Data portals and citizen engagement: participation in context

I’m cross-posting this from a deep-dive series of working drafts I’ve been developing for The Open Data Institute, providing ground work for exploring potential future developments that could support data portals and platforms to function better as tools of civic participation. It provides a general history of the development of citizen participation, primarily in the UK context, that I hope may be of interest to a wide range of readers of this blog, as well as setting this in the context of data portals as participation tools (possibly more of a niche interest..). You can find the full series of posts which talk a lot more about data portals, here.

A key cause of data portal dissatisfaction is the apparent failure of portals to provide effective platforms for citizen participation in government and governance. The supposed promise of portals to act as participatory platforms can be read into the 2009 Obama Open Government Memo on transparent, participatory and collaborative government, and the launch of data.gov.uk amongst the hackathons and experiments with online engagement that surrounded the Power of Information report and taskforce. Popular portal maturity models have envisioned them evolving to become participatory platforms [1] [2] and whilst some work has acknowledged that there are different forms of participatory engagement with the state, ranging from monitorial democracy, to the co-production of public services [3], the mechanisms by which portals can help drive participation, and the forms of participation in focus, have been frequently under-theorised.

In the current policy landscape, there is a renewed interest in some forms of participatory engagement. Citizens assemblies, deliberative fora, and other forms of mini-public are being widely adopted as ways to find or legitimate ways forward on thorny and complex issues. Amidst concerns about public trust, democratic control, and embedded biases, there are calls for participatory processes to surround the design and deployment of algorithmic systems in particular [4], creating new pressure on participatory methods to engage effectively with data. However, public participation has a long history, and these latest trends represent just one facet of the kinds of processes and modes of engagement we need to have in mind when considering the role of data portals in supporting citizen engagement. In this short piece I want to briefly survey the history of public participation, and to identify potential insights for the development of data portals as a support for participatory processes. My focus here is primarily on the UK landscape, although I’ll try and draw upon wider global examples where relevant.

A short history of citizen participation

In the blog post ‘A brief history of participation’, historian Jo Guldi explores the roots of participatory governance ideas, tracing them as far back as the early mediaeval church, and articulating ideas of participatory governance as a reaction to the centralised bureaucracies of the modern nation state. Guldi points to the emergence of “a holistic political theory of self-rule applicable to urban planning and administration of everyday life” emerging in the 1960s, driven by mass youth movements, mass media, and new more inclusive notions of citizenship in an era of emerging civil rights. In essence, as the franchise, and education, expanded, default models of ‘elite governance’ came to be challenged by the idea that the public should have a greater voice in day to day decision making, if not greater direct ownership and control of public authority.

In Guldi’s global narrative, the emphasis of the 1970s and 80s was then on applying participatory ideas within the field of International Development, particularly participatory mapping – in which marginalised citizens are empowered to construct their own maps of territory: in a sense creating counter-data to secure land rights, and protect customary resources from logging or other incursions. Guldi points in particular to the role of institutions such as the World Bank in promoting participatory development practises, a theme also found in Leal’s ‘Participation: the ascendancy of a buzzword in the neo-liberal era[5]. Leal highlights how, although participatory methods have their roots in the emancipatory pedagogy of Paulo Friere and in Participatory Action Research, which aims at a transformation of individual capabilities alongside wider cultural, political and economic structures – the adoption of participation as a tool in development can act in practice as a tool of co-option: depoliticising critical decisions and offering participants only the option to modify, rather than fundamentally challenge, directions of development. Sherry Arnstein’s seminal ‘A ladder of citizen participation’ article [6], published in 1969 in an urban planning journal, has provided a reliable lens for asking whether participation in practice constitutes decoration, tokenism, or genuine citizen power.

Illustration of the ladder of participation from Arnstein’s original article, showing eight rungs, and three categories of participation, from ‘nonparticipation’, to ‘degrees of tokenism’ and up to ‘degrees of citizen power’.

In the UK, whilst radical participatory theory influenced grassroots community development work throughout the 1980s, it was with the election of the New Labour Government in 1997 that participation gained significant profile in mainstream policy-making: with major initiatives around devolution, the ‘duty to consult’, and an explosion of interest in participatory methods and initiatives. Fenwick and McMillan describe participation for New Labour as ‘something at the heart of the guiding philosophy of government’, framed in part as a reaction to the consumer-oriented marketised approach to public management of the Thatcher era.  Yet, they also highlight a tension between an ideological commitment to participation, and a managerial approach to policy that sought to also ‘manage’ participation and its outcomes. Over this period, a particular emphasis was placed on participation in local governance, leading top-down participation agendas to meet with grassroots communities and community development practices that had been forged through, and often in opposition to, recent decades of Conservative rule. At its best, this connection of participatory skill with space to apply it provided space for more radical experiments with community power. At its worst, and increasingly over time, it led to co-option of independent community actors within state-directed participation: leading ultimately to a significant loss of both state-managed and community-driven participatory practice when the ‘era of austerity’ arrived in 2010.

The 2000s saw a proliferation of guides, handbooks and resources (e.g.) outlining different methods for citizen participation: from consultation, to participatory budgeting, citizens panels, appreciative inquiries, participatory research, and youth fora. Digital tools were initially seen broadly as another ‘method’ of participation, although over time understanding (albeit still relatively limited) has developed of how to integrate digital platforms as part of wider participatory processes – and as digital development has become more central in policy making, user-involvement methodologies from software development have to be critically considered as part of the citizen participation toolbox. Concepts of co-production, co-design and user-involvement in service design have also increasingly provided a link-point between trends in digital development and citizen participation.

Looking at the citizen participation landscape in 2021, two related models appear to be particularly prominent: deliberative dialogues, and citizens assemblies. Both are predicated on bringing together broadly representative groups of citizens, and providing them with ‘expert input’, generally through workshop-based processes, and encouraging deliberation to inform policy, or to generate recommendations from an assembly. Notably, deliberative methods have been adopted particularly in relation to science and technology, seen as a way to secure public trust in emerging scientific or technological practice, including data sharing, AI and use of algorithmic systems. Whilst deliberative workshops and citizens assemblies are by no means the only participatory methods in use in 2021, they are notable for their reliance on expert input: although the extent to which direct access to data features in any of these processes is perhaps a topic for further research.

By right, or by results

Before I turn to look specifically at the intersection of data and participation, it is useful to briefly remark on two distinct lines of argument for participation: values or rights-based, vs. results based.

The rights-based approach can be found both in theories of participatory democracy that argue democratic mandate is not passed periodically from voters to representatives, but is constantly renewed through participatory activities engaging broad groups of citizens, and in human-rights frameworks, including notably the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), which establishes children’s rights to appropriate participation in all decisions that affect them. Guidance on realising participation rights adopted in 2018 by the UN Human Rights Council explicitly makes a link with access to information rights, including proactive disclosure of information, efforts to make this accessible to marginalised groups, and independent oversight mechanisms.

A results-based approach to citizen participation is based on the idea that citizen engagement leads to better outcomes: including supporting more efficient and effective delivery of public services, securing greater citizen trust in the decisions that are made, or reducing the likelihood of decisions being challenged. Whilst some user and human-centred design methodologies may make reference to rights-based justifications for inclusion of often marginalised stakeholders, in general, these approaches are rooted more in a result-based than a rights-based framework: in short, many firms and government agencies have discovered projects have greater chance of success when you adopt consultative and participatory design approaches.

