Book by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., Daniel Boden: “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government.Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)”
Collective intelligence and international development
Gina Lucarelli, Tom Saunders and Eddie Copeland at Nesta: “The mountain kingdom of Lesotho, a small landlocked country in Sub-Saharan Africa, is an unlikely place to look for healthcare innovation. Yet in 2016, it became the first country in Africa to deploy the test and treat strategy for treating people with HIV. Rather than waiting for white blood cell counts to drop, patients begin treatment as soon as they are diagnosed. This strategy is backed by the WHO as it has the potential to increase the number of people who are able to access treatment, consequently reducing transmisssion and keeping people with HIV healthy and alive for longer.
While lots of good work is underway in Lesotho, and billions have been spent on HIV programmes in the country, the percentage of the population infected with HIV has remained steady and is now almost 23%. Challenges of this scale need new ideas and better ways to adopt them.
On a recent trip to Lesotho as part of a project with the United Nations Development Group, we met various UN agencies, the World Bank, government leaders, civil society actors and local businesses, to learn about the key development issues in Lesotho and to discuss the role that ‘collective intelligence’ might play in creating better country development plans. The key question Nesta and the UN are working on is: how can we increase the impact of the UN’s work by tapping into the ideas, information and possible solutions which are distributed among many partners, the private sector, and the 2 million people of Lesotho?
…our framework of collective intelligence, a set of iterative stages which can help organisations like the UN tap into the ideas, information and possible solutions of groups and individuals which are not normally involved included in the problem solving process. For each stage, we also presented a number of examples of how this works in practice.
Collective intelligence framework – stages and examples
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Better understanding the facts, data and experiences: New tools, from smartphones to online communities enable researchers, practitioners and policymakers to collect much larger amounts of data much more quickly. Organisations can use this data to target their resources at the most critical issues as well as feed into the development of products and services that more accurately meet the needs of citizens. Examples include mPower, a clinical study which used an app to collect data about people with Parkinsons disease via surveys and smartphone sensors.
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Better development of options and ideas: Beyond data collection, organisations can use digital tools to tap into the collective brainpower of citizens to come up with better ideas and options for action. Examples include participatory budgeting platforms like “Madame Mayor, I have an idea” and challenge prizes, such as USAID’s Ebola grand challenge.
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Better, more inclusive decision making: Decision making and problem solving are usually left to experts, yet citizens are often best placed to make the decisions that will affect them. New digital tools make it easier than ever for governments to involve citizens in policymaking, planning and budgeting. Our D-CENT tools enable citizen involvement in decision making in a number of fields. Another example is the Open Medicine Project, which designs digital tools for healthcare in consultation with both practitioners and patients.
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Better oversight and improvement of what is done: From monitoring corruption to scrutinising budgets, a number of tools allow broad involvement in the oversight of public sector activity, potentially increasing accountability and transparency. The Family and Friends Test is a tool that allows NHS users in the UK to submit feedback on services they have experienced. So far, 25 million pieces of feedback have been submitted. This feedback can be used to stimulate local improvement and empower staff to carry out changes… (More)”
Participatory Budgeting and Transparency in Municipal Finances
Paper by Anthony Crossman and Dov Fischer: “In the recessionary years following the 2008 financial crisis, prominent voices predicted an imminent crisis in state and municipal finances. The voices – including Bill Gates, Josh Ruah, Meredith Whitney, Paul Volcker, and Richard Ravitch – declared or implied that the road to fiscal responsibility lies in reining in the pensions and benefits of public servants. We argue that painting public employees as villains introduces divisiveness in what should be a universal goal of sound public finances. We suggest that the road to fiscal responsibility lies with budgetary transparency and widespread public knowledge of state and municipal finances. A potential key to achieving these objectives is participatory budgeting. We motivate a research question on the local government level: Does participatory budgeting increase transparency? Although it is too early to test this question on the local level, we use country-level data from the International Budgetary Partnership to explore ways to operationalize budgetary transparency in order to measure the association between participatory budgeting and budgetary transparency….(More)”
Participatory Budgeting — Not A One-Size-Fits All Approach
Alexandra Flynn at Osgood Digital Commons: “Municipal staff and politicians are moving aside to let someone else make budget decisions – community residents. This practice, known as participatory budgeting or PB, is a completely different way of managing public money. It allows the public to both identify projects and programs that they want to see in their neighbourhoods, and to vote on which ones to fund. The process was developed twenty-five years ago and there are now over 1,500 participatory budgets around the world …
There is no one-size-fits all model for participatory budgeting. The UN-Habitat suggests that the following are essential pieces for the introduction of a participatory budgeting process: the will of the mayor, public interest, clarity on administration and the decisionmaking process, education tools on the budgeting process, widely distributed information on the participatory budgeting process through all possible means, and information on infrastructure and public service shortfalls. The UN-Habitat recommends that participatory budgeting should not be used if honesty and transparency are lacking in local administration. Municipal governments should be clear that the final decision rests with the elected representatives of the local authority and that the process does not replace representative democracy with direct referendums.
