How to harness the wisdom of crowds to improve public service delivery and policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Eddie Copeland in PolicyBytes: “…In summary, government has used technology to streamline transactions and better understand the public’s opinions. Yet it has failed to use it to radically change the way it works. Have public services been reinvented? Is government smaller and leaner? Have citizens, businesses and civic groups been offered the chance to take part in the work of government and improve their own communities? On all counts the answer is unequivocally, no. What is needed, therefore, is a means to enable citizens to provide data to government to inform policymaking and to improve – or even help deliver – public services. What is needed is a Government Data Marketplace.

Government Data Marketplace

A Government Data Marketplace (GDM) would be a website that brought together public sector bodies that needed data, with individuals, businesses and other organisations that could provide it. Imagine an open data portal in reverse: instead of government publishing its own datasets to be used by citizens and businesses, it would instead publish its data needs and invite citizens, businesses or community groups to provide that data (for free or in return for payment). Just as open data portals aim to provide datasets in standard, machine-readable formats, GDM would operate according to strict open standards, and provide a consistent and automated way to deliver data to government through APIs.
How would it work? Imagine a local council that wished to know where instances of graffiti occurred within its borough. The council would create an account on GDM and publish a new request, outlining the data it required (not dissimilar to someone posting a job on a site like Freelancer). Citizens, businesses and other organisations would be able to view that request on GDM and bid to offer the service. For example, an app-development company could offer to build an app that would enable citizens to photograph and locate instances of graffiti in the borough. The app would be able to upload the data to GDM. The council could connect its own IT system to GDM to pass the data to their own database.
Importantly, the app-development company would specify via GDM how much it would charge to provide the data. Other companies and organisations could offer competing bids for delivering the same – or an even better service – at different prices. Supportive local civic hacker groups could even offer to provide the data for free. Either way, the council would get the data it needed without having to collect it for itself, whilst also ensuring it paid the best price from a number of competing providers.
Since GDM would be a public marketplace, other local authorities would be able to see that a particular company had designed a graffiti-reporting solution for one council, and could ask for the same data to be collected in their own boroughs. This would be quick and easy for the developer, as instead of having to create a bespoke solution to work with each council’s IT system, they could connect to all of them using one common interface via GDM. That would good for the company, as they could sell to a much larger market (the same solution would work for one council or all), and good for the councils, as they would benefit from cheaper prices generated from economies of scale. And since GDM would use open standards, if a council was unhappy with the data provided by one supplier, it could simply look to another company to provide the same information.
What would be the advantages of such a system? Firstly, innovation. GDM would free government from having to worry about what software it needed, and instead allow it to focus on the data it required to provide a service. To be clear: councils themselves do not need a graffiti app – they need data on where graffiti is. By focusing attention on its data needs, the public sector could let the market innovate to find the best solutions for providing it. That might be via an app, perhaps via a website, social media, or Internet of Things sensors, or maybe even using a completely new service that collected information in a radically different way. It will not matter – the right information would be provided in a common format via GDM.
Secondly, the potential cost savings of this approach would be many and considerable. At the very least, by creating a marketplace, the public sector would be able to source data at a competitive price. If several public sector bodies needed the same service via GDM, companies providing that data would be able to offer much cheaper prices for all, as instead of having to deal with hundreds of different organisations (and different interfaces) they could create one solution that worked for all of them. As prices became cheaper for standard solutions, this would in turn encourage more public sector bodies to converge on common ways of working, driving down costs still further. Yet these savings would be dwarfed by those possible if GDM could be used to source data that public sectors bodies currently have to manually collect themselves. Imagine if instead of having teams of inspectors to locate instances X, Y or Z, it could instead source the same data from citizens via GDM?
There would no limit to the potential applications to which GDM could be put by central and local government and other public sector bodies: for graffiti, traffic levels, environmental issues, education or welfare. It could be used to crowdsource facts, figures, images, map coordinates, text – anything that can be collected as data. Government could request information on areas on which it previously had none, helping them to assign their finite resources and money in a much more targeted way. New York City’s Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics has demonstrated that up to 500% increases in the efficiency of providing some public services can be achieved, if only the right data is available.
For the private sector, GDM would stimulate the growth of innovative new companies offering community data, and make it easier for them to sell data solutions across the whole of the public sector. They could pioneer in new data methods, and potentially even take over the provision of entire services which the public sector currently has to provide itself. For citizens, it would offer a means to genuinely get involved in solving issues that matter to their local communities, either by using apps made by businesses, or working to provide the data themselves.
And what about the benefits for policymaking? It is important to acknowledge that the idea of harnessing the wisdom of crowds for policymaking is currently experimental. In the case of Policy Futures Markets, some applications have also been considered to be highly controversial. So which methods would be most effective? What would they look like? In what policy domains would they provide most value? The simple fact is that we do not know. What is certain, however, is that innovation in open policymaking and crowdsourcing ideas will never be achieved until a platform is available that allows such ideas to be tried and tested. GDM could be that platform.
Public sector bodies could experiment with asking citizens for information or answers to particular, fact-based questions, or even for predictions on future outcomes, to help inform their policymaking activities. The market could then innovate to develop solutions to source that data from citizens, using the many different models for harnessing the wisdom of crowds. The effectiveness of those initiatives could then be judged, and the techniques honed. In the worst case scenario that it did not work, money would not have been wasted on building the wrong platform – GDM would continue to have value in providing data for public service needs as described above….”

