public policy

Reapplying behavioral symmetry: public choice and choice architecture

Curated on March 27, 2018October 23, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Michael David Thomas in Public Choice: “New justifications for government intervention based on behavioral psychology rely on a behavioral asymmetry between expert policymakers and market participants. Public choice theory applied the behavioral symmetry assumption to policy making in order to illustrate how special interests corrupt the suppositions of benevolence on the part of policy makers. Cognitive problems associated with market choices have been used to argue for even more intervention.

If behavioral symmetry is applied to the experts and not just to market participants, problems with this approach to public policy formation become clear. Manipulation, cognitive capture, and expert bias are among the problems associated with a behavioral theory of market failure. The application of behavioral symmetry to the expanding role of choice architecture will help to limit the bias in behavioral policy. Since experts are also subject to cognitive failures, policy must include an evaluation of expert error. Like the rent-seeking literature before it, a theory of cognitive capture points out the systematic problems with a theory of asymmetry between policy experts and citizens when it comes to policy making….(More)”.

Could the open government movement shut the door on Freedom of Information

Curated on March 14, 2018May 29, 2019 by Stefaan Verhulst

Suzanne J. Piotrowski, Alex Ingrams and Daniel Berliner in The Conversation: “For democracy to work, citizens need to know what their government is doing. Then they can hold government officials and institutions accountable.

Over the last 50 years, Freedom of Information – or FOI – laws have been one of the most useful methods for citizens to learn what government is doing. These state and federal laws give people the power to request, and get, government documents. From everyday citizens to journalists, FOI laws have proven a powerful way to uncover the often-secret workings of government.

But a potential threat is emerging – from an unexpected place – to FOI laws.

We are scholars of government administration, ethics and transparency. And our research leads us to believe that while FOI laws have always faced many challenges, including resistance, evasion, and poor implementation and enforcement, the last decade has brought a different kind of challenge in the form of a new approach to transparency….

The open government movement could help FOI implementation. Government information posted online, which is a core goal of open government advocates, can reduce the number of FOI requests. Open government initiatives can explicitly promote FOI by encouraging the passage of FOI laws, offering more training for officials who fill FOI requests, and developing technologies to make it easier to process and track FOI requests.

On the other hand, the relationship between open government and FOI may not always be positive in practice.

First, as with all kinds of public policy issues, resources – both money and political attention – are inherently scarce. Government officials now have to divide their attention between FOI and other open government initiatives. And funders now have to divide their financial resources between FOI and other open government initiatives.

Second, the open government reform movement as well as the FOI movement have long depended on nonprofit advocacy groups – from the National Freedom of Information Coalition and its state affiliates to the Sunlight Foundation – to obtain and disseminate government information. This means that the financial stability of those nonprofit groups is crucial. But their efforts, as they grow, may each only get a shrinking portion of the total amount of grant money available. Freedominfo.org, a website for gathering and comparing information on FOI laws around the world, had to suspend its operations in 2017 due to resources drying up.

We believe that priorities among government officials and good government advocates may also shift away from FOI. At a time when open data is “hot,” FOI programs could get squeezed as a result of this competition. Further, by allowing governments to claim credit for more politically convenient reforms such as online data portals, the open government agenda may create a false sense of transparency – there’s a lot more government information that isn’t available in those portals.

This criticism was leveled recently against Kenya, whose government launched a high-profile open data portal for publishing data on government performance and activities in 2011, yet delayed passage of an FOI law until 2016.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, one government minister said in 2012,“I’d like to make Freedom of Information redundant, by pushing out so much data that people won’t have to ask for it.”…(More)”

Data Collaboratives can transform the way civil society organisations find solutions

Curated on February 22, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst at Disrupt & Innovate: “The need for innovation is clear: The twenty-first century is shaping up to be one of the most challenging in recent history. From climate change to income inequality to geopolitical upheaval and terrorism: the difficulties confronting International Civil Society Organisations (ICSOs) are unprecedented not only in their variety but also in their complexity. At the same time, today’s practices and tools used by ICSOs seem stale and outdated. Increasingly, it is clear, we need not only new solutions but new methods for arriving at solutions.

Data will likely become more central to meeting these challenges. We live in a quantified era. It is estimated that 90% of the world’s data was generated in just the last two years. We know that this data can help us understand the world in new ways and help us meet the challenges mentioned above. However, we need new data collaboration methods to help us extract the insights from that data.

