Last days to enter the #PolicyMaking20 prize

The Crossover project, together with UNDP CIS, the Democratic Society and Euractiv, is organising the first “Policy-Making 2.0″ prize [1]. It goal is to raise awareness and consolidate the community about a new set of tools to support policy making, such as as open and big data, visualisation, opinion mining, collaborative governance, modeling and simulation, serious gaming.

Submit your application using this simple form (takes 5 minutes to complete): http://bit.ly/policyapps 

The 3 prizes, a symbolic iPad mini, will be assigned by a high-profile jury [3] including professors, policy-makers and web entrepreneurs.

The prize will be given at the fist policy-making 2.0 conference , where you are also invited to participate [2]. At the conference we will present the final Roadmap for Policy-Making 2.0, where your comments are very welcome [4].

Hope to see you there!

[1] http://www.crossover-project.eu/PolicyMaking20Prize.aspx

[2] http://www.crossover-project.eu

[3] http://www.crossover-project.eu/TheJury.aspx

[4] http://makingspeechestalk.com/crossover/

How can technology improve public policy? Come and find out in Dublin!

David Osimo, Giulio Quaggiotto and Anthony Zacharzewski

Join us in Dublin 17 and 18 June

This June, policymakers and techies from around Europe will come together in Dublin to discuss how technology can be used to improve the policymaking process.

The challenge

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have supported decision-making processes for many years.

Whether used for analyzing datasets, managing processes, or monitoring expenditure, governments have been a traditional large user of technology.

Today’s ICTs are well-suited to dealing with predictable, traditional problems that can be cracked with brute computing force, or a simple linear process.

Unfortunately, the world we live in is not linear, and definitely not simple. Poor policy decisions have flowed from the use of tools ill fitted to anticipate either the problems or impacts of policy decisions. The financial crisis is just one example, enabled by a reliance on models and algorithms based on untested assumptions.

“As a policy maker during the crisis, I found the available models of limited help. In fact, I would go further: in the face of the crisis, we felt abandoned by conventional tools.” (Jean-Claude Trichet, former Head of the European Central Bank)

At the same time, social media have accustomed citizens to voice their opinions, but have not yet provided the tools to genuinely improve policy.

The opportunities

The rise of social media and networked tools provide opportunities to take ICTs in government out of the engine room and put them into the public space.

In recent years, we have seen the emergence of an ecosystem of “policy applications” which use technology to improve the quality of policy making:

· Linked, open, big data help making sense of big data, for instance to monitor government performance (as in TopBraid )

· Visualization tools help us better understand the nature of public policy issues, such as demographic problems (see Gapminder)

· Collaborative tools such as Co-ment.com help analyze public policy documents in detail through collective intelligence and collaborative commenting

· Opinion mining solutions such as Discovertext helped to analyze and make sense of thousand of public comments to regulation proposals

· Serious games and persuasive technologies such as Glowcaps induce behavioural change, such as exercising more or sticking to medication, by enhancing feedback and peer pressure

· Systems modeling and simulation such as Gleam help anticipate the impact of policy decisions, taking into account the complexity of human behaviour and feedback systems

The discourse around government 2.0 and open government has focused mainly on open data and collaborative public services.

New models of open, networked governance take these conversations wider and make them richer.

“Open” in this context does not mean passively open like a door, but actively open like a shop, seeking out people to come and join in.

As web 2.0 turned the web into an environment that was experienced and moulded through social action, policymaking 2.0 should turn government into a more social, flexible and participatory experience.

For us to make the case for policy making that fits this century (rather than the last), we have to champion, advance and experiment with models that recognize human beings for what they are: complex, connected and diverse.

More than that, we have to make the case in public for these new approaches, and give credit to those who are leading in the direction we want others to follow.

Time to make it happen!

It is now time to bring together this dispersed community, create links between different experiences and raise the awareness of policy-makers.

For this reason, the Crossover project, UNDP, the Democratic Society and Euractiv are launching the first conference on policy-making 2.0, which will bring together researchers and practitioners from the global community.

The conference will be held at Trinity College, Dublin, on 17 and 18 June, 2013 (alongside the Digital Agenda Assembly 2013).

Speakers include:

- Miguel Gonzalez Sancho, Member of Cabinet of Commissioner Kroes

- Emer Coleman, former Deputy Director of UK Government Digital Service

- Tomislav Korman, Croatian government, Head of Online Communication

- Prof. Igor Mayer, University of Delft, Serious games for policy

- Prof. Eliot Rich, University of Albany,  Systems Thinking, System Dynamics, and Group Decision Support

- Anna Carbone, FuturICT flagship project

- Alberto Cottica, Policy-Making powered by Networks

- David Osimo, Crossover project, The Research Roadmap on Policy-Making 2.0

At the same time, we’re launching the Policy Applications Prize, designed to reward the most impactful and innovative software solutions for policy making.