Sharing Data Is a Form of Corporate Philanthropy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Matt Stempeck in HBR Blog:  “Ever since the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters was signed in 1999, satellite companies like DMC International Imaging have had a clear protocol with which to provide valuable imagery to public actors in times of crisis. In a single week this February, DMCii tasked its fleet of satellites on flooding in the United Kingdom, fires in India, floods in Zimbabwe, and snow in South Korea. Official crisis response departments and relevant UN departments can request on-demand access to the visuals captured by these “eyes in the sky” to better assess damage and coordinate relief efforts.

DMCii is a private company, yet it provides enormous value to the public and social sectors simply by periodically sharing its data.
Back on Earth, companies create, collect, and mine data in their day-to-day business. This data has quickly emerged as one of this century’s most vital assets. Public sector and social good organizations may not have access to the same amount, quality, or frequency of data. This imbalance has inspired a new category of corporate giving foreshadowed by the 1999 Space Charter: data philanthropy.
The satellite imagery example is an area of obvious societal value, but data philanthropy holds even stronger potential closer to home, where a wide range of private companies could give back in meaningful ways by contributing data to public actors. Consider two promising contexts for data philanthropy: responsive cities and academic research.
The centralized institutions of the 20th century allowed for the most sophisticated economic and urban planning to date. But in recent decades, the information revolution has helped the private sector speed ahead in data aggregation, analysis, and applications. It’s well known that there’s enormous value in real-time usage of data in the private sector, but there are similarly huge gains to be won in the application of real-time data to mitigate common challenges.
What if sharing economy companies shared their real-time housing, transit, and economic data with city governments or public interest groups? For example, Uber maintains a “God’s Eye view” of every driver on the road in a city:
stempeck2
Imagine combining this single data feed with an entire portfolio of real-time information. An early leader in this space is the City of Chicago’s urban data dashboard, WindyGrid. The dashboard aggregates an ever-growing variety of public datasets to allow for more intelligent urban management.
stempeck3
Over time, we could design responsive cities that react to this data. A responsive city is one where services, infrastructure, and even policies can flexibly respond to the rhythms of its denizens in real-time. Private sector data contributions could greatly accelerate these nascent efforts.
Data philanthropy could similarly benefit academia. Access to data remains an unfortunate barrier to entry for many researchers. The result is that only researchers with access to certain data, such as full-volume social media streams, can analyze and produce knowledge from this compelling information. Twitter, for example, sells access to a range of real-time APIs to marketing platforms, but the price point often exceeds researchers’ budgets. To accelerate the pursuit of knowledge, Twitter has piloted a program called Data Grants offering access to segments of their real-time global trove to select groups of researchers. With this program, academics and other researchers can apply to receive access to relevant bulk data downloads, such as an period of time before and after an election, or a certain geographic area.
Humanitarian response, urban planning, and academia are just three sectors within which private data can be donated to improve the public condition. There are many more possible applications possible, but few examples to date. For companies looking to expand their corporate social responsibility initiatives, sharing data should be part of the conversation…
Companies considering data philanthropy can take the following steps:

  • Inventory the information your company produces, collects, and analyzes. Consider which data would be easy to share and which data will require long-term effort.
  • Think who could benefit from this information. Who in your community doesn’t have access to this information?
  • Who could be harmed by the release of this data? If the datasets are about people, have they consented to its release? (i.e. don’t pull a Facebook emotional manipulation experiment).
  • Begin conversations with relevant public agencies and nonprofit partners to get a sense of the sort of information they might find valuable and their capacity to work with the formats you might eventually make available.
  • If you expect an onslaught of interest, an application process can help qualify partnership opportunities to maximize positive impact relative to time invested in the program.
  • Consider how you’ll handle distribution of the data to partners. Even if you don’t have the resources to set up an API, regular releases of bulk data could still provide enormous value to organizations used to relying on less-frequently updated government indices.
  • Consider your needs regarding privacy and anonymization. Strip the data of anything remotely resembling personally identifiable information (here are some guidelines).
  • If you’re making data available to researchers, plan to allow researchers to publish their results without obstruction. You might also require them to share the findings with the world under Open Access terms….”

Chief Executive of Nesta on the Future of Government Innovation

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Interview between Rahim Kanani and Geoff Mulgan, CEO of NESTA and member of the MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance: “Our aspiration is to become a global center of expertise on all kinds of innovation, from how to back creative business start-ups and how to shape innovations tools such as challenge prizes, to helping governments act as catalysts for new solutions,” explained Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation. In an interview with Mulgan, we discussed their new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, which highlights 20 of the world’s top innovation teams in government. Mulgan and I also discussed the founding and evolution of Nesta over the past few years, and leadership lessons from his time inside and outside government.
Rahim Kanani: When we talk about ‘innovations in government’, isn’t that an oxymoron?
Geoff Mulgan: Governments have always innovated. The Internet and World Wide Web both originated in public organizations, and governments are constantly developing new ideas, from public health systems to carbon trading schemes, online tax filing to high speed rail networks.  But they’re much less systematic at innovation than the best in business and science.  There are very few job roles, especially at senior levels, few budgets, and few teams or units.  So although there are plenty of creative individuals in the public sector, they succeed despite, not because of the systems around them. Risk-taking is punished not rewarded.   Over the last century, by contrast, the best businesses have learned how to run R&D departments, product development teams, open innovation processes and reasonably sophisticated ways of tracking investments and returns.
Kanani: This new report, published in partnership with Bloomberg Philanthropies, highlights 20 of the world’s most effective innovation teams in government working to address a range of issues, from reducing murder rates to promoting economic growth. Before I get to the results, how did this project come about, and why is it so important?
Mulgan: If you fail to generate new ideas, test them and scale the ones that work, it’s inevitable that productivity will stagnate and governments will fail to keep up with public expectations, particularly when waves of new technology—from smart phones and the cloud to big data—are opening up dramatic new possibilities.  Mayor Bloomberg has been a leading advocate for innovation in the public sector, and in New York he showed the virtues of energetic experiment, combined with rigorous measurement of results.  In the UK, organizations like Nesta have approached innovation in a very similar way, so it seemed timely to collaborate on a study of the state of the field, particularly since we were regularly being approached by governments wanting to set up new teams and asking for guidance.
Kanani: Where are some of the most effective innovation teams working on these issues, and how did you find them?
Mulgan: In our own work at Nesta, we’ve regularly sought out the best innovation teams that we could learn from and this study made it possible to do that more systematically, focusing in particular on the teams within national and city governments.  They vary greatly, but all the best ones are achieving impact with relatively slim resources.  Some are based in central governments, like Mindlab in Denmark, which has pioneered the use of design methods to reshape government services, from small business licensing to welfare.  SITRA in Finland has been going for decades as a public technology agency, and more recently has switched its attention to innovation in public services. For example, providing mobile tools to help patients manage their own healthcare.   In the city of Seoul, the Mayor set up an innovation team to accelerate the adoption of ‘sharing’ tools, so that people could share things like cars, freeing money for other things.  In south Australia the government set up an innovation agency that has been pioneering radical ways of helping troubled families, mobilizing families to help other families.
Kanani: What surprised you the most about the outcomes of this research?
Mulgan: Perhaps the biggest surprise has been the speed with which this idea is spreading.  Since we started the research, we’ve come across new teams being created in dozens of countries, from Canada and New Zealand to Cambodia and Chile.  China has set up a mobile technology lab for city governments.  Mexico City and many others have set up labs focused on creative uses of open data.  A batch of cities across the US supported by Bloomberg Philanthropy—from Memphis and New Orleans to Boston and Philadelphia—are now showing impressive results and persuading others to copy them.
 

