New book by Alon Peled: “The computer systems of government agencies are notoriously complex. New technologies are piled on older technologies, creating layers that call to mind an archaeological dig. Obsolete programming languages and closed mainframe designs offer barriers to integration with other agency systems. Worldwide, these unwieldy systems waste billions of dollars, keep citizens from receiving services, and even—as seen in interoperability failures on 9/11 and during Hurricane Katrina—cost lives. In this book, Alon Peled offers a groundbreaking approach for enabling information sharing among public sector agencies: using selective incentives to “nudge” agencies to exchange information assets. Peled proposes the establishment of a Public Sector Information Exchange (PSIE), through which agencies would trade information.
After describing public sector information sharing failures and the advantages of incentivized sharing, Peled examines the U.S. Open Data program, and the gap between its rhetoric and results. He offers examples of creative public sector information sharing in the United States, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Iceland. Peled argues that information is a contested commodity, and draws lessons from the trade histories of other contested commodities—including cadavers for anatomical dissection in nineteenth-century Britain. He explains how agencies can exchange information as a contested commodity through a PSIE program tailored to an individual country’s needs, and he describes the legal, economic, and technical foundations of such a program. Touching on issues from data ownership to freedom of information, Peled offers pragmatic advice to politicians, bureaucrats, technologists, and citizens for revitalizing critical information flows.”
Driving Innovation With Open Data
Research Article by The GovLab’s Joel Gurin (Chapter 6 in the report, “The Future of Data-Driven Innovation.”): The chapters in this report provide ample evidence of the power of data and its business potential. But like any business resource, data is only valuable if the benefit of using it outweighs its cost. Data collection, management, distribution, quality control, and application all come at a price—a potential obstacle for companies of any size, though especially for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Over the last several years, however, the “I” of data’s return on investment (ROI) has become less of a hurdle, and new data-driven companies are developing rapidly as a result. One major reason is that governments at the federal, state, and local level are making more data available at little or no charge for the private sector and the public to use. Governments collect data of all kinds—including scientific, demographic, and financial data—at taxpayer expense.
Now, public sector agencies and departments are increasingly repaying that public investment by making their data available to all for free or at a low cost. This is Open Data. While there are still costs in putting the data to use, the growing availability of this national resource is becoming a significant driver for hundreds of new businesses. This chapter describes the growing potential of Open Data and the data-driven innovation it supports, the types of data and applications that are most promising, and the policies that will encourage innovation going forward. Read and download this article in PDF format. “
Why we’re failing to get the most out of open data
Victoria Lemieux at the WEF Blog: “An unprecedented number of individuals and organizations are finding ways to explore, interpret and use Open Data. Public agencies are hosting Open Data events such as meetups, hackathons and data dives. The potential of these initiatives is great, including support for economic development (McKinsey, 2013), anti-corruption (European Public Sector Information Platform, 2014) and accountability (Open Government Partnership, 2012). But is Open Data’s full potential being realized?
A news item from Computer Weekly casts doubt. A recent report notes that, in the United Kingdom, poor data quality is hindering the government’s Open Data program. The report goes on to explain that – in an effort to make the public sector more transparent and accountable – UK public bodies have been publishing spending records every month since November 2010. The authors of the report, who conducted an analysis of 50 spending-related data releases by the Cabinet Office since May 2010, found that that the data was of such poor quality that using it would require advanced computer skills.
Far from being a one-off problem, research suggests that this issue is ubiquitous and endemic. Some estimates indicate that as much as 80 percent of the time and cost of an analytics project is attributable to the need to clean up “dirty data” (Dasu and Johnson, 2003).
In addition to data quality issues, data provenance can be difficult to determine. Knowing where data originates and by what means it has been disclosed is key to being able to trust data. If end users do not trust data, they are unlikely to believe they can rely upon the information for accountability purposes. Establishing data provenance does not “spring full blown from the head of Zeus.” It entails a good deal of effort undertaking such activities as enriching data with metadata – data about data – such as the date of creation, the creator of the data, who has had access to the data over time and ensuring that both data and metadata remain unalterable.
Similarly, if people think that data could be tampered with, they are unlikely to place trust in it; full comprehension of data relies on the ability to trace its origins….”
Open Source Governance—A More Ambitious Cousin of Collaborative Governance
New paper by Ani Matei & Sergiu Ioan Irimia in the International Journal of Public Administration: “Open source represents a model generally known for its success in software production. The objective of this article is to establish a new strategic approach of using open source development principles for managing collaborative arrangements between citizens and public administration. The identity of open source governance is developed by highlighting how it is different from its main “competitor”—collaborative governance, and from other two popular concepts—open government and e-democracy. The other sections are designed to answer to public managers regarding why and what to adopt from this governance model for public sector services.”