Participation, technology and data

Although there have been experiments with online participation since the earliest days of computer mediated communication, the rise of Web 2.0 brought with it substantial new interest in online platforms as tools of citizen engagement: both enabling insights to be gathered from existing online social spaces and digital traces, and supporting more emergent, ad-hoc or streamlined modes of co-creation, co-production, or simply communication with the state (as, for example, in MySociety’s online tools to write to public representatives, or report street scene issues in need of repair). There was also a shift to cast the private sector as a third stakeholder group within participatory processes – primarily framed as originator of ideas, but also potentially as the target of participation-derived messages. As the Open Government Partnership’s declaration puts it, states would “commit to creating mechanisms to enable greater collaboration between governments and civil society organizations and businesses.”

With rising interest in open data, a number of new modes and theories of participation came to the fore: the hackathon [7][8][9], the idea of the armchair auditor [10], and the idea of ‘government as a platform’ [11][12] each invoke particular visions of citizen-state and private-sector engagement.

A focus in some areas of government on bringing in greater service-design approaches, and rhetoric, if not realities, of data-driven decision making have also created new spaces for particular forms of participatory process, albeit state-initiated, rather than citizen created. And recent discussions around data portals and citizen participation have often centred on the question of how to get citizens to engage more with data, rather than how data can support existing or potential topic-focussed public participation.

In my 2010 MSc thesis on ‘Open Data, Democracy & Public Sector reform: open government data use from data.gov.uk’ I developed an initial typology of civic Open Government Data uses, based on a distinction between formal political participation (representative democracy), collaborative/community based participation (i.e. participatory democracy or utility-based engagement), and market participation (i.e. citizen as consumer). In this model, the role data plays, and the mechanisms it works through, vary substantially: from data being used through media to inform citizen scrutiny of government, and ultimately discipline political action through voting; to data enabling citizens to collaborate in service design, or independent problem solving beyond the state; and to the consumer-citizen driving change through better informed choices of access to public services. In other words, greater access to data theoretically enables a host of different genres of participation (albeit there’s a normative question over how meaningful or equitable each of these different forms of participation are) – and many of these do not rely on the state hosting or convening the participation process.

What is notable about each of these ‘mechanisms of change’ is that data accessed from a portal is just one component of a wider process: be that the electoral process in its entirety, a co-design initiative at the community level, or some national market-mechanism supported by intermediaries translating ‘raw data’ into more accessible information that can drive decisions over which hospital to use, or which school to choose for a child. However, whilst many participatory initiatives have suffered in an era of austerity, and enthusiasm for the web as an open agora for public debate has waned in light of a more hostile social media environment, portals have persisted as a primary expression of the ‘open government’ era: leaving considerable pressure placed upon the portal to deliver not only transparency, but also participation and collaboration too.

Citizen participation and data portals

What can we take from this brief survey of citizen participation when it comes to thinking about the role of data portals?

Firstly, the idea that portals as technical platforms can meaningfully ‘host’ participation in its entirety appears more or less a dead-end. Participation takes many varied forms, and whilst portals might be designed (and organisationally supported) in ways that position them as part of participatory democracy, they should not be the destination.

Secondly, different methods of citizen participation have different needs. Some require access to simple granular ‘facts’ to equalise the balance of power between citizen and state. Others look for access to data that can support deep research to understand problems, or experimental prototyping to develop solutions. Whilst in the former case, quick search and discovery of individual data-points is likely to be the priority, in these latter cases, greater understanding of the context of a dataset is likely to be particularly valuable, as would, in many cases, the ability to be in contact with a datasets’ steward.

Third, the current deliberative wave appears as likely to have data as its subject (or at least, the use of data in AI, algorithmic systems or other policy tools), as it is to use open data as an input to deliberation. This raises interesting possibilities for portals to surface and support great deliberation around how data is collected and used, as a precursor to supporting more effective use of that data to drive policy making.

Fourth, citizen participation has rarely been a ‘mass’ phenomena. Various research suggest that at any time less than 10% of the population are engaged in any meaningful form of civic participation, and only a percentage of these are likely to be involved in forms of engagement that are particularly likely to benefit from data. Portals should not carry the burden of solving a participation deficit, but there may be avenues to design them such that they connect with a wider group of active citizens than their current data-focussed constituency.

Fifth, and finally, citizen participation is not invented with the portal – and we need to be conscious of both the long history, and contested conceptualisations, of citizen participation. The government portal that seeks to add participatory features is unlikely to be able to escape the charge that it is seeking to ‘manage’ participation processes: although independently created or curated portals may be able to align with more bottom-up community participation action and operate within a more emancipatory, Frierian notion. Both data, and participation, are, after all, about power. And given power is generally always contested, the configuration of portals as a participatory tool may be similarly so.

Citations

  1. Alexopoulos, C., Diamantopoulou, V., & Charalabidis, Y. (2017). Tracking the Evolution of OGD Portals: A Maturity Model. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (pp. 287–300). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64677-0_24

  2. Zhu, X., & Freeman, M. A. (2018). An evaluation of U.S. municipal open data portals: A user interaction framework. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 70(1), 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24081

  3. Ruijer, E., Grimmelikhuijsen, S., & Meijer, A. (2017). Open data for democracy: Developing a theoretical framework for open data use. Government Information Quarterly, 34(1), 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2017.01.001

  4. Wilson, C. (2021). Public engagement and AI: A values analysis of national strategies. Government Information Quarterly, 101652. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2021.101652

  5. Leal, P. A. (2007). Participation: The Ascendancy of a Buzzword in the Neo-Liberal Era. Development in Practice, 17(4/5), 539–548.

  6. Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A Ladder Of Citizen Participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216–224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225

  7. Johnson, P., & Robinson, P. (2014). Civic Hackathons: Innovation, Procurement, or Civic Engagement? Review of Policy Research, 31(4), 349–357. https://doi.org/10.1111/ropr.12074

  8. Sieber, R. E., & Johnson, P. A. (2015). Civic open data at a crossroads: Dominant models and current challenges. Government Information Quarterly, 32(3), 308–315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.giq.2015.05.003

  9. Perng, S.-Y. (2019). Hackathons and the Practices and Possibilities of Participation. In The Right to the Smart City (pp. 135–149). Emerald Publishing Limited. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191010

  10. O’Leary, D. E. (2015). Armchair Auditors: Crowdsourcing Analysis of Government Expenditures. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, 12(1), 71–91. https://doi.org/10.2308/jeta-51225

  11. O’Reilly, T. (2011). Government as a Platform. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 6(1), 13–40. https://doi.org/10.1162/inov_a_00056

  12. The OECD digital government policy framework. (2020, October 7). OECD Public Governance Policy Papers. Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development  (OECD). https://doi.org/10.1787/f64fed2a-en

Practical Participation – 2016 update

pp-logo-2014-alpha-largeAlthough this year my primary focus is on PhD write-up, I’m still keeping active with the two companies I’ve co-founded. So, a couple of updates – firstly, the annual Practical Participation newsletter, compiled by Jennie Fleming.

Practical Participation 2016 – looking back and looking ahead

We wanted to get in contact with you with our annual update of what we are doing at Practical Participation. Tim, Bill and Jennie – are a team with complementary skills, backgrounds and interests and have extensive experience in a range of areas. If you are interested in working with any of the team, do please contact them personally to discuss how we can work together.  

Over the last year, Tim has been working on incubating and spinning out a couple of open data and engagement projects. 2015 started with Practical Participation acting as host to newly formed technical help-desk services for the Open Contracting Data Standard, and 360 Giving standard for philanthropy data. Those are now transferred over to a new workers co-operative, Open Data Services, where a growing team is supporting work to open up data for public good across the world. Tim also spent a large part of 2015 working on the International Open Data Conference (IODC) in Ottawa. His main role was facilitating an ‘action track’ – running a participatory process to bring together threads of discussion at the conference into a global roadmap for open data collaboration. The result is available online here. He’s continued to support the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition  (GODAN) network, working with the team on inputs to the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Summit in Mexico last October, and on a range of other research projects. 