UNTAPPED DATA POTENTIAL

For all of data’s potential to address public challenges, the truth remains that most data generated today is in fact collected by the private sector – including ICSOs who are often collecting a vast amount of data – such as, for instance, the International Committee of the Red Cross, which generates various (often sensitive) data related to humanitarian activities. This data, typically ensconced in tightly held databases toward maintaining competitive advantage or protecting from harmful intrusion, contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for innovation in how we solve public problems. But because of access restrictions and often limited data science capacity, its vast potential often goes untapped.

DATA COLLABORATIVES AS A SOLUTION

Data Collaboratives offer a way around this limitation. They represent an emerging public-private partnership model, in which participants from different areas — including the private sector, government, and civil society — come together to exchange data and pool analytical expertise.

While still an emerging practice, examples of such partnerships now exist around the world, across sectors and public policy domains. Importantly several ICSOs have started to collaborate with others around their own data and that of the private and public sector. For example:

Several civil society organisations, academics, and donor agencies are partnering in the Health Data Collaborative to improve the global data infrastructure necessary to make smarter global and local health decisions and to track progress against the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Additionally, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) built Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), a platform for sharing humanitarian from and for ICSOs – including Caritas, InterAction and others – donor agencies, national and international bodies, and other humanitarian organisations.

These are a few examples of Data Collaboratives that ICSOs are participating in. Yet, the potential for collaboration goes beyond these examples. Likewise, so do the concerns regarding data protection and privacy….(More)”.

Opening Government to Improve Outcomes

Curated on February 14, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Laura Wesley at Canada Beyond 150: “Open Government is a concept. It’s a view into government. It’s an invitation to stakeholders, citizens and civil society to help shape government decisions and actions. It is not a program or policy, yet both can be part of achieving the vision of a government that encourages civic participation, invites accountability and demonstrates transparency. Examples of open government include proactively disclosing financial and human resources-related information online and publishing expenditures that can be displayed visually or as machine-readable charts. These measures are intended to strengthen public sector management.

From my place within the public service, I see opening government as a verb. To me, it’s what we are doing to create opportunities for people – wherever they work or reside – to contribute to the activities that go into governing so that the country reflects the values of those who live in it. Engaging citizens and stakeholders in the context of policy shaping builds trust, seeks others’ perspectives, enables accountability, and allows us to collectively design better policy, programs and services.

What is engagement in the context of public policy?

Engagement processes can be structured and formal like parliamentary committees to study an issue or those that allow for anyone to provide feedback on legislation as it moves through Parliament. They can be done by elected officials or by public servants working on their behalf, for example, through processes that invite stakeholders to comment on proposed regulatory or legislative changes. They can be informal, like hosting conversations online. They can be open and transparent, moderated or unmoderated, multilateral or bilateral. There are many options, yet deciding which methods to employ at the right time can be cloaked in complexity, with much at risk if we get it wrong. So how can we teach “engagement” as a mechanism to improve policy-shaping?

Canada Beyond 150 is a participatory learning program for public servants to experience new ways of developing and delivering public policy. I was excited to learn that engagement, along with design and foresight, was one of the three pillars of the program. My team had mapped some of the system-wide gaps that needed to be filled in order to build the organizational muscle required to engage broadly; this was our chance to understand how to support new public servants through change….(More)”.

A Roadmap to a Nationwide Data Infrastructure for Evidence-Based Policymaking

Curated on February 1, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction by Julia Lane and Andrew Reamer of a Special Issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: “Throughout the United States, there is broad interest in expanding the nation’s capacity to design and implement public policy based on solid evidence. That interest has been stimulated by the new types of data that are available that can transform the way in which policy is designed and implemented. Yet progress in making use of sensitive data has been hindered by the legal, technical, and operational obstacles to access for research and evaluation. Progress has also been hindered by an almost exclusive focus on the interest and needs of the data users, rather than the interest and needs of the data providers. In addition, data stewardship is largely artisanal in nature.