Municipalities may want to consider the following issues when implementing participatory budgeting in their communities….(More)”
Power to the people: how cities can use digital technology to engage and empower citizens
Tom Saunders at NESTA: “You’re sat in city hall one day and you decide it would be a good idea to engage residents in whatever it is you’re working on – next year’s budget, for example, or the redevelopment of a run down shopping mall. How do you go about it?
In the past, you might have held resident meetings and exhibitions where people could view proposed designs or talk to city government employees. You can still do that today, but now there’s digital: apps, websites and social media. So you decide on a digital engagement strategy: you build a website or you run a social media campaign inviting feedback on your proposals. What happens next?
Two scenarios: 1) You get 50 responses, mostly from campaign groups and local political activists; or 2) you receive such a huge number of responses that you don’t know what to do with them. Besides which, you don’t have the power or budget to implement 90 per cent of the suggestions and neither do you have the time to tell people why their proposals will be ignored. The main outcome of your citizen engagement exercise seems to be that you have annoyed the very people you were trying to get buy in from. What went wrong?
Four tips for digital engagement
With all the apps and platforms out there, it’s hard to make sense of what is going on in the world of digital tools for citizen engagement. It seems there are three distinct activities that digital tools enable: delivering council services online – say applying for a parking permit; using citizen generated data to optimise city government processes and engaging citizens in democratic exercises. In Conneced Councils Nesta sets out what future models of online service delivery could look like. Here I want to focus on the ways that engaging citizens with digital technology can help city governments deliver services more efficiently and improve engagement in democratic processes.
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Resist the temptation to build an app…
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Think about what you want to engage citizens for…
Sometimes engagement is statutory: communities have to be shown new plans for their area. Beyond this, there are a number of activities that citizen engagement is useful for. When designing a citizen engagement exercise it may help to think which of the following you are trying to achieve (note: they aren’t mutually exclusive):
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Better understanding of the facts
If you want to use digital technologies to collect more data about what is happening in your city, you can buy a large number of sensors and install them across the city, to track everything from people movements to how full bins are. A cheaper and possibly more efficient way for cities to do this might involve working with people to collect this data – making use of the smartphones that an increasing number of your residents carry around with them. Prominent examples of this included flood mapping in Jakarta using geolocated tweets and pothole mapping in Boston using a mobile app.
For developed world cities, the thought of outsourcing flood mapping to citizens might fill government employees with horror. But for cities in developing countries, these technologies present an opportunity, potentially, for them to leapfrog their peers – to reach a level of coverage now that would normally require decades of investment in infrastructure to achieve. This is currently a hypothetical situation: cities around the world are only just starting to pilot these ideas and technologies and it will take a number of years before we know how useful they are to city governments.
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Generating better ideas and options
The examples above involve passive data collection. Moving beyond this to more active contributions, city governments can engage citizens to generate better ideas and options. There are numerous examples of this in urban planning – the use of Minecraft by the UN in Nairobi to collect and visualise ideas for the future development of the community, or the Carticipe platform in France, which residents can use to indicate changes they would like to see in their city on a map.
It’s all very well to create a digital suggestion box, but there is a lot of evidence that deliberation and debate lead to much better ideas. Platforms like BetterReykjavic include a debate function for any idea that is proposed. Based on feedback, the person who submitted the idea can then edit it, before putting it to a public vote – only then, if the proposal gets the required number of votes, is it sent to the city council for debate.
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Better decision making
As well as enabling better decision making by giving city government employees, better data and better ideas, digital technologies can give the power to make decisions directly to citizens. This is best encapsulated by participatory budgeting – which involves allowing citizens to decide how a percentage of the city budget is spent. Participatory budgeting emerged in Brazil in the 1980s, but digital technologies help city governments reach a much larger audience. ‘Madame Mayor, I have an idea’ is a participatory budgeting process that lets citizens propose and vote on ideas for projects in Paris. Over 20,000 people have registered on the platform and the pilot phase of the project received over 5000 submissions.
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Remember that there’s a world beyond the internet…
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Pick the right question for the right crowd…
When we talk to city governments and local authorities, they express a number of fears about citizen engagement: Fear of relying on the public for the delivery of critical services, fear of being drowned in feedback and fear of not being inclusive – only engaging with those that are online and motivated. Hopefully, thinking through the issues discussed above may help alleviate some of these fears and make city government more enthusiastic about digital engagement….(More)
Transforming governance: how can technology help reshape democracy?