Recent progress in Open Data production and consumption

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Examples from a Governmental institute (SMHI) and a collaborative EU research project (SWITCH-ON) by Arheimer, Berit; and Falkenroth, Esa: “The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) has a long tradition both in producing and consuming open data on a national, European and global scale. It is also promoting community building among water scientists in Europe by participating in and initiating collaborative projects. This presentation will exemplify the contemporary European movement imposed by the INSPIRE directive and the Open Data Strategy, by showing the progress in openness and shift in attitudes during the last decade when handling Research Data and Public Sector Information at a national European institute. Moreover, the presentation will inform about a recently started collaborative project (EU FP7 project No 603587) coordinated by SMHI and called SWITCH-ON http://water-switch-on.eu/. The project addresses water concerns and currently untapped potential of open data for improved water management across the EU. The overall goal of the project is to make use of open data, and add value to society by repurposing and refining data from various sources. SWITCH-ON will establish new forms of water research and facilitate the development of new products and services based on principles of sharing and community building in the water society. The SWITCH-ON objectives are to use open data for implementing: 1) an innovative spatial information platform with open data tailored for direct water assessments, 2) an entirely new form of collaborative research for water-related sciences, 3) fourteen new operational products and services dedicated to appointed end-users, 4) new business and knowledge to inform individual and collective decisions in line with the Europe’s smart growth and environmental objectives. The presentation will discuss challenges, progress and opportunities with the open data strategy, based on the experiences from working both at a Governmental institute and being part of the global research community.”

European Commission encourages re-use of public sector data

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Press Release: “Today, the European Commission is publishing guidelines to help Member States benefit from the revised Directive on the re-use of public sector information (PSI Directive). These guidelines explain for example how to give access to weather data, traffic data, property asset data and maps. Open data can be used as the basis for innovative value-added services and products, such as mobile apps, which encourage investment in data-driven sectors. The guidelines published today are based on a detailed consultation and cover issues such as:

  1. Licencing: guidelines on when public bodies can allow the re-use of documents without conditions or licences; gives conditions under which the re-use of personal data is possible. For example:

  • Public sector bodies should not impose licences when a simple notice is sufficient;

  • Open licences available on the web, such as several “Creative Commons” licences can facilitate the re-use of public sector data without the need to develop custom-made licences;

  • Attribution requirement is sufficient in most cases of PSI re-use.

  1. Datasets: presents five thematic dataset categories that businesses and other potential re-users are mostly interested in and could thus be given priority for being made available for re-use. For example:

  • Postcodes, national and local maps;

  • Weather, land and water quality, energy consumption, emission levels and other environmental and earth data;

  • Transport data: public transport timetables, road works, traffic information;

  • Statistics: GDP, age, health, unemployment, income, education etc.;

  • Company and business registers.

  1. Cost: gives an overview on how public sector bodies, including libraries, museums and archives, should calculate the amount they should charge re-users for data. For example:

  • Where digital documents are downloaded electronically a no‑cost policy is recommended;

  • For cost-recovery charging, any income generated in the process of collecting or producing documents, e.g. from registration fees or taxes, should be subtracted from the total costs incurred so as to establish the ‘net cost’ of collection, production, reproduction and dissemination.