There are very real consequences that result from lack of action. State and local governments are often hampered in their capacity to effectively mount and learn from innovative efforts. Although jurisdictions often have treasure troves of data from existing programs, the data are stove-piped, underused, and poorly maintained. The experience reported by one large city public health commissioner is too common: “We commissioners meet periodically to discuss specific childhood deaths in the city. In most cases, we each have a thick file on the child or family. But the only time we compare notes is after the child is dead.”¹ In reality, most localities lack the technical, analytical, staffing, and legal capacity to make effective use of existing and emerging resources.

It is our sense that fundamental changes are necessary and a new approach must be taken to building data infrastructures. In particular,

Privacy and confidentiality issues must be addressed at the beginning—not added as an afterthought.
Data providers must be involved as key stakeholders throughout the design process.
Workforce capacity must be developed at all levels.
The scholarly community must be engaged to identify the value to research and policy….

To develop a roadmap for the creation of such an infrastructure, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, together with the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, hosted a day-long workshop of more than sixty experts to discuss the findings of twelve commissioned papers and their implications for action. This volume of The ANNALS showcases those twelve articles. The workshop papers were grouped into three thematic areas: privacy and confidentiality, the views of data producers, and comprehensive strategies that have been used to build data infrastructures in other contexts. The authors and the attendees included computer scientists, social scientists, practitioners, and data producers.

This introductory article places the research in both an historical and a current context. It also provides a framework for understanding the contribution of the twelve articles….(More)”.

How the Data That Internet Companies Collect Can Be Used for the Public Good

Curated on January 25, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst and Andrew Young at Harvard Business Review: “…In particular, the vast streams of data generated through social media platforms, when analyzed responsibly, can offer insights into societal patterns and behaviors. These types of behaviors are hard to generate with existing social science methods. All this information poses its own problems, of complexity and noise, of risks to privacy and security, but it also represents tremendous potential for mobilizing new forms of intelligence.

In a recent report, we examine ways to harness this potential while limiting and addressing the challenges. Developed in collaboration with Facebook, the report seeks to understand how public and private organizations can join forces to use social media data — through data collaboratives — to mitigate and perhaps solve some our most intractable policy dilemmas.

Data Collaboratives: Public-Private Partnerships for Our Data Age

For all of data’s potential to address public challenges, most data generated today is collected by the private sector. Typically ensconced in corporate databases, and tightly held in order to maintain competitive advantage, this data contains tremendous possible insights and avenues for policy innovation. But because the analytical expertise brought to bear on it is narrow, and limited by private ownership and access restrictions, its vast potential often goes untapped.

Data collaboratives offer a way around this limitation. They represent an emerging public-private partnership model, in which participants from different areas , including the private sector, government, and civil society , can come together to exchange data and pool analytical expertise in order to create new public value. While still an emerging practice, examples of such partnerships now exist around the world, across sectors and public policy domains….

Professionalizing the Responsible Use of Private Data for Public Good

For all its promise, the practice of data collaboratives remains ad hoc and limited. In part, this is a result of the lack of a well-defined, professionalized concept of data stewardship within corporations. Today, each attempt to establish a cross-sector partnership built on the analysis of social media data requires significant and time-consuming efforts, and businesses rarely have personnel tasked with undertaking such efforts and making relevant decisions.

As a consequence, the process of establishing data collaboratives and leveraging privately held data for evidence-based policy making and service delivery is onerous, generally one-off, not informed by best practices or any shared knowledge base, and prone to dissolution when the champions involved move on to other functions.

By establishing data stewardship as a corporate function, recognized within corporations as a valued responsibility, and by creating the methods and tools needed for responsible data-sharing, the practice of data collaboratives can become regularized, predictable, and de-risked.

If early efforts toward this end — from initiatives such as Facebook’s Data for Good efforts in the social media space and MasterCard’s Data Philanthropy approach around finance data — are meaningfully scaled and expanded, data stewards across the private sector can act as change agents responsible for determining what data to share and when, how to protect data, and how to act on insights gathered from the data.

Still, many companies (and others) continue to balk at the prospect of sharing “their” data, which is an understandable response given the reflex to guard corporate interests. But our research has indicated that many benefits can accrue not only to data recipients but also to those who share it. Data collaboration is not a zero-sum game.

With support from the Hewlett Foundation, we are embarking on a two-year project toward professionalizing data stewardship (and the use of data collaboratives) and establishing well-defined data responsibility approaches. We invite others to join us in working to transform this practice into a widespread, impactful means of leveraging private-sector assets, including social media data, to create positive public-sector outcomes around the world….(More)”.