>> Register for the conference

>> Submit your policy app and win a prize

Getting ready for Policy-Making 2.0 conference: interview with @Alberto_Cottica

In preparation of the Crossover conference on Policy-Making 2.0, to set the tune, I start interviewing some of the speakers about their perspective on the future of policy-making. Here’s my first interview with social networks research hacker Alberto Cottica.

Soem background: policy-making 2.0 has become the central topic of my work in recent years, both in research and practice.

As Crossover project, together with OpenPolicy and UNDP, we’re organizing the first conference on Policy-Making 2.0 in Dublin, on June 17th-18th.

This is, for me, the natural prosecution of the Public Services 2.0 workshop which we organised with Dominic Campbell and Lee Bryant in 2009 (full report here).

We want to establish policy-making 2.0 as a proper research and practice domain, which encompasses part of the e-Democracy and traditional economic modeling. These are tools to improve the quality of policy-making based on simulation, modeling, visualisation, opinion mining, open data and more (see here for a full description).

We’re gathering an impressive list of speakers that will shed light on the different aspects, on the opportunities and challenges.

On top of that, we’re launching the first “Policy Making 2.0 prize“, where a high profile jury will identify the best applications for policy making. And we’re publishing the Research Roadmap which is currently commentable here (yes, it’s the same software of Commentneelie.eu).

Registration is open and free here.

 

How Search induces Quora users to provide answers rather than questions

Q&A sites are one of the most recent web trends. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on Q&A website for a client, and I’m really fond of it.

I’m trying to set up a Q&A service “on demand”, using SaaS like qhub.com, StackOverflow, Answerbase, Shapado.

I realized why these web services differ from Quora (which is an own website, does not provide you the possibility to set up a Q&A service).

Quora is designed to encourage answers; those services encourage question.

Quora is about collective intelligence by filtering answers; the others are about increased customer power by crowdsourcing questions. In this sense, they don’t differ much from Uservoice or GetSatisfaction.

I am more interested in Quora-like applications, but it appear that there is no SaaS to do that. Perhaps I should instal Osqa or Shapado and tweak it.

How does Quora do that? Through a search function embedded in the “ask a question” box. When you start typing a question on Quora, a built-in search function shows you related questions that already exists. You are automatically induced to visit those questions, and maybe provide answers, rather than asking another question. I have no data but I’m pretty sure that if you do an online experiment, the websites with search function embedded would have a much higher Answers/Questions ratio.

Instead, Stack Overflow for example simply suggests you to first search, then ask the question if it’s not already there. It’s more cumbersome for users, although it could work for the highly committed Stack Overflow users.

When #opendata fails the reality check: the case of #desahucios in Spain

Spain is facing one of the deepest social conflict of its young democracy. Following the economic and financial crisis, there has been an explosion of “desahucios” (evictions): people are forced to leave their houses, bought through unrealistic mortgages with rigid clauses, to the banks that provided the mortgages. On top of loosing the house, they still need to pay back part of the loan since the housing market has collapsed and houses are now worth less than the mortgage. The EU has recognized that the Spanish Law should be changed as it does not protect enough the people against the bank. Spanish judges have stopped executing the “desahucios”, yet the new law proposal fails to gain approval from the government party.
This has led to major social unrests: every day the newpapers report about suicides of people who loose their home; acts of civil resistance to the “desahucios” have now become the norm; activists protest against the politicians by following them in their homes; banks are all equally considered (as in most countries) as main culprits.

In this context, imagine my surprise to realize that 5 years after the beginning of the crisis there is a complete lack of reliable statistics on this matter. Official data coming from the Justice department report together “desahucios” for house purchasing and rental, for the first and second houses, and put the figure to several hundred thousands since 2008. On top of that, they don’t report on which bank has activated the procedure.
There are some activity on crowdsourcing data, but while laudable, they only report about 600 cases (about 0,02%).

We don’t know the total number of people affected. We don’t know if the trend is increasing. We don’t know which banks are keener to expropriate people.

The government seems to promise some data for the next year, but it is not clear whether it will present the distribution by bank.

We’re escalating into social conflict (people against politician, people against banks) because we lack the basic tools for understanding the size of the problem, and who’s responsible for that.

This seems to me one of the most evident cases where open data could make the difference, and we should expect the open data evangelist to fight.

Yet this is not the case. There is very little activity asking for this data. On change.org, there are no petitions asking for data on this. On tuderechoasaber.es, the Spanish version of “whatdotheyknow”, there is one Freedom of Information request which has 3 followers including myself, despite the fact that the request is three months old, and has no answer.

We, the open data evangelists, did not meet the challenge of the reality check, when open data are most needed and would make the difference at a crucial historical moment. The open data community seems detached from the activist against “desahucios”. We need a Social Innovation Camp on this that brings together the two.