European Commission Vice President @NeelieKroesEU said: “This guidance will help all of us benefit from the wealth of information public bodies hold. Opening and re-using this data will lead to many new businesses and convenient services.“

An independent report carried out by the consultants McKinsey in 2013 claimed that open data re-use could boost the global economy hugely; and a 2013 Spanish studyfound that commercial re-users in Spain could employ around 10,000 people and reach a business volume of €900 million….”

See also Speech by Neelie Kroes: Embracing the open opportunity

Meet the UK start-ups changing the world with open data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst
Sophie Curtis in The Telegraph: “Data is more accessible today than anyone could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago. From corporate databases to social media and embedded sensors, data is exploding, with total worldwide volume expected to reach 6.6 zettabytes by 2020.
Open data is information that is available for anyone to use, for any purpose, at no cost. For example, the Department for Education publishes open data about the performance of schools in England, so that companies can create league tables and citizens can find the best-performing schools in their catchment area.
Governments worldwide are working to open up more of their data. Since January 2010, more than 18,500 UK government data sets have been released via the data.gov.uk web portal, creating new opportunities for organisations to build innovative digital services.
Businesses are also starting to realise the value of making their non-personal data freely available, with open innovation leading to the creation products and services that they can benefit from….

Now a range of UK start-ups are working with the ODI to build businesses using open data, and have already unlocked a total of £2.5 million worth of investments and contracts.
Mastodon C joined the ODI start-up programme at its inception in December 2012. Shortly after joining, the company teamed up with Ben Goldacre and Open Healthcare UK, and embarked on a project investigating the use of branded statins over the far cheaper generic versions.
The data analysis identified potential efficiency savings to the NHS of £200 million. The company is now also working with the Technology Strategy Board and Nesta to help them gain better insight into their data.
Another start-up, CarbonCulture is a community platform designed to help people use resources more efficiently. The company uses high-tech metering to monitor carbon use in the workplace and help clients save money.
Organisations such as 10 Downing Street, Tate, Cardiff Council, the GLA and the UK Parliament are using the company’s digital tools to monitor and improve their energy consumption. CarbonCulture has also helped the Department of Energy and Climate Change reduce its gas use by 10 per cent.
Spend Network’s business is built on collecting the spend statements and tender documents published by government in the UK and Europe and then publishing this data openly so that anyone can use it. The company currently hosts over £1.2 trillion of transactions from the UK and over 1.8 million tenders from across Europe.
One of the company’s major breakthroughs was creating the first national, open spend analysis for central and local government. This was used to uncover a 45 per cent delay in the UK’s tendering process, holding up £22 billion of government funds to the economy.
Meanwhile, TransportAPI uses open data feeds from Traveline, Network Rail and Transport for London to provide nationwide timetables, departure and infrastructure information across all modes of public transport.
TransportAPI currently has 700 developers and organisations signed up to its platform, including individual taxpayers and public sector organisations like universities and local authorities. Travel portals, hyperlocal sites and business analytics are also integrating features, such as the ‘nearest transport’ widget, into their websites.
These are just four examples of how start-ups are using open data to create new digital services. The ODI this week announced seven new open data start-ups joining the programme, covering 3D printed learning materials, helping disabled communities, renewable energy markets, and smart cities….”

Digital Government: Turning the Rhetoric into Reality

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Miguel Carrasco and Peter Goss at BCG Perspectives: “Getting better—but still plenty of room for improvement: that’s the current assessment by everyday users of their governments’ efforts to deliver online services. The public sector has made good progress, but most countries are not moving nearly as quickly as users would like. Many governments have made bold commitments, and a few countries have determined to go “digital by default.” Most are moving more modestly, often overwhelmed by complexity and slowed by bureaucratic skepticism over online delivery as well as by a lack of digital skills. Developing countries lead in the rate of online usage, but they mostly trail developed nations in user satisfaction.
Many citizens—accustomed to innovation in such sectors as retailing, media, and financial services—wish their governments would get on with it. Of the services that can be accessed online, many only provide information and forms, while users are looking to get help and transact business. People want to do more. Digital interaction is often faster, easier, and more efficient than going to a service center or talking on the phone, but users become frustrated when the services do not perform as expected. They know what good online service providers offer. They have seen a lot of improvement in recent years, and they want their governments to make even better use of digital’s capabilities.
Many governments are already well on the way to improving digital service delivery, but there is often a gap between rhetoric and reality. There is no shortage of government policies and strategies relating to “digital first,” “e-government,” and “gov2.0,” in addition to digital by default. But governments need more than a strategy. “Going digital” requires leadership at the highest levels, investments in skills and human capital, and cultural and behavioral change. Based on BCG’s work with numerous governments and new research into the usage of, and satisfaction with, government digital services in 12 countries, we see five steps that most governments will want to take:

1. Focus on value. Put the priority on services with the biggest gaps between their importance to constituents and constituents’ satisfaction with digital delivery. In most countries, this will mean services related to health, education, social welfare, and immigration.

2. Adopt service design thinking. Governments should walk in users’ shoes. What does someone encounter when he or she goes to a government service website—plain language or bureaucratic legalese? How easy is it for the individual to navigate to the desired information? How many steps does it take to do what he or she came to do? Governments can make services easy to access and use by, for example, requiring users to register once and establish a digital credential, which can be used in the future to access online services across government.

3. Lead users online, keep users online. Invest in seamless end-to-end capabilities. Most government-service sites need to advance from providing information to enabling users to transact their business in its entirety, without having to resort to printing out forms or visiting service centers.

4. Demonstrate visible senior-leadership commitment. Governments can signal—to both their own officials and the public—the importance and the urgency that they place on their digital initiatives by where they assign responsibility for the effort.

5. Build the capabilities and skills to execute. Governments need to develop or acquire the skills and capabilities that will enable them to develop and deliver digital services.

This report examines the state of government digital services through the lens of Internet users surveyed in Australia, Denmark, France, Indonesia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the UK, and the U.S. We investigated 37 different government services. (See Exhibit 1.)…”

Government, Foundations Turn to Cash Prizes to Generate Solutions

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Megan O’Neil at the Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Government agencies and philanthropic organizations are increasingly staging competitions as a way generate interest in solving difficult technological, social, and environmental problems, according to a new report.
“The Craft of Prize Design: Lessons From the Public Sector” found that well-designed competitions backed by cash incentives can help organizations attract new ideas, mobilize action, and stimulate markets.
“Incentive prizes have transformed from an exotic open innovation to a proven innovation strategy for the public, private, and philanthropic sectors,” the report says.
Produced by Deloitte Consulting’s innovation practice, the report was financially supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Case; Joyce; John S. and James L. Knight; Kresge; and Rockefeller foundations.
The federal government has staged more than 350 prize competitions during the past five years to stimulate innovation and crowdsource solutions, according to the report. And philanthropic organizations are also fronting prizes for competitions promoting innovative responses to questions such as how to strengthen communities and encourage sustainable energy consumption.
One example cited by the report is the Talent Dividend Prize, sponsored by CEOs for Cities and the Kresge Foundation, which awards $1-million to the city that most increases its college graduation rate during a four-year period. A second example is the MIT Clean Energy Prize, co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, which offered a total of $1 million in prize money. Submissions generated $85 million in capital and research grants, according to the report.
A prize-based project should not be adopted when an established approach to solve a problem already exists or if potential participants don’t have the interest or time to work on solving a problem, the report concludes. Instead, prize designers must gauge the capacity of potential participants before announcing a prize, and make sure that it will spur the discovery of new solutions.”