Also at the OGP Summit, Tim co-hosted a workshop on the development resources to support the implementation of the recently launched International Open Data Charter. Over 2016 he’ll be working with the Open Data Charter network to support the creation of ‘Sector Packages’, showing key ways open data can make a difference in anti-corruption, amongst other places. You can contact Tim at tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk.

Jennie’s been continuing her evaluation work with the Children’s Society Young Carers in Focus project and Enthusiasm youth projects. She also undertook a review of the work of the Youth Team at Trafford Housing Trust. The review considered the activity and impact of the youth team to learn from the previous years’ work and to inform proposals for the future. With Practical Participation associate Sarah Hargreaves and young advisor Ruth Taylor she undertook research for Heritage Lottery Fund about youth involvement in decision making about a new grant programme they are establishing. The report reviewed current good practice in the area and set out models for how young people could be meaningfully involved in the decision making processes for the grants.

Jennie is also providing non-line managerial support to the Youth and Community team at Valley House and the youth worker at The Nottingham Refugee Forum. With CRAE’s merger with Just for Kids Law she is now a Trustee of Just for Kids Law and the Chair of the Policy and Strategic Litigation sub-committee. If you think Jennie’s skills and expertise could be useful to you – do get in contact with her jennie@practicalparticipation.co.uk

Bill’s main focus is supporting four local communities as part of the resident-led Lottery funded Big Local programme of £1m over ten years in 150 neighbourhoods in England. Each area has built a dynamic community conversation as the foundation for their plans. Each is seeing great outcomes for residents across a range of priorities they themselves have set. It’s an exciting and replicable model of community empowerment and control

Work relating to Children and Young People Improving Access to Psychological Services has taken Bill back to Rotherham, with a focused piece of work scoping children and young people’s voice and influence in mental health services and offering a practical model to help map and plan improvement. 

Bill remains involved with a number of youth services and especially with youth work within the Housing sector, facilitated by Joe Rich of Affinity Sutton. Youth services continue their freefall with occasional glimmers of hope as in Brighton where the worst of cuts were averted in part we hope through our support to young people’s voices being heard.

Work with young carers has continued through partnership with The Children’s Society and Carers Trust in the Making a Step Change programme. Working across a number of local authorities is a reminder of the power of the voice of experience, coupled with vital leadership and management.

And finally, Bill continues as a practice educator with three social work students this last year, helping retain the vital focus on quality of direct inter-personal practice.

20 ways to connect open data and local democracy

[Summary: notes for a workshop on local democracy and open data]

At the Local Democracy for Everyone (#notInWestminister) workshop in Huddersfield today I led a session titled ‘20 ways to connect open data and local democracy‘. Below is the list of ideas we started the workshop with

In the workshop we explored how these, and other approaches, could be used to respond to priority local issues, from investing funds in environmental projects, to shaping local planning processes, and dealing with nuisance pigeons.

Graphic recording from break-out session by [@Jargonautical](http://www.twitter.com/jargonautical]

There is more to do to re-imagine how local open data should work, but the conversations today offered an interesting start.

1. Practice open data engagement

Data portals can be very impersonal things. But behind every dataset is a council officer or a team working to collect, manage and use the data. Putting a human face on datasets, linking them to the policy areas they affect, and referencing datasets from reports that draw upon them can all help put data in context and make it more engaging.

The Five Stars of Open Data Engagement provides a model for stepping up engagement activities, from providing better and more social meta-data, through to hosting regular office-hours and drop-in sessions to help the local community understand and use data better.

2. Showing the council contribution

A lot of the datasets required by the Local Government Transparency Code are about the cost of services. What information and data is needed to complete the picture and to show the impact of services and spending?

The Caring for my Neighbourhood project in Sao Paulo looked to geocode government budget and spending data, to understand where funds were flowing, and have opened up a conversation with government about how to collected data in ways that make connecting budget data and its impacts easier in future.

Local government in the UK has access to a rich set of service taxonomies which could be used to link together data on staff salaries, contracts and spending, with stats and stories on the service they provide and their performance. Finding ways to make this full picture accesssible and easy to digest can provide the foundation for more informed local dialogue.

3. Open Data Discourses

In Massachussetts the Open Data Discourse project has been developing the idea of data challenges: based not just one app-building, but also on using data to create policy ideas that can address an identified local challenge.

For Cambridge, Mass, the focus for the first challenge in fall 2014 was on pedestrian, bicycle, and car accidents in the City. Data on accidents was provided, and accesed over 2,000 times in a six-week challenge period. The challenge resulted in eight submissions “that addressed policy-relevant issues such as how to format traffic accident data to enable trend analysis across the river into Boston, or how to reduce accidents and encourage cycling by having a parked car buffer.”

The challenge processes culminated in a friday evening meeting that brought together community members who had worked on challenge ideas, with councillors and representatives of the local authority, to showcase the solutions and provide an award for a winning idea.

4. Focus on small data

There’s a lot of talk out there about ‘big data’ and how big data analytics can revolutionise government. But many of the datasets that matter are small data: spreadsheets created by an officer, or records held by community groups in various structures and formats.

Rahul Bhargava defines small data as:

“the thing that community groups have always used to do their work better in a few ways:

  • Evaluate: Groups use Small Data to evaluate programs so they can improve them
  • Communicate: Groups use Small Data to communicate about their programs and topics with the public and the communities they serve
  • Advocate: Groups use Small Data to make evidence-based arguments to those in power”

Simple steps to share and work with small data can make a big difference: and keep citizens rather than algorythms in control.

5. Tactile data and data murals

The Data Therapy project has been exploring a range of ways to make data more tactile: from laser-cutting food security information into vegetables to running ‘low tech data’ workshops that use pipe-cleaners, lego and crayons to explore representations of data about a local community.

Turning complex comparisons and numbers into physical artefacts, and finding the stories inside the statitics can offer communities a way into data-informed dialogue, without introducing lots of alienating graphs and numbers.

The Data Therapy project’s data murals connect discussions of data with traditional community arts practice: painting large scale artworks that represent a community interpretation of local data and information.

6. Data-driven art

The Open Data Institute’s Data as Culture project has run a series of data art commissions: leading to a number of data-driven art works that bring real-time data flows into the physical environment. In 2011 Bristol City Council commissioned a set of art works, ‘Invisible Airs‘ that included a device stabbing books in response to library cuts, and a spud gun triggered by spending records.

Alongside these political art works that add an explicit emotional dimension to public data, low-cost network connected devices can also be used to make art that passively informs – introducing indicators that show the state of local data into public space.

7. Citizen science

Not all the data that matters to local decision making comes from government. Citizens can create their own data, via crowdsourcing and via citizen-science approaches to data collection.

The Public Lab describes itself as a ‘DIY Environmental Science Community’ and provides How To information on how citizens groups can build their own sensors or tools for everything from arial mapping to water quality monitoring. Rather than ‘smart cities’ that centralise data from sensor networks, citizen science offers space for a collaboration between government and communities – creating smart citizens who can collect and make sense of data alongside local officials.

In China, citizens started their own home water quality testing to call for government to recognise and address clean water problems.

8. Data dives & hackathons

DataKind works to bring together expert analysts with social-sector organisations that have data in order to look for trends and insights. Modelled on a hackathon, where activity takes place over an intense day or weekend of work, DataDives can generate new findings, new ideas about hwo to use data, and new networks for the local authority to draw upon.

Unlike a hackathon where the focus is often on developing a technical app or innovation and where programme skill is often a pre-requisite, a Data Dive might be based around answering a particular question, or around finding what data means to multi-disciplinary teams.

It is possible to design inclusive hackathons which connect up the lived experience of communities with digital skills from inside and outside the community. The Hackathon FAQ explores some of the common pitfals of holding a civic hackathons: encouraging critical thought about whether prizes and other common features are likely to incentivise contributions, or distort the kinds of team building and collaboration wanted in a civic setting.