Can we sensibly claim that open data matters, when at the time it could make the difference on a topical issue, no one cared to fight for it?

But let’s finish on a positive note. Imagine if we could use open data to build a ranking of banks showing the percentage of “desahucios” over total number of mortgages given. Wouldn’t this empower citizens to choose better and induce banks to behave better? This “desahucios index” could become a powerful assessment not only of the “ethical attitude” of the bank, but also a “quality indicator” as evictions are also a sign of bad management. Who’s interested to work on this?

Starting my own Q and A: how to integrate offline and online engagement?

I recently gave a speech at an event of the Euractiv foundation about the future of policy-making in Europe. Following the event, I was asked several questions. Rather than answering only to the person, I will answer the questions on this blog. This is a way for me to experiment with Q&A, a tool I very much like. This is an experiment in preparing for the Policy-making 2.0 conference which we hold in June in Dublin (more information to follow)

The first question is about how to integrate best online and offline engagement. This is something I addressed many times, when animating the  Digital Agenda Assembly and many other European events.

Online engagement and offline are not substitute, but complementary. Online tools can be used before, during and after an event to augment its relevance and impact..

Before an event, it serves the purpose of preparing the discussion and framing it in a way that is clear to all participants. Questions should be asked to and by participants, or the keynote speaker should present its key ideas. The discussion that follows helps putting people on the right wave-length for the event. An additional tool I used is crowdsourcing (voting) to identify the topics to be discussed and the people to invite. To make this meaningful, it is crucial to report the results of the online discussion at the beginning of the event.

During the event, we mostly use twitter to get feedback from people in the room and outside. This creates a back-channel that facilitates peer-to-peer connection between participants and releases possible tensions created by the limited time, since people can voice their opinion online. We usually report during the event on “what’s being tweeted”. The role of twitter is dramatically different if the event is being broadcasted or not: if yes, twitter is mainly a way to let people participate remotely in an active manner. The best practice in this sense for me remains the Public Services 2.0 workshop in 2009.

After the event,  online engagement helps turning the energy of the one-off event into a more sustainable collaboration. It is crucial to ensure online spaces for follow-up and link between participants, such as an online discussion forum or a mailing list. While this can be easily made on the fly through free online tools such as Google Groups, it is best organised and launched before the event (such as the DAA website).

What would MySociety do? Imagining the MP 2.0

I was lucky enough to be contacted by one of the new MPs of the Italian government, Paolo Coppola. He was one of the “administrators 2.0″ from local government in Italy (but also a professor in Computer Science). He asked Marcello Verona and I about ideas to open up his parliamentary work (also based on our experience with CommentNeelie.eu).

The hangout soon took the form of a brainstorming about what would an ideal “MP 2.0″ look like. The best way to frame this for me is: if it was a MP, what would MySociety do?

This is particularly stimulating in view of our work on Policy-Making 2.0, which we will present and discuss at the forthcoming conference in Dublin, June 17/18. Stay tuned for more.

Some ideas emerged. First, it is great that MP starts to open up parliamentary work after winning the elections, not (as usual) as a short-term tool to gain a positive image in view of the elections. Open engagement is a long-term process, needs time to gain trust.

Secondly, there is no predefined set of tools, but rather a set of values that can be applied to any problem/ issue of the parliamentary activity. It’s about “thinking open” for each activity. One example: he receives 50 law proposals per day from fellow MPs, and there’s no way he could read them all. What about posting them online and letting people signal the most relevant and explain why (in plain Italian)?

It was particularly stimulating to hear his views on the problems of scalability and on the overall disappointment with the tools available. We all agreed that current technologies don’t scale well: engaging is still to time-consuming, you need a lot of human effort to sift through the contributions, and very little high-quality content emerge. The best ready-made solution is still letting people signal and filter the most relevant comments, as in Ideascale and Uservoice. More advanced solutions such as opinion mining, visualisation, network analysis, are far from maturity.

Myself, I am a fan of quora-like platforms, or symmetric Q&A, with a particular attention to reputation-based system to filter information (like Quora PeopleRank algorythm).

Overall, my recommendation is to move not in the direction of direct democracy and total transparency, but on gradually opening up each step to leverage open collective intelligence. A MP has to take decisions of his own, but has to be accountable and should take advantage of openness to attract micro-expertise which he does not have.

I am particularly against total transparency such as the web streaming of the negotiation between Grillo and Bersani. Politics needs private moments to negotiate: they need to be recognized as such. It’s not about secrecy, but the right to one-to-one discussion. If you want total transparency, you call for secrecy that you don’t know. I am in favour of transparent secrecy, the recognized space for one-to-one negotiation.

At the end, we left the meeting with a very provocative statement for the situation in Italy: we realize that WE LOVE POLITICS!

Look forward to continuing the conversation and hearing your views on this: what would MySociety do?