Research Briefing by Matt Leighninger: “Around the world, people are asking how we can make democracy work in new and better ways. We are frustrated by political systems in which voting is the only legitimate political act, concerned that many republics don’t have the strength or appeal to withstand authoritarian figures, and disillusioned by the inability of many countries to address the fundamental challenges of health, education and economic development.
We can no longer assume that the countries of the global North have ‘advanced’ democracies, and that the nations of the global South simply need to catch up. Citizens of these older democracies have increasingly lost faith in their political institutions; Northerners cherish their human rights and free elections, but are clearly looking for something more. Meanwhile, in the global South, new regimes based on a similar formula of rights and elections have proven fragile and difficult to sustain. And in Brazil, India and other Southern countries, participatory budgeting and other valuable democratic innovations have emerged. The stage is set for a more equitable, global conversation about what we mean by democracy.
How can we adjust our democratic formulas so that they are more sustainable, powerful, fulfilling – and, well, democratic? Some of the parts of this equation may come from the development of online tools and platforms that help people to engage with their governments, with organisations and institutions, and with each other. Often referred to collectively as ‘civic technology’ or ‘civic tech’, these tools can help us map public problems, help citizens generate solutions, gather input for government, coordinate volunteer efforts, and help neighbours remain connected. If we want to create democracies in which citizens have meaningful roles in shaping public decisions and solving public problems, we should be asking a number of questions about civic tech, including:
- How can online tools best support new forms of democracy?
- What are the examples of how this has happened?
- What are some variables to consider in comparing these examples?
- How can we learn from each other as we move forward?
This background note has been developed to help democratic innovators explore these questions and examine how their work can provide answers….(More)”
Soon Your City Will Know Everything About You
Philip N. Howard at Yahoo Tech: “They call it “the Internet of Things” — the rapidly growing network of everyday objects equipped with sensors, tiny power supplies, and internet addresses. Within a few years, we will be immersed in a world of these connected devices. The best estimatessuggest that there will be about 60 billion of them by the year 2020. We’ve already seen internet-accessible sensors implanted in dolls, cars, and cows.
Currently, the biggest users of these sensor arrays are in cities, where city governments use them to collect large amounts of policy-relevant data. In Los Angeles, the crowdsourced traffic and navigation app Waze collects data that helps residents navigate the city’s choked highway networks. In Chicago, an ambitious program makes public data available to startups eager to build apps for residents. The city’s 49th ward has been experimenting with participatory budgeting and online votingto take the pulse of the community on policy issues. Chicago has also been developing the “Array of Things,” a network of sensors that track, among other things, the urban conditions that affect bronchitis.
Edmonton uses the cloud to track the condition of playground equipment. And a growing number of countries have purpose-built smart cities, like South Korea’s high tech utopia city of Songdo, where pervasive sensor networks and ubiquitous computing generate immense amounts of civic data for public services.
The drive for smart cities isn’t restricted to the developed world. Rio de Janeiro coordinates the information flows of 30 different city agencies. In Beijing and Da Nang (Vietnam), mobile phone data is actively tracked in the name of real-time traffic management. Urban sensor networks, in other words, are also developing in countries with few legal protections governing the usage of data.
These services are promising and useful. But you don’t have to look far to see why the Internet of Things has serious privacy implications. Public data is used for “predictive policing” in at least 75 cities across the U.S., including New York City, where critics maintain that using social media or traffic data to help officers evaluate probable cause is a form of digital stop-and-frisk. In Los Angeles, the security firm Palantir scoops up publicly generated data on car movements, merges it with license plate information collected by the city’s traffic cameras, and sells analytics back to the city so that police officers can decide whether or not to search a car. In Chicago, concern is growing about discriminatory profiling because so much information is collected and managed by the police department — an agency with a poor reputation for handling data in consistent and sensitive ways. In 2015, video surveillance of the police shooting Laquan McDonald outside a Burger King was erased by a police employee who ironically did not know his activities were being digitally recorded by cameras inside the restaurant.
Since most national governments have bungled privacy policy, cities — which have a reputation for being better with administrative innovations — will need to fill this gap. A few countries, such as Canada and the U.K., have independent “privacy commissioners” who are responsible for advocating for the public when bureaucracies must decide how to use or give out data. It is pretty clear that cities need such advocates too.
What would Urban Privacy Commissioners do? They would teach the public — and other government staff — about how policy algorithms work. They would evaluate the political context in which city agencies make big data investments. They would help a city negotiate contracts that protect residents’ privacy while providing effective analysis to policy makers and ensuring that open data is consistently serving the public good….(more)”.