Open Data Risk Assessment

Curated on January 25, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Future of Privacy Forum: “The transparency goals of the open data movement serve important social, economic, and democratic functions in cities like Seattle. At the same time, some municipal datasets about the city and its citizens’ activities carry inherent risks to individual privacy when shared publicly. In 2016, the City of Seattle declared in its Open Data Policy that the city’s data would be “open by preference,” except when doing so may affect individual privacy. To ensure its Open Data Program effectively protects individuals, Seattle committed to performing an annual risk assessment and tasked the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) with creating and deploying an initial privacy risk assessment methodology for open data.

This Report provides tools and guidance to the City of Seattle and other municipalities navigating the complex policy, operational, technical, organizational, and ethical standards that support privacyprotective open data programs. Although there is a growing body of research regarding open data privacy, open data managers and departmental data owners need to be able to employ a standardized methodology for assessing the privacy risks and benefits of particular datasets internally, without access to a bevy of expert statisticians, privacy lawyers, or philosophers. By optimizing its internal processes and procedures, developing and investing in advanced statistical disclosure control strategies, and following a flexible, risk-based assessment process, the City of Seattle – and other municipalities – can build mature open data programs that maximize the utility and openness of civic data while minimizing privacy risks to individuals and addressing community concerns about ethical challenges, fairness, and equity.

This Report first describes inherent privacy risks in an open data landscape, with an emphasis on potential harms related to re-identification, data quality, and fairness. To address these risks, the Report includes a Model Open Data Benefit-Risk Analysis (“Model Analysis”). The Model Analysis evaluates the types of data contained in a proposed open dataset, the potential benefits – and concomitant risks – of releasing the dataset publicly, and strategies for effective de-identification and risk mitigation. This holistic assessment guides city officials to determine whether to release the dataset openly, in a limited access environment, or to withhold it from publication (absent countervailing public policy considerations). …(More)”.

Congress Is Broken. CrowdLaw Could Help Fix It.

Curated on January 23, 2018August 3, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Beth Noveck in Forbes: “The way Congress makes law is simply no longer viable. In David Schoenbrod’s recent book DC Confidential, he outlines “five tricks” politicians use to take credit in front of television cameras in order to further political party agendas while passing the blame and the buck to future generations for bad legislation. Although Congress makes the laws that govern all Americans, people also feel disenfranchised. One study concludes that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” But technology offers the promise of improving both the quality and accountability of lawmaking by opening up the process to more and more diverse expertise and input from the public at every stage of the legislative process. We call such open and participatory lawmaking: “CrowdLaw.”

Moving Beyond the Ballot Box

Around the world, there are already over two dozen examples of local legislatures and national parliaments turning to the internet to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of the laws they make; we need to do the same here if we are to begin to fix congressional dysfunction.

For example, Finland’s Citizen’s Initiative Act at the national level, like Madrid’s Decide initiative at the local level, allows any member of the public with the requisite signatures to propose new legislation, meaning that not only interest groups and politicians get to set the agenda for lawmaking.

In France, the Parlement & Citoyens platform allows the public to respond to a problem posed by a representative by contributing information about both causes and solutions. Relevant citizen input is then synthesized, debated, and incorporated into the resulting draft legislation. This brings greater empiricism into the legislative process through public contribution of expertise….(More)”.

‘Politics done like science’: Critical perspectives on psychological governance and the experimental state

Curated on January 20, 2018October 24, 2018 by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Rhys Jones and Mark Whitehead There has been a growing academic recognition of the increasing significance of psychologically – and behaviourally – informed modes of governance in recent years in a variety of different states. We contend that this academic research has neglected one important theme, namely the growing use of experiments as a way of developing and testing novel policies. Drawing on extensive qualitative and documentary research, this paper develops critical perspectives on the impacts of the psychological sciences on public policy, and considers more broadly the changing experimental form of modern states. The tendency for emerging forms of experimental governance to be predicated on very narrow, socially disempowering, visions of experimental knowledge production is critiqued. We delineate how psychological governance and emerging forms of experimental subjectivity have the potential to enable more empowering and progressive state forms and subjectivities to emerge through more open and collective forms of experimentation…(More)”.