Open for Business: How Open Data Can Help Achieve the G20 Growth Target

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New Report commissioned by Omydiar Network on the Business Case for Open Data: “Economic analysis has confirmed the significant contribution to economic growth and productivity achievable through an open data agenda. Governments, the private sector, individuals and communities all stand to benefit from the innovation and information that will inform investment, drive the creation of new industries, and inform decision making and research. To mark a step change in the way valuable information is created and reused, the G20 should release information as open data.
In May 2014, Omidyar Network commissioned Lateral Economics to undertake economic analysis on the potential of open data to support the G20’s 2% growth target and illustrate how an open data agenda can make a significant contribution to economic growth and productivity. Combining all G20 economies, output could increase by USD 13 trillion cumulatively over the next five years. Implementation of open data policies would thus boost cumulative G20 GDP by around 1.1 percentage points (almost 55%) of the G20’s 2% growth target over five years.
Recommendations
Importantly, open data cuts across a number of this year’s G20 priorities: attracting private infrastructure investment, creating jobs and lifting participation, strengthening tax systems and fighting corruption. This memo suggests an open data thread that runs across all G20 priorities. The more data is opened, the more it can be used, reused, repurposed and built on—in combination with other data—for everyone’s benefit.
We call on G20 economies to sign up to the Open Data Charter.
The G20 should ensure that data released by G20 working groups and themes is in line with agreed open data standards. This will lead to more accountable, efficient, effective governments who are going further to expose inadequacy, fight corruption and spur innovation.
Data is a national resource and open data is a ‘win-win’ policy. It is about making more of existing resources. We know that the cost of opening data is smaller than the economic returns, which could be significant. Methods to respect privacy concerns must be taken into account. If this is done, as the public and private sector share of information grows, there will be increasing positive returns.
The G20 opportunity
This November, leaders of the G20 Member States will meet in Australia to drive forward commitments made in the St Petersburg G20 Leaders Declaration last September and to make firm progress on stimulating growth. Actions across the G20 will include increasing investment, lifting employment and participation, enhancing trade and promoting competition.
The resulting ‘Brisbane Action Plan’ will encapsulate all of these commitments with the aim of raising the level of G20 output by at least 2% above the currently projected level over the next five years. There are major opportunities for cooperative and collective action by G20 governments.
Governments should intensify the release of existing public sector data – both government and publicly funded research data. But much more can be done to promote open data than simply releasing more government data. In appropriate circumstances, governments can mandate public disclosure of private sector data (e.g. in corporate financial reporting).
Recommendations for action

  • G20 governments should adopt the principles of the Open Data Charter to encourage the building of stronger, more interconnected societies that better meet the needs of our citizens and allow innovation and prosperity to flourish.
  • G20 governments should adopt specific open data targets under each G20 theme, as illustrated below, such as releasing open data related to beneficial owners of companies, as well revenues from extractive industries
  • G20 governments should consider harmonizing licensing regimes across the G20
  • G20 governments should adopt metrics for measuring the quantity and quality of open data publication, e.g. using the Open Data Institute’s Open Data Certificates as a bottom-up mechanism for driving the adoption of common standards.

Illustrative G20 examples
Fiscal and monetary policy
Governments possess rich real time data that is not open or accessed by government macro-economic managers. G20 governments should:

  • Open up models that lie behind economic forecasts and help assess alternative policy settings;
  • Publish spending and contractual data to enable comparative shopping by government between government suppliers.

Anti corruption
Open data may directly contribute to reduced corruption by increasing the likelihood corruption will be detected. G20 governments should:

  • Release open data related to beneficial owners of companies as well as revenues from extractive industries,
  • Collaborate on harmonised technical standards that permit the tracing of international money flows – including the tracing of beneficial owners of commercial entities, and the comparison and reconciliation of transactions across borders.

Trade
Obtaining and using trade data from multiple jurisdictions is difficult. Access fees, specific licenses, and non-machine readable formats all involve large transaction costs. G20 governments should:

  • Harmonise open data policies related to trade data.
  • Use standard trade schema and formats.

Employment
Higher quality information on employment conditions would facilitate better matching of employees to organizations, producing greater job-satisfaction and improved productivity. G20 governments should:

  • Open up centralised job vacancy registers to provide new mechanisms for people to find jobs.
  • Provide open statistical information about the demand for skills in particular areas to help those supporting training and education to hone their offerings.

Energy
Open data will help reduce the cost of energy supply and improve energy efficiency. G20 governments should:

  • Provide incentives for energy companies to publish open data from consumers and suppliers to enable cost savings through optimizing energy plans.
  • Release energy performance certifications for buildings
  • Publish real-time energy consumption for government buildings.