Public Spending, by the People
Public Agenda: “From 2014 to 2015, more than 70,000 residents across the United States and Canada directly decided how their cities and districts should spend nearly $50 million in public funds through a process known as participatory budgeting (PB). PB is among the fastest growing forms of public engagement in local governance, having expanded to 46 communities in the U.S. and Canada in just 6 years.
PB is a young practice in the U.S. and Canada. Until now, there’s been no way for people to get a general understanding of how communities across the U.S. implement PB, who participates, and what sorts of projects get funded. Our report, “Public Spending, By the People” offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of PB in the U.S. and Canada.
Here’s a summary of what we found:
Overall, communities using PB have invested substantially in the process and have seen diverse participation. But cities and districts vary widely in how they implemented their processes, who participated and what projects voters decided to fund. Officials vary in how much money they allocate to PB and some communities lag far behind in their representation of lower-income and less educated residents.
The data in this report came from 46 different PB processes across the U.S. and Canada. The report is a collaboration with local PB evaluators and practitioners. The work was funded by the Democracy Fund and the Rita Allen Foundation, and completed through a research partnership with the Kettering Foundation.
You can read the findings in brief below, download a PDF of the executive summary, download the full report or scroll through charts and graphics from the report. This report is also part of an ongoing Public Agenda project on participatory budgeting – you can read about the project here.”
NEW Platform for Sharing Research on Opening Governance: The Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX)
Andrew Young: “Today, The GovLab, in collaboration with founding partners mySociety and the World Bank’s Digital Engagement Evaluation Team are launching the Open Governance Research Exchange (OGRX), a new platform for sharing research and findings on innovations in governance.
From crowdsourcing to nudges to open data to participatory budgeting, more open and innovative ways to tackle society’s problems and make public institutions more effective are emerging. Yet little is known about what innovations actually work, when, why, for whom and under what conditions.
And anyone seeking existing research is confronted with sources that are widely dispersed across disciplines, often locked behind pay walls, and hard to search because of the absence of established taxonomies. As the demand to confront problems in new ways grows so too does the urgency for making learning about governance innovations more accessible.
As part of GovLab’s broader effort to move from “faith-based interventions” toward more “evidence-based interventions,” OGRX curates and makes accessible the most diverse and up-to-date collection of findings on innovating governance. At launch, the site features over 350 publications spanning a diversity of governance innovation areas, including but not limited to:
- Behavioral Science and Nudges
- Citizen Engagement and Crowdsourcing
- Civic Technology
- Data Analysis
- Expert Networking
- Labs and Experimentation
- Open Data…
Visit ogrx.org to explore the latest research findings, submit your own work for inclusion on the platform, and share knowledge with others interested in using science and technology to improve the way we govern. (More)”
Participatory Budgeting
Two new books on Participatory Budgeting:
Participatory Budgeting in Europe: Democracy and public governance by Yves Sintomer, Anja Röcke, and Carsten Herzberg: “Can participatory budgeting help make public services really work for the public? Incorporating a range of experiments in ten different countries, this book provides the first comprehensive analysis of participatory budgeting in Europe and the effect it has had on democracy, the modernization of local government, social justice, gender mainstreaming and sustainable development. By focussing on the first decade of European participatory budgeting and analysing the results and the challenges affecting the agenda today it provides a critical appraisal of the participatory model. Detailed comparisons of European cases expose similarities and differences between political cultures and offer a strong empirical basis to discuss the theories of deliberative and participatory democracy and reveal contradictory tendencies between political systems, public administrations and democratic practices. (More)”
Participatory Budgeting in the United States: A Guide for Local Governments by Victoria Gordon, Jeffery L. Osgood, Jr., and Daniel Boden : “Although citizen engagement is a core public service value, few public administrators receive training on how to share leadership with people outside the government. Participatory Budgeting in the United States serves as a primer for those looking to understand a classic example of participatory governance, engaging local citizens in examining budgetary constraints and priorities before making recommendations to local government. Utilizing case studies and an original set of interviews with community members, elected officials, and city employees, this book provides a rare window onto the participatory budgeting process through the words and experiences of the very individuals involved. The central themes that emerge from these fascinating and detailed cases focus on three core areas: creating the participatory budgeting infrastructure; increasing citizen participation in participatory budgeting; and assessing and increasing the impact of participatory budgeting. This book provides students, local government elected officials, practitioners, and citizens with a comprehensive understanding of participatory budgeting and straightforward guidelines to enhance the process of civic engagement and democratic values in local communities….(More)