9. Contextualised consultation

Too often local consultations ask questions without providing citizens with the information they might need to explore and form their opinions. For example, a online consultation on green spaces, simply by asking for the Ward or Postcode of a respondent, could provide tailored information (and questions) about the current green spaces nearby.

Live open data feedback on the demographics and diversity of consultation respondents could also play a role in incentivising people to take part to ensure their views are represented.

It’s important though not to make too many assumptions when providing contextualised data: a respondent might care about the context near where their parents or children live, as much as their own for example – and so interfaces should offer the ability to look at data around areas other than your home.

10. Adopt a dataset

When it snows in America, Fire Hydrants on the street can get frozen under the ice, and so its important to dig them out after snowfall. However, the council don’t have resources to always get to all the hydrants in time. Code for America found an ingenious solution, taking an open dataset of fire hydrants, and creating a campaign for people to ‘Adopt a Hydrant‘, committing to dig it out when the blizzards come. They combined data with a social layer.

The same approach could work for many other community assets, but it could also work for datasets. Which dataset could be co-created with the community? Could walkers help adopt footpath data and help keep it updated? Could the local bus user group adopt data on accessibility of public tranport roots, helping keep it updated?

The relationships created around a data quality feedback loop might also become important relationships for improving the services that the data describes. ?

11. Data-rich press releases

Local authorities are used to putting out press releases, often with selected statistics in. But how can those releases also contain links to key datasets, and even interactive assets that journalists and the public can draw upon to dig deeper into the data.

Data visualisation expert David McCandless has argued that interactivity plays an important role in allowing people to explore structured data and information, and to turn it into knowledge. The Guardian Data Blog has shown how engaging information can be created from datasets. Whilst the Data Journalism Handbook offers some pointers for journalists (and local bloggers) to get started with data, many local newspapers don’t have the dedicated data-desks of big media houses – so the more the authority can do to provide data in ready-to-reuse forms, the more it can be turned into a resource to support local debate.

12. URLs for everything – with a call to action

Which is more likely to turn up on Twitter and get clicked on:

“What do you think of new cycle track policy? Look on page 23, paragraph 2 or report at bottom of this page: http://localcouncil.gov/reports/1234”? or

“What do you think of new cycle track policy? http://localcouncil.gov/policy/ab12”

Far too often the important information citizens might want might be online, but is burried away in documents or provided in ways that are impossible to link to.

When any proposal, policy, decision or transaction gets a permenant URL (web address) it can become a social object: something people can talk about on twitter and facebook and in other spaces.

For Linked Data advocates, giving everything in a dataset its own URL plays an important role in machine-to-machine communication, but it also plays a really important role in human communication. Think about how visitors to a data item might also be offered a ‘call to action’, whether it’s to report concerns about a spending transaction, or volunteer to get involved in events at a park represented by a data item.

13. Participatory budgeting – with real data

What can £5000 buy you? How much does it cost to run a local carnival? Or a swimming pool? Or to provide improved social care? Or cycle lanes? Answers to these questions might exist inside spending data – but often when participatory budgeting activities take place the information needed to work out what kinds of options may be affordable only comes into the picture late in the process.

Open Spending, the World Bank, NESTA and the Finish Institute have all explored how open data could change the participatory budgeting process – although as yet there have been few experiments to really explore the possibilities.

14. Who owns it?

Kirlees Council have put together the ‘Who Owns My Neighbourhood?’ site to let residents explore land holdings and to “help take responsibility for land, buildings and activities in your neighbourhood”. Similar sites, with the goal of improving how land is used and addressing the problem of vacant lots, are cropping up across American cities.

These tools can enable citizens to identify land and government assets that could be better used by the community: but unchecked they may also risk giving more power to wealthy property speculators as a widely cited case study from Bangalore has warned.

15. Social audits

In many parts of the developing world, particularly across India, the Social Audit is an important process, focussed on “reviewing official records and determining whether state reported expenditures reflect the actual monies spent on the ground” (Aiyar & Samji, 2009).

Social Audits involve citizens groups trained up to look at records and ‘ground truth’ whether or not resources have been used in the way authorities say. Crucially, Social Audits culminate in public hearings: meetings where the findings are presented and discussed.

Models of citizen-led investigation, followed by formal public meetings, are also a feature of the London Citizens community organising approach, where citizens assemblies put community views to people in power. How could key local datasets form part of an evidence gathering audit process, whether facilitated by local government or led by independent community organisations?

16. Geofenced bylaws, licenses and regulations: building the data layer of the local authority

After seeing some of the projects to open up the legal codes of US cities I started where I would find out about the Byelaws in my home town of Oxford. As the page on the City Council website that hosts them explaines: “Byelaws generally require something to be done – or not done – in a particular location.”. Unfortunately, in Oxford, what is required to be done, and where is locked up inside scanned PDFs of typewritten minutes.

There are all sorts of local rules and regulations, licenses and other information that authorities issue which is tied to a particular geographic location: yet this is rarely a layer in the Geographic Information Systems that authorities use. How might geocoding this data, or even making it available through geofencing apps help citizens to navigate, explore and debate the rules that shape their local places.?

17. Conversations around the contracts pipeline?

The Open Contracting project is calling for transparency and participation in public contracting. As part of the UK Local Government Transparency Code authorities have to publish the contracts they have entered into – but publishing the contract pipeline and planned procurement offers an important opportunity to work out if there are fresh ideas or important insights that could shape how funds are spent.

The Open Contracting Data Standard provides a way of sharing a flow of data about the early stages of a contracting process. Combine that information with a call to action, and a space for conversation, and there are ways to get citizens shaping tenders and the selection of suppliers.

18. Participatory planning: visualising the impacts of decisions

What data should a local authority ask developers submitting planning applications to provide?

For many developments there might be detailed CAD models available which could be shared and explored in mapping software to support a more informed conversation about proposed building projects. ?

19. Stats that matter

?Local authorities often conduct one-off surveys and data collection excercises. These are a vital opportunity to build up an understanding of the local area. What opportunities are there to work in partnership with local community groups to identify the important questions that they want to ask? How can local government and community groups collaborate to collect actionable stats that matter: pooling needs, and even resources, to get the best sample and the best depth of insight?

20. Spreadsheet scorecards and dashboards

Dig deep enough in most local organisations and you will find one or more ‘super spreadsheets’ that capture and analyse key statistics and performance indicators. Many more people can easily pick up the skills to create a spreadsheet scorecard than can become overnight app developers.

Google Docs spreadsheets can pick up data live from the web. What dashboards might a local councillor want? Or a local residents association? What information would make them better able to do their job?

New Paper – Mixed incentives: Adopting ICT innovations for transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption

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[Summary: critical questions to ask when planning, funding or working on ICTs for transparency and accountability]

Last year I posted some drafts of a paper I’ve been writing with Silvana Fumega at the invitation of the U4 Anti-Corruption Center, looking at the incentives for, and dynamics of, adoption of ICTs as anti-corruption tools. Last week the final paper was published in the U4 Issue series, and you can find it for download here.

In the final iteration of the paper we have sought to capture the core of the analysis in the form of a series of critical questions that funders, planners and implementers of anti-corruption ICTs can ask. These are included in the executive summary below, and elaborated more in the full paper.

Adopting ICT innovations for transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption – Executive Summary

Initiatives facilitated by information and communication technology (ICT) are playing an increasingly central role in discourses of transparency, accountability, and anti-corruption. Both advocacy and funding are being mobilised to encourage governments to adopt new technologies aimed at combating corruption. Advocates and funders need to ask critical questions about how innovations from one setting might be transferred to another, assessing how ICTs affect the flow of information, how incentives for their adoption shape implementation, and how citizen engagement and the local context affect the potential impacts of their use.