Infrastructure
Current infrastructure asset information is fragmented and inefficient. Exposing current asset data would be a significant first step in understanding gaps and providing new insights. G20 governments should:

  • Publish open data on governments’ infrastructure assets and plans to better understand infrastructure gaps, enable greater efficiency and insights in infrastructure development and use and analyse cost/benefits.
  • Publish open infrastructure data, including contracts via Open Contracting Partnership, in a consistent and harmonised way across G20 countries…”

Open Government Will Reshape Latin America

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Alejandro Guerrero at Medium: “When people think on the place for innovations, they typically think on innovation being spurred by large firms and small startups based in the US. And particularly in that narrow stretch of land and water called Silicon Valley.
However, the flux of innovation taking place in the intersection between technology and government is phenomenal and emerging everywhere. From the marble hallways of parliaments everywhere —including Latin America’s legislative houses— to office hubs of tech-savvy non-profits full of enthusiastic social changers —also including Latin American startups— a driving force is starting to challenge our conception of how government and citizens can and should interact. And few people are discussing or analyzing these developments.
Open Government in Latin America
The potential for Open Government to improve government’s decision-making and performance is huge. And it is particularly immense in middle income countries such as the ones in Latin America, where the combination of growing incomes, more sophisticated citizens’ demands, and broken public services is generating a large bottom-up pressure and requesting more creative solutions from governments to meet the enormous social needs, while cutting down corruption and improving governance.
It is unsurprising that citizens from all over Latin America are increasingly taking the streets and demanding better public services and more transparent institutions.
While these protests are necessarily short-lived and unarticulated —a product of growing frustration with government— they are a symptom with deeper causes that won’t go easily away, and these protests will most likely come back with increasing frequency and the unresolved frustration may eventually transmute in political platforms with more radical ideas to challenge the status quo.
Behind the scene, governments across the region still face enormous weaknesses in public management, ill-prepared and underpaid public officials carry on with their duties as the platonic idea of a demotivated workforce, and the opportunities for corruption, waste, and nepotism are plenty. The growing segment of more affluent citizens simply opt out from government and resort to private alternatives, thus exacerbating inequalities in the already most unequal region in the world. The crumbling middle classes and the poor can just resort to voicing their complaints. And they are increasingly doing so.
And here is where open government initiatives might play a transformative role, disrupting the way governments make decisions and work while empowering citizens in the process.
The preconditions for OpenGov are almost here
In Latin America, connectivity rates are growing fast (reaching 61% in 2013 for the Americas as a whole), close to 90% of the population owns a cellphone, and access to higher levels of education keeps growing (as an example, the latest PISA report indicates that Mexico went from 58% in 2003 to 70% high-schoolers in 2012). The social conditions for a stronger role of citizens in government are increasingly there.
Moreover, most Latin American countries passed transparency laws during the 2000s, creating the enabling environment for open government initiatives to flourish. It is thus unsurprising that the next generation of young government bureaucrats, on average more internet-savvy and better educated than its predecessors, is taking over and embracing innovations in government. And they are finding echo (and suppliers of ideas and apps!) among local startups and civil society groups, while also being courted by large tech corporations (think of Google or Microsoft) behind succulent government contracts associated with this form of “doing good”.
This is an emerging galaxy of social innovators, technologically-savvy bureaucrats, and engaged citizens providing a large crowd-sourcing community and an opportunity to test different approaches. And the underlying tectonic shifts are pushing governments towards that direction. For a sampler, check out the latest developments for Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Paraguay, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Uruguay and (why not?) my own country, which I will include in the review often for the surprisingly limited progress of open government in this OECD member, which shares similar institutions and challenges with Latin America.

A Road Full of Promise…and Obstacles

Most of the progress in Latin America is quite recent, and the real impact is still often more limited once you abandon the halls of the Digital Government directorates and secretarías or look if you look beyond the typical government data portal. The resistance to change is as human as laughing, but it is particularly intense among the public sector side of human beings. Politics also typically plays a enormous role in resisting transparency open government, and in a context of weak institutions and pervasive corruption, the temptation to politically block or water down open data/open government projects is just too high. Selective release of data (if any) is too frequent, government agencies often act as silos by not sharing information with other government departments, and irrational fears by policy-makers combined with adoption barriers (well explained here) all contribute to deter the progress of the open government promise in Latin America…”