France Announces An Ambitious New Data Strategy
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch: “After four long months of speculations and political maneuvering, the French Government finally announced that France is getting its first Chief Data Officer….
First, it’s all about pursuing Etalab’s work when it comes to open data. The small team acted as a startup and quickly iterated on its central platform and multiple side projects. It came up with pragmatic solutions to complicated public issues, such as public health data or fiscal policy simulation. France is now the fourth country in the United Nations e-government survey.
Now, the CDO will have even more official and informal legitimacy to ask other ministries to release data sets. It’s not just about following open government theories — it’s not just about releasing public data to serve the public interest. The team can also simulate new policies before they are implemented, and share recommendations with the ministries working on these new policies.
When a new policy is written, the Government should evaluate all the ins and outs of it before implementation. Citizens should expect no less from their government.
At a larger scale, this nomination is very significant for the French Government. For years, its digital strategy was mostly about finding the best way to communicate through the Internet. But when it came to creating new policies, computers couldn’t help them.
Also announced today, the Government is modernizing and unifying its digital platform between all its ministries and services — it’s never too late. The CDO team will work closely with the DISIC to design this platform — it should be a multi-year project.
Finally, the Government will invest $160 million (€125 million) to innovate in the public sector when it makes sense. In other words, the government will work with private companies (and preferably young innovative companies) to improve the infrastructure that powers the public sector.
France is the first European country to get a Chief Data Officer…”
DrivenData
DrivenData Blog: “As we begin launching our first competitions, we thought it would be a good idea to lay out what exactly we’re trying to do and why….
At DrivenData, we want to bring cutting-edge practices in data science and crowdsourcing to some of the world’s biggest social challenges and the organizations taking them on. We host online challenges, usually lasting 2-3 months, where a global community of data scientists competes to come up with the best statistical model for difficult predictive problems that make a difference.
Just like every major corporation today, nonprofits and NGOs have more data than ever before. And just like those corporations, they are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their data. We work with mission-driven organizations to identify specific predictive questions that they care about answering and can use their data to tackle.
Then we host the online competitions, where experts from around the world vie to come up with the best solution. Some competitors are experienced data scientists in the private sector, analyzing corporate data by day, saving the world by night, and testing their mettle on complex questions of impact. Others are smart, sophisticated students and researchers looking to hone their skills on real-world datasets and real-world problems. Still more have extensive experience with social sector data and want to bring their expertise to bear on new, meaningful challenges – with immediate feedback on how well their solution performs.
Like any data competition platform, we want to harness the power of crowds combined with the increasing prevalence of large, relevant datasets. Unlike other data competition platforms, our primary goal is to create actual, measurable, lasting positive change in the world with our competitions. At the end of each challenge, we work with the sponsoring organization to integrate the winning solutions, giving them the tools to drive real improvements in their impact….
We are launching soon and we want you to join us!
If you want to get updates about our launch this fall with exciting, real competitions, please sign up for our mailing list here and follow us on Twitter: @drivendataorg.
If you are a data scientist, feel free to create an account and start playing with our first sandbox competitions.
If you are a nonprofit or public sector organization, and want to squeeze every drop of mission effectiveness out of your data, check out the info on our site and let us know! “
18F launches alpha foia.gov in a bid to reboot Freedom of Information Act requests for the 21st century
at E Pluribus Unum: “18F, the federal government’s new IT development shop, has launched a new look at the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in the form of a open source application hosted on Github. Today’s announcement is the most substantive evidence yet that the Obama administration will indeed modernize the Freedom of Information Act, as the United States committed to doing in its second National Action Plan on Open Government. Given how poor some of the “FOIA portals” and underlying software that supports them exists is at all level of government, this is tremendous news for anyone that cares about the use of technology to support open government.
Notably, 18F already has a prototype (pictured above) online that shows what a consolidated request submission hub could look like and plans to iterate upon it. This is a perfect example of “lean government,” or the application of lean startup principles and agile development to the creation of citizen-centric services in the public sector. Demonstrating its commitment to developing free and open source software in the open, 18F asked the public to follow the process online at their FOIA software repository on Github, send them feedback or even contribute to the project….”
Public Innovation through Collaboration and Design
New book edited by Christopher Ansell, and Jacob Torfing: “While innovation has long been a major topic of research and scholarly interest for the private sector, it is still an emerging theme in the field of public management. While ‘results-oriented’ public management may be here to stay, scholars and practitioners are now shifting their attention to the process of management and to how the public sector can create ‘value’.
One of the urgent needs addressed by this book is a better specification of the institutional and political requirements for sustaining a robust vision of public innovation, through the key dimensions of collaboration, creative problem-solving, and design. This book brings together empirical studies drawn from Europe, the USA and the antipodes to show how these dimensions are important features of public sector innovation in many Western democracies with different conditions and traditions.
This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.
