment, clusters organizations into shared themes and offers robust examples of activity and impact.
- Anthony M. Townsend – Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia – a book exploring the diversity of motivations, challenges and potential benefits of smart cities in our “era of mass urbanization and technological ubiquity.”
Annotated Selected Readings (in alphabetical order)
Books
Goldsmith, Stephen, and Susan Crawford. The Responsive City: Engaging Communities Through Data-Smart Governance. 1 edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2014. http://bit.ly/1zvKOL0.
- The Responsive City, a guide to civic engagement and governance in the digital age, is the culmination of research originating from the Data-Smart City Solutions initiative, an ongoing project at Harvard Kennedy School working to catalyze adoption of data projects on the city level.
- The “data smart city” is one that is responsive to citizens, engages them in problem solving and finds new innovative solutions for dismantling entrenched bureaucracy.
- The authors document case studies from New York City, Boston and Chicago to explore the following topics:
- Building trust in the public sector and fostering a sustained, collective voice among communities;
- Using data-smart governance to preempt and predict problems while improving quality of life;
- Creating efficiencies and saving taxpayer money with digital tools; and
- Spearheading these new approaches to government with innovative leadership.
Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. 1 edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. http://bit.ly/17Y4G0R.
- In this book, Townsend illustrates how “cities worldwide are deploying technology to address both the timeless challenges of government and the mounting problems posed by human settlements of previously unimaginable size and complexity.”
- He also considers “the motivations, aspirations, and shortcomings” of the many stakeholders involved in the development of smart cities, and poses a new civics to guide these efforts.
- He argues that smart cities are not made smart by various, soon-to-be-obsolete technologies built into its infrastructure; instead, it is how citizens are using ever-changing and grassroots technologies to be “human-centered, inclusive and resilient” that will make cities ‘smart.’
Reports + Journal Articles
Black, Alissa, and Rachel Burstein. “The 2050 City – What Civic Innovation Looks Like Today and Tomorrow.” White Paper. New America Foundation – California Civic Innovation Project, June 2013. https://bit.ly/2GohMvw.
- Through their interviews, the authors determine that civic innovation is not just a “compilation of projects” but that it can inspire institutional structural change.
- Civic innovation projects that have a “technology focus can sound very different than process-related innovations”; however the outcomes are actually quite similar as they disrupt how citizens and government engage with one another.
- Technology is viewed by some of the experts as an enabler of civic innovation – not necessarily the driver for innovation itself. What constitutes innovation is how new tools are implemented by government or by civic groups that changes the governing dynamic.
Patel, Mayur, Jon Sotsky, Sean Gourley, and Daniel Houghton. “Knight Foundation Report on Civic Technology.” Presentation. Knight Foundation, December 2013. http://slidesha.re/11UYgO0.
- This reports aims to advance the field of civic technology, which compared to the tech industry as a whole is relatively young. It maps the field, creating a starting place for understanding activity and investment in the sector.
- It defines two themes, Open Government and Civic Action, and identifies 11 clusters of civic tech innovation that fall into the two themes. For each cluster, the authors describe the type of activities and highlights specific organizations.
- The report identified more than $430 million of private and philanthropic investment directed to 102 civic tech organizations from January 2011 to May 2013.
Open Plans. “Field Scan on Civic Technology.” Living Cities, November 2012. http://bit.ly/1HGjGih.
- Commissioned by Living Cities and authored by Open Plans, the Field Scan investigates the emergent field of civic technology and generates the first analysis of the potential impact for the field as well as a critique for how tools and new methods need to be more inclusive of low-income communities in their use and implementation.
- Respondents generally agreed that the tools developed and in use in cities so far are demonstrations of the potential power of civic tech, but that these tools don’t yet go far enough.
- Civic tech tools have the potential to improve the lives of low-income people in a number of ways. However, these tools often fail to reach the population they are intended to benefit. To better understand this challenge, civic tech for low-income people must be considered in the broader context of their interactions with technology and with government.
- Although hackathons are popular, their approach to problem solving is not always driven by community needs, and hackathons often do not produce useful material for governments or citizens in need.
Goldberg, Jeremy M. “Riding the Second Wave of Civic Innovation.” Governing, August 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOKnhJ.