ICTs can be applied to anti-corruption efforts in many different ways. These technologies change the flow of information between governments and citizens, as well as between different actors within governments and within civil society. E?government ICTs often seek to address corruption by automating processes and restricting discretion of officials. However, many contemporary uses of ICTs place more emphasis on the concept of transparency as a key mechanism to address corruption. Here, a distinction can be made between technologies that support “upward transparency,” where the state gains greater ability to observe and hear from its citizens, or higher-up actors in the state gain greater ability to observe their subordinates, and “downward transparency,” in which “the ‘ruled’ can observe the conduct, behaviour, and/or ‘results’ of their ‘rulers’” (Heald 2006). Streamlined systems that citizens can use to report issues to government fall into the former category, while transparency portals and open data portals are examples of the latter. Transparency alone can only be a starting point for addressing corruption, however: change requires individuals, groups, and institutions who can access and respond to the information.

In any particular application of technology with anti-corruption potential, it is important to ask:

  • What is the direction of the information flow: from whom and to whom?
  • Who controls the flow of information, and at what stages?
  • Who needs to act on the information in order to address corruption?

Different incentives can drive government adoption of ICTs. The current wave of interest in ICT for anti-corruption is relatively new, and limited evidence exists to quantify the benefits that particular technologies can bring in a given context. However, this is not limiting enthusiasm for the idea that governments, particularly developing country governments, can adopt new technologies as part of open government and anti-corruption efforts. Many technologies are “sold” on the basis of multiple promised benefits, and governments respond to a range of different incentives. For example, governments may use ICTs to:

  • Improve information flow and government efficiency, creating more responsive public institutions, supporting coordination.
  • Provide open access to data to enable innovation and economic growth, responding to claims about the economic value of open data and its role as a resource for private enterprise.
  • Address principal-agent problems, allowing progressive and reformist actors within the state to better manage and regulate other parts of the state by detecting and addressing corruption through upward and downward transparency.
  • Respond to international pressure, following the trends in global conversations and pressure from donors and businesses, as well as the availability of funding for pilots and projects.
  • Respond to bottom-up pressure, both from established civil society and from an emerging global network of technology-focussed civil society actors. Governments may do this either as genuine engagement or to “domesticate” what might otherwise be seen as disruptive innovations.

In supporting ICTs for anti-corruption, advocates and donors should consider several key questions related to incentives:

  • What are the stated motivations of government for engaging with this ICT?
  • What other incentives and motivations may be underlying interest in this ICT?
  • Which incentives are strongest? Are any of the incentives in conflict?
  • Which incentives are important to securing anti-corruption outcomes from this ICT?
  • Who may be motivated to oppose or inhibit the anti-corruption applications of this ICT?

The impact of ICTs for anti-corruption is shaped by citizen engagement in a local context. Whether aimed at upward or downward transparency, the successful anti-corruption application of an ICT relies upon citizen engagement. Many factors affect which citizens can engage through technology to share reports with government or act upon information provided by government. ICTs that worked in one context might not achieve the same results in a different setting (McGee and Gaventa 2010). The following questions draw attention to key aspects of context:

  • Who has access to the relevant technologies? What barriers of connectivity, literacy, language, or culture might prevent a certain part of the population from engaging with an ICT innovation?
  • What alternative channels (SMS, offline outreach) might be required to increase the reach of this innovation?
  • How will the initiative close the feedback loop? Will citizens see visible outcomes over the short or long term that build rather than undermine trust?
  • Who are the potential intermediary groups and centralised users for ICTs that provide upward or downward transparency? Are both technical and social intermediaries present? Are they able to work together?

Towards sustainable and effective anti-corruption use of ICTs. As Strand (2010) argues, “While ICT is not a magic bullet when it comes to ensuring greater transparency and less corruption . . . it has a significant role to play as a tool in a number of important areas.” Although taking advantage of the multiple potential benefits of open data, transparency portals, or digitised communication with government can make it easier to start a project, funders and advocates should consider the incentives for ICT adoption and their likely impact on how the technology will be applied in practice. Each of the questions above is important to understanding the role a particular technology might play and the factors that affect how it is implemented and utilised in a particular country.

 

You can read the full paper here.

Generation Y? Bridging the participation gap in an online world

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Back in July 2011 I spoke at a conference on ‘Generation-Y’ and public services hosted by Institut de la Gestion Publique (Institute for Public Management) in Paris. I was asked to write up the talk as an article for a print publication. So, I wrote up an extended version of this blog post, and fired it off, with a creative commons license on. A few months later I found myself having to print and sign paper contracts to convince the publishers that yes, they really could print the article. To make them happier I agreed I wouldn’t publish a copy of the article till it was out in their book. And then I pretty much forgot about it.

So I was surprised to get back from the OKF Winter Summit yesterday to find a parcel from France containing a copy of the book, French translation of the article included. 18 months after the conference, a print document void of links or graphics, with no mention of the creative commons license on the article. It looks like Institut de la Gestion Publique still have a very long way to go before they are really taking seriously the expectations gaps that my article talked about.

Ah well. Here’s a copy of the full article in English anyway (PDF). Unfortunately I’ve not been given a digital copy of the version in French, but happy to scan it in if anyone would like it.

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Open Policy Making for the UK Open Government Partnership National Action Plan

[Summary: thoughts on opportunities and challenges for open policy making from today’s OGP CSO Brown Bag lunch]

The Civil Service Reform Plan sets out a commitment that ‘Open policy making will become the default’ way policy is made, noting that ‘Whitehall does not have a monopoly on policy making expertise’. The Reform Plan states that government will ‘establish a clear model of open policy making’. However, whilst a number of principles of open policy making have been articulated (such as shared accountability; transparency; and cross-boundary teams), open policy making appears right now to be in a more experimental phase, with a range of recent initiatives using the label. In their case study looking at the creation of the National Planning Policy Framework, and a number of other instances of open policy making, the Institute for Government argue that in practice “there is no one [open policy making] model – and the choice of model will depend on the objectives to be met through greater openness”.

So, the decision to explore the use of open policy making as a framework for government and civil society collaboration around the UK’s Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, and co-chairmanship of the global OGP, raises as many questions as it answers. This blog post captures some of my personal reflections on possible elements of a UK OGP open policy-making process.

(For background on the Open Government Partnership, and how UK civil society have been engaging with the OGP so far, see www.opengovernment.org.uk. The quick summary: The OGP is an international initiative for governments to commit to open government actions: the UK is a founding member, and currently co-chair of the initiative. It created an Action Plan in 2011 of open government commitments, and, as part of members of the OGP, must review and revise this in collaboration with civil society in 2012 and 2013.)

Elements: Shared submissions to ministers

UK involvement in the Open Government Partnership is ultimately the responsibility of Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude. As part of an open policy making process, civil society and civil servants can work together on developing submissions to the Minister, developing a shared evidence base and case for what a revised National Action Plan should cover, and potential actions for the UK to take as OGP co-chair and host of the 2013 OGP plenary meeting.

This approach can be contrasted to classic policy-making consultation, in which civil servants might go out to consult on a policy, but in which the submission to a Minister, and the responses, are composed entirely by, or addressed to, the civil servants.

Elements: shared and independent spaces

To make shared submissions work, it is important for government and civil society to distinguish between issues that can and can’t be handled through this process.

The UK’s current Open Government Partnership National Action Plan (drafted entirely within Whitehall) is resolutely focussed on open data, whilst many CSOs want to see the UK focus on the full range of topics set out in the Open Government Partnership Declaration, including access to information; citizen participation; anti-corruption and integrity of public institutions. When UK civil society met a few weeks back, they outlined a number of different priority areas related to open government, including a number of concrete advocacy asks on extractive industry transparency, whistleblower protection, an extension of the right to information to cover private sector delivering public services, and emphasising participation alongside transparency as key elements of open government.