Contents:
This volume provides insights for practitioners who are interested in developing an innovation strategy for their city, agency, or administration and will be essential reading for scholars, practitioners and students in the field of public policy and public administration.
Contents:
1. Collaboration and Design: New Tools for Public Innovation (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing) 2. Necessity as the Mother of Reinvention: Discourses of Innovation in Local Government (Steven Griggs and Helen Sullivan) 3. Reconstructing Bureaucracy for Service Innovation in the Governance Era (Robert Agranoff) 4. The Complexity of Governance: Challenges for Public Sector Innovation (Susanne Boch Waldorff, Lone Søderkvist Kristensen, and Betina Vind Ebbesen) 5. The Impact of Collaboration on Innovative Projects: A Study of Dutch Water Management (Nanny Bressers) 6. Understanding Innovative Regional Collaboration: Metagovernance and Boundary Objects as Mechanisms (Stig Montin, Magnus Johansson Joakim Forsemalm) 7. The Importance of Joint Schemas and Brokers in Promoting Collaboration for Innovation (Barbara Gray and Hong Ren) 8. Collaborative Networks and Innovation: The Negotiation-Management Nexus (Robyn Keast and Jennifer Waterhouse) 9. Innovative Leadership Through Networks (Katrien Termeer and Sibout Nooteboom) 10. Designing Collaborative Policy Innovation: Lessons from a Danish Municipality (Annika Agger and Eva Sørensen) 11. Design Attitude as an Innovation Catalyst (Christian Bason) 12. Collaborating on Design – Designing Collaboration (Christopher Ansell and Jacob Torfing)“
Let the games begin: how government is using ‘gamification’ to change public behaviour
Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “Governments across the region are turning to “gamification” – otherwise known as “game science” – to help create new ways to persuade their populations.
FutureGov recently attended a session at GovCamp Australia where officials discussed the potential of this new approach. It has pulled together the best examples of successful government games, and sought advice from the private sector on building something that will achieve results.
How it works
How does gamification work? It creates an environment where people play games to win prizes or compete against one another, all while learning about about a new message or behaving in a certain, desirable manner. The approach can be used by every type of agency, and has been trialled on public sector campaigns including military recruitment, physical fitness, speeding prevention, consumer rights awareness and even making citizens engage with census data.
For example, it was used by the Department of Justice of Victoria, Australia when they wanted to make young people aware of consumer protection laws. Discussion of legal concepts did not seem particularly appealing, so they took a different tack by launching a game called Party for Your Rights. “It’s targeted at young people, teaching them their rights through the activity of going to a party. It’s very appealing, with retro 1980s graphics and music,” explained Paul Chandley, general manager of digital strategy and engagement in the Victorian Department of Justice.
Since its launch in June 2014, it has been played 23,000 times. A survey found that 96% of players surveyed said they felt either more informed of their rights or more confident about using their rights after interacting with the game.
The game proved popular in Australia and there are plenty of other examples of successful games built by government agencies – FutureGov has profiled the six best examples of gamification in government.…”
See also:
The Emergence of Government Innovation Teams
Hollie Russon Gilman at TechTank: “A new global currency is emerging. Governments understand that people at home and abroad evaluate them based on how they use technology and innovative approaches in their service delivery and citizen engagement. This raises opportunities, and critical questions about the role of innovation in 21st century governance.
Bloomberg Philanthropies and Nesta, the UK’s Innovation foundation, recently released a global report highlighting 20 government innovation teams. Importantly, the study included teams that were established and funded by all levels of government (city, regional and national), and aims to find creative solutions to seemingly intractable solutions. This report features 20 teams across six continents and features some basic principles and commonalities that are instructive for all types of innovators, inside and outside, of government.
Using Government to Locally Engage
One of the challenges of representational democracy is that elected officials and government officials spend time in bureaucracies isolated from the very people they aim to serve. Perhaps there can be different models. For example, Seoul’s Innovation Bureau is engaging citizens to re-design and re-imagine public services. Seoul is dedicated to becoming a Sharing City; including Tool Kit Centers where citizens can borrow machinery they would rarely use that would also benefit the whole community. This approach puts citizens at the center of their communities and leverages government to work for the people…
As I’ve outlined in a earlier TechTank post, there are institutional constraints for governments to try the unknown. There are potential electoral costs, greater disillusionment, and gaps in vital service delivery. Yet, despite all of these barriers there are a variety of promising tools. For example, Finland has Sitra, an Innovation fund, whose mission is to foster experimentation to transform a diverse set of policy issues including sustainable energy and healthcare. Sitra invests in both the practical research and experiments to further public sector issues as well as invest in early stage companies.
We need a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and challenges, of innovation in government. Luckily there are many researchers, think-tanks, and organizations beginning analysis. For example, Professor and Associate Dean Anita McGahan, of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, calls for a more strategic approach toward understanding the use of innovation, including big data, in the public sector…”