- In this piece, Goldberg argues that innovation and entrepreneurship in local government increasingly require mobilizing talent from many sectors and skill sets.
- Organizations and Fellowship programs such as Bayes Impact, Code for America, Data Science for Social Good and Fuse Corps, are creating a new public-private partnership model that is bringing new talent into city hall, increasing innovation capacity and engagement with diverse networks.
Black, Alissa, and Burstein, Rachel. “A Guide for Making Innovation Offices Work.” IBM Center for the Business of Government, October 2014. http://bit.ly/1vOFZP4.
- In this report, Burstein and Black examine the recent trend toward the creation of innovation offices across the nation at all levels of government to understand the structural models now being used to stimulate innovation—both internally within an agency, and externally for the agency’s partners and communities.
- The authors conducted interviews with leadership of innovation offices of cities that include Philadelphia, Austin, Kansas City, Chicago, Davis, Memphis and Los Angeles.
- The report cites examples of offices, generates a typology for the field, links to projects and highlights success factors.
Mulholland, Jessica, and Noelle Knell. “Chief Innovation Officers in State and Local Government (Interactive Map).” Government Technology, March 28, 2014. http://bit.ly/1ycArvX.
- This article provides an overview of how different cities structure their Chief Innovation Officer positions and provides links to offices, projects and additional editorial content.
- Some innovation officers find their duties merged with traditional CIO responsibilities, as is the case in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York City. Others, like those in Louisville and Nashville, have titles that reveal a link to their jurisdiction’s economic development endeavors.
Toolkits
Bloomberg Philanthropies. January 2014. “Transform Your City through Innovation: The Innovation Delivery Model for Making It Happen.” New York: Bloomberg Philanthropies. http://bloombg.org/120VrKB.
- In 2011, Bloomberg Philanthropies funded a three-year innovation capacity program in five major United States cities— Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans – in which cities could hire top-level staff to develop and see through the implementation of solutions to top mayoral priorities such as customer service, murder, homelessness, and economic development, using a sequence of steps.
- The Innovation Delivery Team Playbook describes the Innovation Delivery Model and describes each aspect of the model from how to hire and structure the team, to how to manage roundtables and run competitions.
What do businesses really look for in open data?
Harvey Lewis in Computer Weekly: “In 2015, the UK’s primary open data portal, www.data.gov.uk, will be six years old. The portal hosts approximately 20,000 official data sets from central government departments and their agencies, local authorities and other public sector bodies across the country. Just over half of these data sets are available as open data under the Open Government Licence (OGL). Data.gov.uk forms part of an international network of over three hundred open data efforts that have seen not just thousands but millions of data sets worldwide becoming freely available for personal or commercial use. [See http://datacatalogs.org and www.quandle.com].
…simply publishing open data does not guarantee that a business will use it…., if businesses are building new products or services, or relying on the data to inform their strategy, a number of characteristics other than just openness become critical in determining success:
- Provenance – what is the source of the data and how it was collected? Is it authoritative?
- Completeness and accuracy – are the examples and features of the data present and correct, and, if not, is the quality understood and documented?
- Consistency – is the data published in a consistent, easy-to-access format and are any changes documented?
- Timeliness – is the data available when it is needed for the time periods needed?
- Richness – does the data contain a level of detail sufficient to answer our questions?
- Guarantees of availability – will the data continue to be made available in the future?
If these characteristics cannot be guaranteed in open data or are unavailable except under a commercial licence then many businesses would prefer to pay to get them. While some public sector bodies – particularly the Trading Funds – have, over the years, established strong connections with business users of their data and understand their needs implicitly, the Open Data Institute is the first to cement these characteristics into a formal certification scheme for publishers of open data.
A campaign is needed to get publishers to adopt these certificates and to recognise that, economically at least, they are as important as Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s five-star scale for linked open data. ….”
Special Issue on Open Government
Introduction by Mila Gascó to the Special Issue on Open Government in the Social Science Computer Review: “Public administrations around the world have embarked on open government initiatives and have worked to redefine their relationship with citizens and with each other. Researchers and academicians have recently also focused on studying what governments are implementing. Still, there are gaps and difficulties that both practitioners and academicians need to tackle. This special issue aims at contributing to the open government field in this respect.”