Some of the issues on the civil society agenda overlap with those government is already working on. Others are off the current government agenda. We might visualise this with a venn diagram, where the overlap of civil society and government agenda’s provides the space for open policy making, but both government and civil society continue to have issues they care about that fall outside this shared space.

In these cases, participating in an open policy making does not preclude civil society from continuing to campaign for new issues to be added to the agenda, or adopting outsider advocacy strategies to call for an issue to be added to the shared space of open policy making.

Effective open policy making needs honesty and reasonable expectations on all sides about those issues where there is enough consensus for joint submissions and evidence gathering, and a range of alternative routes through which issues that don’t make it into the shared open policy making space can still be taken forward through other routes.

Elements: joint outreach

A number of the models of open policy making that the Institute for Government highlight in their report only really open up the policy making process to a small number of individuals – often ‘experts’ from organisations already involved in policy advocacy. However, opening government should be about more than just a few extra voices – and needs to connect with citizens and civil society groups working at the grass roots across the country.

Part of an open policy making process may involved shared identification of evidence gaps, and collaboration between government and civil society organisations to develop an outreach strategy, raising awareness of open government issues, and drawing on much more diverse evidence and inputs into key documents and decision making around the OGP.

Challenges: open meetings and open networks

So far, the network of CSOs on the Open Government Partnership has been organised in the open: through a mailing list that anyone can join, and using Google Docs shared for anyone to read and edit. There is no formal membership process, or terms of reference for the group. This way of organising provides space for the network to develop organically, to draw in new participants, and to avoid putting lots of energy into structure rather than substance – but it also potentially raises some challenges for open policy making processes – as sharing information and working collaborative with an open network in theory means having a process that is open to almost anyone.

Going back to the Institute for Government’s case study of the National Policy Planning Framework, it suggests that having some boundaries, and having the ‘open policy’ group working on the framework operating effectively under-the-radar for much of their duration was important to their ability to be effective, and not to be overwhelmed by competing demands. Yet, setting boundaries and being less than transparent about the existence, membership and work of an open policy making group on open government would seem at odds with open government values.

Finding agile methods to agree minutes from meetings (perhaps live-drafting in an online document with civil society and government co-editing the notes) without getting into long drawn-out sign off processes, and having clear principles on what information should be shared when, is likely to be important to having a credible open policy making process.

Challenges: resources and regions

At the heart of the proposed open policy making processes around the OGP is the idea of a regular co-working space, initially to be hosted at the open data institute, where civil society and government can meet on a weekly basis. This is a powerful demonstration of commitment to an open process, but also risks leaving policy shaped by those with the resources to regularly spend a working day in London.

Creating opportunities for online input can help address this, but attention still needs to be paid to inclusion – finding ways to ensure that resources are available to support participation of diverse groups in the process. This is perhaps part of a more general challenge for civil society as responsibility for core elements of public governance is increasingly shifted outside of government (as in open data supporting the ‘armchair auditor’), and onto civil society. We need to explore new mechanisms to support diverse civil society action on governance, and to prevent this outward shift of governance responsibility simply empowering the well resourced.

Next steps

For the OGP open policy making process, one of the next steps is likely to involve working out which issues can be addressed as part of the shared space between government and civil society. Keep an eye on the www.opengovernment.org.uk blog for news of upcoming workshops and meetings that will hopefully be exploring just that.

What should a UK Open Government Partnership Forum look like?

[Summary: Open spaces events across that whole UK that provide access for all ages are key to an effective UK OGP forum]

A key step in a countries participation in the Open Government Partnership (OGP) involves establishing ongoing public consultation between government, citizens, civil society organisations and the private sector on the development and implementation of OGP action plans. Given the UK is currently co-chair of OGP, and will be hosting the next OGP plenary meeting in London in March next year, establishing an effective, credible and dynamic forum for ongoing multi-stakeholder participation in OGP should be a top priority.

 

Members of the informal network of UK-based Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) engaging with the OGP process have been thinking about what such a forum could look like, and in this post I want to offer one possible take, based on my experience of taking part in a range of open space and unConference events over recent years.

Proposal: At the heart of the UK OGP forum should be a series of regular open space events, taking place across the UK, with a focus on getting out of London. Events should be open to anyone to take part – from active citizens and community groups, to social entrepreneurs, private sector firms, national and local government representatives and  local and international CSOs.
Simple principles of inclusion should  be established to ensure the events provide a welcoming environment for all, including for children and young people, and older people .

What is an open space or unConference?

Open space events are created by their participants. Rather than having a set agenda, the discussion agenda for an open space event is set on the day by participants announcing sessions and discussions they would like to take part in. Participants then self-select to take part in the sessions they have the most interest in. Simple principles encourage participants, wherever they come from, to take shared ownership of the discussions and the outcomes of the day. Open space events and unConferences can have a focussed theme to guide the focus of the specific sessions that take place.

I first encountered open space on a large scale in the UKGovCamp unconferences, which, as it turns out, are in many ways a paradigmatic example of key aspects of digital open government in action. At the annual UKGovCamp events (and their spin off LocalGovCamp events around the UK), civil servants, citizens, CSOs, social innovators, business people, and event a few politicians, spend a day in practical conversation about how to make government work better – sharing knowledge, developing plans and deepening shared commitment to shared problems.

See the Wikipedia article on Open-space technology for more on open space, and links to examples of open space events in action.

Why should open space events be part of the UK OGP forum?

Open Government is about more than a few action plan commitments to better ICT systems or increasing access to data. It involves active rethinking the relationship between citizen and state both as democracy continues to evolve, and as technologies, globalisation and other social forces reconfigure the capabilities of both citizens and governments. Open Government needs mass participation – and open space events are one way to develop action-focussed dialogues that support large-scale participation.

  • A UK OGP Forum needs to be not only about feeding demands up to government, but also about disseminating OGP ideas and commitments across the whole of the public sector. For many people, it is open local government which will have most impact on their lives, and taking the OGP conversation on the road to events that can include all tiers of government provides an opportunity to join up open government practice across government.
  • Open space events are also very cost-effective. You need a room, some refreshments, some flip-chart paper – and, well, that’s about it.
  • Open space events are powerful network building opportunities – helping develop both civil society open government networks, and build new connections between civil society and government (and even across different parts of government)
  • With social media and a few social reporters, open space events can also become largely self-documenting, and with good facilitation it is possible to include remote participation, using the Internet to make sure anyone with a contribution to make to a topic under discussion can input into the dialogue.
  • Most of all, open space events embody principles of openness, collaboration and innovation – and so are an ideal vehicle for developing a dynamic UK OGP forum.

How could it work in practice?

Well, there’s nothing to stop anyone organising their own Open Government unConference, inviting civil servants and a whole range of other stakeholders, recording the key outcomes of the discussions, and then sending that all to the Cabinet Office team working on the UK’s OGP participation. However, to make open space a core part of the UK OGP process a number of elements may be worth considering. Here’s one sketch of how that could work:

  • In partnership with the OGP team in government, planning a series of quarterly OGP open space events, which central civil servants commit to take part in. These would take place in each of the nations of the United Kingdom, and should have as their core theme the commitments of the UK Action Plan. Events should issue and open invite, and should be designed to ensure maximum diversity of participants from across all sectors.
  • In addition, government, CSOs and other stakeholders should agree to providing sponsorship for thematic OGP open space meetings. Anyone could organise a thematic meeting, providing they apply key principles of inclusiveness, open participation and transparency in the organisation of the events.
  • The OpenGovernment.org.uk site becomes a platform to collate notes from all the discussion sessions, drawing on social media content and notes captured by facilitators and rapporteurs at the events.
  • Each individual open space discussion within the events does not have to reach a consensus on its topic, but would have the option of producing a 1/2 page summary of discussions that can be shared online. Government commit to reading all these notes when reviewing the action plan.
  • Existing open space events (e.g. UKGovCamp) could choose to add an OGP track of discussions, feeding in as any thematic event would.

What about formal representation and accountability? How do decisions get made?

Some of the other ideas for a UK OGP Forum are far more focussed on formal structures and procedures. I don’t reject the value of formal structures where questions of accountability and representation are in play. However, unless actual authority to decide what does into country action plans is shared with an OGP forum, then as a consultative body, a more open model would seem more appropriate.

Established CSOs have existing channels through which they are talking with government. A forum should  help them co-ordinate their asks and offers on open government issues through existing channels, rather than add another narrow channel of communication.

Open processes are not immune from their problems: they can suffer from those who shout loudest being those who are heard most, or from those in power being able to pick and choose which voices they engage with. However, finding ways to deal with these issues in the open is an important challenge and learning journey for us to go on if we truly want to find inclusive models of open governance and open government that work…

A realistic proposal?

I’ve written this outline sketch up as a contribution to the debate on what an OGP forum should look like. Government tendencies to control processes, and manage engagement in neat boxes can be strong. But to an extent open government has to be about challenging that – and as a process that will involve a shared learning journey for both government, civil society and citizens, I hope this does make for a realistic proposal…

OGP Take Aways

[Summary: Ten observations and take-aways from #ogp2012]

In an attempt to use reflective blogging to capture thoughts from the Open Government Partnership meeting in Brasilia I’ve jotted down ten key learning points, take-aways, or areas I’ve been musing on. Where critical, I hope they are taken in the spirit of constructive critique.

1) Good ideas come from everywhere
Warren Krafchik made this point in the closing plenary, and it’s one that was apparent throughout OGP. The OGP provides a space for shared learning in all directions: across sectors and across countries. I’ve certainly found my own understanding of open data has been deepened by thinking about how the lessons from Transparent Chennai and Bangalore might apply in the UK context, and I look forward to OGP exchanges providing space for much more sharing of challenges and solutions.

2) The quality of Right to Information really matters
Another bit of shared learning from OGP was previewed in a Guardian article by Arunu Roy writing about the potential strength of the Indian Right to Information (RTI) Act, as against the UK Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. A lot of the civil society participants I spoke with had experience of working with their national RTI laws, or lobbying for them to be created, and the quality, rather than just the presence, of the laws, was a key theme. Some RTI laws require payment to request data; some allow anonymity, others ensure every requester provides their full details. These differences matter, and that presents a challenge for the OGP mechanisms, which at the moment simply require a RTI Bill as a condition of joining.

3) Whistle blower protection is an important factor in the journey from openness to impact
In the closing plenary, Samantha Powell summed this one up: “when you have access to information that challenges conventional wisdom, or when you witness some wrongdoing, you need the protection to come forward with it, and to often that protection is lacking”.

Open data, and access to information might give people working in organisations some of the pieces of the jigsaw they need to spot corruption and wrongdoing. But if they have no protection to highlight that, we may miss many of the opportunities for more open information to bring accountability and impact.

4) We’ve not yet cracked culture change and capacity building
The shift to open government is not just a shift of policy, it also involves culture shift inside government (and to an extent in how civil society interfaces with government). I heard a few mentions of the need for culture change in National Action Plan sessions, but no clear examples of concerted government efforts to address ‘closed cultures’.

5) Ditto effective large scale public engagement
Many countries hadn’t consulted widely on their National Action Plans, and few action plans I heard details of included much substantive on public participation. In part this was explained because of the short lead time that many countries had to produce their action plans: but for me this seems to point to a number of significant challenges we need to work out how to address if open government is to be participative government. Working out more agile models of engagement, that still meet desirable criteria of being inclusive and accessible is a big challenge. For the OGP, it’s also interesting to consider the role of ‘engagement with citizens’ through mass participation, and engagement with CSOs, potentially as mediators of citizen voice. One idea I explored in a few conversations was whether, when OGP Governments support mass-participation in shaping action plans, the raw input should be shared and jointly analysed with CSOs.

6) There is a need to distinguish e-government, from open government
As one of the speakers put it in the closing plenary of day 1: “the open government partnership is not an e-government partnership”. E-government to make public service provision more effective has it’s place, and may overlap with open government, but in itself e-government is not one-and-the-same-as open government.

7) We need both data infrastructures, and accessibility ecosystem, for open data
This is something I’ll write a bit more on soon, but broadly there needs to be a recognition that not only do both government and civil society have a role in providing national infrastructures of open data to support governance, but they also both have a role in stimulating eco-systems that turn that data into information and make it accessible. Some of that comes out a bit in the five stars of open data engagement, though stimulating eco-systems might involve more than just engagement around specific datasets.

8) We need to develop a deeper dialogue between technologists and issue activists
David Eaves has blogged about OGP highlighting a sense of a divide between many of the established civil society groups, and the more emergent technology-skilled open data / open government community. The message that open government is broader than open data can be read in multiple ways. It can be taken as trying to avoid an OGP agenda being used to further ‘open data from government’ as opposed to ‘open data for open government’. It can be taken as a downplaying of the opportunity that technologies bring for opening government. Or it can be taken as calling for technologies to build upon, rather than to try and side-step or leap-over, the hard work and often very contested work that has gone into securing access to information policies and other open government foundations. Some of the best cases I heard about over the OGP were where, having secured a right to information, activists were then able to use technologies and data to more effectively drive accountability.

Finding the common ground, and admitting spaces of difference, between technology and issue-focussed open government communities is another key challenge as OGP develops.

9) Monitoring should ultimately be about change for citizens, not just commitments and process
One of the key tasks for the OGP Steering Committee over the coming months is to develop an Independent Review Mechanism to monitor country action plans. In one of the panel sessions this was described more as an ‘evidence collection’ mechanism, to ensure all voices in a country are heard, rather than an assessment and judgement mechanism – so it holds out real potential to support both third-party evaluation (i.e. non OGP) of country progress against action plans, and to support formative evaluation and learning.

One point which came up a number of times was that OGP should be about change for citizens, not just commitments and process. A IRM that asks the ‘What’s Changed?‘ question of a wide range of citizens, particularly those normally excluded from decision making processes, would be good to see.

10) Deciding on the tenth item for a ten-item list is tricky
Instead you can just link to wisdom from @tkb.

Reflecting on the Open Government Partnership

I’ve been  in Brasilia this week for at meeting of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a new international initiative now involving 55 governments and run by a joint government and civil society steering committee, to secure state commitments to promoting transparency, empowering citizens, fighting corruption, and harnessing new technologies to strengthen governance. Unfortunately, new technologies and WiFi access were a little lacking at the conference venue on the first day, so I’m only now getting to blog some of the notes and reflections I jotted down during the event. I’ve tried to use ” quotes for “near verbatim” quotes (some via the translators), and ‘for paraphrases’ on elements that jumped out at me from different presentations.

The morning opened with presentations from US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Nika Gilauri, President of Georgia, Jakaya Kikwete, President of Tanazania and Dilma Rousseff, President of Brazil, discussing their commitments to open government.

Hilary Clinton’s speech highlighted that 1/4 of the worlds people now live in countries which have joined the OGP, ‘each of which has outlined concrete, credible steps, to open government’, although noting that it is ‘not enough to assert we will be committed to openness, we have to deliver on the commitments we have made’. Hilary’s speech also set out a belief that the biggest divisions between states in future will not be on geographic, wealth or religious lines, but will be concerned with openness: “those societies that believe they can be closed to change, closed to beliefs and ideas different from theirs, will find that in our Internet world they will be quickly left behind.”. This focus on technologically driven change was an explicit strand in both Clinton’s speech, and much of the OGP discourse, although the speech also ended with a recognition that ‘new tools of the digital age will not change human nature, only we can do that’.

Nika Gilauri’s speech opened with an inspiring claim: ‘I truly believe that open government initiative and partnership can leave poverty behind’. The logic is that challenging corruption can lead to governments using resources more efficiently and effectively. The rest of Nika’s speech focussed on the impacts of ‘open government’ reforms on Georgia, where a drive to address corruption has seen the figures for the number of Georgians who paid a bribe in the last 12 months drop to 4%, from a high of 95%. Nika highlighted that the reforms ‘destroy the myth that corruption is cultural, and give hope to other countries’ where corruption appears entrenched. Key to explore in any of the claims made for the effects of open government is how specifically ‘open government’ policies, like promoting transparency or increasing citizen access to decision making mechanisms, have interacted with legal instruments and enforcement measures in anti-corruption. I don’t know the Georgia context, but Nika’s speech for me highlighted that we need to look in depth at understanding the effect openness has, and the wider contextual factors (good and bad) that enable it to drive change.

Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania covered a range of important aspects of developing open government, from promoting press freedom, to parliamentary strengthening. Open government is not only about developing new institutions and structures, but also about reforming existing parts of our democratic systems. Jakaya noted that the Tanzania OGP Action Plan has prioritised local government – looking at basic education, health and water supply, on the grounds that these are most relevant to citizens. The claim ‘getting information on local services is more important than information on complex policy arrangements’ is one that sparked a lot of discussion in the research workshop IDRC convened just before the OGP, so it was interesting to see this claim being made in the opening speeches.

The final opening speech was from Dilma Rousseff who described a range of ways the Brazilian government have been promoting transparency, including introducing a new Access to Information Law, and developing specific transparency portals to cover specific areas such as spending on the World Cup (just across from the conference venue we could see many cranes building a new stadium in Brasilia to host the World Cup) and Olympics. The opportunities for engagement in open government via sports etc. (and the missed opportunity for a UK Olympics transparency portal) are interesting to consider. Dilma also draw attention to the financial sector: ‘in the absence of monitoring, international financial flows become subject to manipulation -with consequent losses for the world economy’, an input that was undoubtedly well received by Chris Taggart of Open Corporates who has been advocating hard for governments to prioritise the transparency of company information. Dilma’s speech also focussed on developing new channels for public participation, from national policy conferences to online engagement processes and public comment periods for new laws, a theme that was overall fairly underdeveloped in most of the OGP sessions I saw.

In the afternoon, countries were presenting their National Action Plans, making commitments that they will deliver as part of the OGP process. I was involved in inputting into a civil society assessment of the UK’s National Action Plan just before OGP, so was keen to see what would be said about it. I’ve blogged more on that over the UK Civil Society OGP blog, but essentially I took away from the session (and other sessions where I heard UK Director of Transparency Tim Kelsey speaking) a real concern that the current framing of open government from the UK Government is (a) very narrowly focussed on open data measures, and (b) as Jo Bates points out in her excellent paper, potentially a co-option of an open government and open data agenda in the interests of a reduced and marketised state: a policy agenda that our last election suggests does not have a popular electoral mandate. I hope my fears on (b) are misplaced, and that the commitment made in that session to a review of the action plan creates space to broaden the UK agenda and commitments as part of the OGP, but I suspect there is a lot of work still to do to support a constructive critical assessment of domestic UK open government.

I’ll post a few key learning take-aways from the whole meeting shortly, but in terms of overall impressions: there were some powerful and inspiring stories of the move towards open government from many countries, including from Omar Abdulkarim, Deputy Prime Minister of Libya, and Ben Abbes, Secretary of State of Tunisia and from a global perspective, building a forum to work out new models of open governance, and to do that through a partnership of civil society and elected governments is an incredibly exciting process to be starting. The meeting format in Brasilia didn’t necessarily make the most of opportunities for ‘open space’ discussions between civil society and governments in a constructive form, collectively addressing contemporary challenges of governance, but the very bringing together of people created the space for many great conversations to happen. Brasilia 2012 was just the start of many of the conversations, and the future of the OGP I suspect will depend on how they can develop and be sustained over the coming year…

Exploring how digital technology can support young people to engage socially and economically in their communities

[Summary: launching an open research project to find key messages for youth-focussed digital innovation]

Over the coming months I’ll be sharing a series of blog posts linked to a project I’m working on with David Wilcox and Alex Farrow for Nominet Trust, developing a number of key messages on how digital technologies can be used to support young people to engage socially and economically in their communities. It’s a project we would love to get your input into…

Here’s where we are starting from:

“The race is on to re-engage young people in building an inclusive, healthier, more equal and economically viable society.

But changing times need fresh thinking and new solutions.  It is essential that we find new, more effective approaches to addressing these persistent social and economic challenges.   

Digital technology offers all of us the opportunity to engage young people in new, more meaningful and relevant ways and enable their participation in building a more resilient society.

We recognise that there is no single solution; many different strategies are needed to support young people. What is going to work?  ”

Between now and mid-May we’re going to be working up a series of key messages for innovators exploring the digital dimension of work with young people (you can input into this draft messages in this document before 12th April), and then taking a ‘social reporting’ approach to curate key social media and online content that helps unpack what those messages might mean in practice.

Digital dimensions of innovation

So many digital innovation projects essentially work by either taking a social challenge, and bolting a digital tool onto it; or taking a digital tool, and bolting on a social issue it might deal with. But digital innovation can be about more than tools and platforms: it can be about seeing how digital communication impacts upon the methods of organizing and the sorts of activities that make sense in contemporary communities. We’re looking for the messages that work from a recognition of the shared space between digital innovation and social change.

For example, back in the Youth Work and Social Networking report (PDF) we explored how, now that digital technologies means young people are in almost constant contact with peer-groups through SMS, social networking and instant messaging, ideas of informal education based solely on an isolated two or three hours a week of face-to-face contact seem outdated. But the solution isn’t just for youth workers to pick up and use social network sites as a venue for existing forms of practice (as a number of ‘virtual youth centre’ projects quickly discovered). Instead, by going back to youth work values, practitioners can identify the new forms of practice and interaction that are possible in the digital world.

And digital innovations to support youth engagement in employment, enterprise and community action might not just involve changing the way services are delivered to young people. A post from Jonathan Ward this morning on the Guardian’s Service Delivery Hub highlights how many of the institutions of localism such as local strategic partnerships, neighborhood planning groups, and localism forums are inaccessible to young people who “are often too busy with family and work commitments to take part in the business of localism”. We could take an approach of bolting-on digital technologies for young people to input into local fora: setting up Facebook groups or online spaces to discuss planning, with someone feeding this into regular face-to-face meetings. But on it’s own this isn’t terribly empowering. Instead, we might explore what tools what would make the processes of neighborhood in general planning more open to youth input, and look at how digital technology can not only allow consultation with young people, but can shift the structures of decision making so that online input is as valued and important as the input of those with the time to turn up to a face-to-face meeting.

Get involved

Between now and April 12th we’re inviting input into the key messages that we should develop further. You can drop ideas into the comments below, or direct into the open document where we’re drafting ideas here. After April 12th, we’ll start working up a selection of the messages and searching out the social media and other online content that can illuminate what these messages might mean in practice.

As we work through our exploration, we’ll be blogging and tweeting reflections, and all the replies and responses we get will be fed into the process.

At the start of June the results of the process will hopefully be published as a paper and online resource to support Nominet Trust’s latest call for proposals.