Tag: government

Open government policies are spreading across Europe — but what are the expected benefits?

Open government policies are spreading across Europe, challenging previous models of the public sector, and defining new forms of relationship between government, citizens, and digital technologies. In their Policy & Internet article “Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries,” Emiliana De Blasio and Donatella Selva present a qualitative analysis of policy documents from France, Italy, Spain, and the UK, in order to map out the different meanings of open government, and how it is framed by different national governments.

As a policy agenda, open government can be thought of as involving four variables: transparency, participation, collaboration, and digital technologies in democratic processes. Although the variables are all interpreted in different ways, participation, collaboration, and digital technology provide the greatest challenge to government, given they imply a major restructuring of public administration, whereas transparency goals (i.e., the disclosure of open data and the provision of monitoring tools) do not. Indeed, transparency is mentioned in the earliest accounts of open government from the 1950s.

The authors show the emergence of competing models of open government in Europe, with transparency and digital technologies being the most prominent issues in open government, and participation and collaboration being less considered and implemented. The standard model of open government seems to stress innovation and openness, and occasionally of public–private collaboration, but fails to achieve open decision making, with the policy-making process typically rooted in existing mechanisms. However, the authors also see the emergence of a policy framework within which democratic innovations can develop, testament to the vibrancy of the relationship between citizens and the public administration in contemporary European democracies.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: Would you say there are more similarities than differences between these countries’ approaches and expectations for open government? What were your main findings (briefly)?

Emiliana / Donatella: We can imagine the four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) as positioned in a continuum between a participatory frame and an economic/innovation frame: on the one side, we could observe that French policies focus on open government in order to strenghten and innovate the tradition of débat public; at the opposite side, the roots of the UK’s open government are in cost-efficiency, accountability and transparency arguments. Just between those two poles, Italian and Spanish policies situate open government in the context of a massive reform of the public sector, in order to reduce the administrative burden and to restore citizen trust in institutions. Two years after we wrote the article, we can observe that both in Italy and Spain something has changed, and participation has regained attention as a public policy issue.

Ed.: How much does policy around open data change according to who’s in power? (Obama and Trump clearly have very different ideas about the value of opening up government..). Or do civil services tend to smooth out any ideological differences around openness and transparency, even as parties enter and leave power?

Emiliana / Donatella: The case of open data is quite peculiar: it is one of the few policy issues directly addressed by the European Union Commission, and now by the transnational agreement on the G8 Open Data Charter, and for this reason we could say there is a homogenising trend. Moreover, opening up data is an ongoing process — started at least eight years ago — that will be too difficult for any new government to stop. As for openness and transparency in general, Cameron (and now May), Hollande, Monti (and then Renzi) and Rajoy’s governments, all wrote policies with a strong emphasis on innovation and openness as the key for a better future.

In fact, we observed that at the national level, the rhetoric of innovation and openness is bipartisan, and not dependent on political orientation — although the concrete policy instruments and implementation strategies might differ. It is also for this reason that governments tend to remain in the “comfort zone” of transparency and public-private partnerships: they still evocate a change in the relationship between public sector and civil society, but they don’t actually address this change.

Still, we should highlight that at the regional and local levels open data, transparency and participation policies are mostly promoted by liberal and/or left-leaning administrations.

Ed.: Your results for France (i.e. almost no mention of the digital economy, growth, or reform of public services) are basically the opposite of Macron’s (winning) platform of innovation and reform. Did Macron identify a problem in France; and might you expect a change as he takes control?

Emiliana / Donatella: Macron’s electoral programme is based on what he already did while in charge at the Ministry of Economy: he pursued a French digital agenda willing to attract foreign investments, to create digital productive hubs (the French Tech), and innovate the whole economy. Interestingly, however, he did not frame those policies under the umbrella of open government, preferring to speak about “modernisation”. The importance given by Macron to innovation in the economy and public sector finds some antecedents in the policies we analysed: the issue of “modernisation” was prominent and we expect it will be even more, now that he has gained the presidency.

Ed.: In your article you analyse policy documents, i.e. texts that set out hopes and intentions. But is there any sense of how much practical effect these have: particularly given how expensive it is to open up data? You note “the Spanish and Italian governments are especially focused on restoring trust in institutions, compensating for scandals, corruption, and a general distrust which is typical in Southern Europe” .. and yet the current Spanish government is still being rocked by corruption scandals.

Emiliana / Donatella: The efficacy of any kind of policies can vary depending on many factors — such as internal political context, international constraints, economic resources, and clarity of policy instruments. In addition, we should consider that at the national level, very few policies have an immediate consequence on citizens’ everyday lives. This is surely one of the worst problems of open government: from the one side, it is a policy agenda promoted in a top-down perspective — from international and/or national institutions; and from the other side, it fails to engage local communities in a purposeful dialogue. At such, open government policies appear to be self-reflective acts by governments, as paradoxical as this might be.

Ed.: Despite terrible, terrible things like the Trump administration’s apparent deletion of climate data, do you see a general trend towards increased datafication, accountability, and efficiency (perhaps even driven by industry, as well as NGOs)? Or are public administrations far too subject to political currents and individual whim?

Emiliana / Donatella: As we face turbulent times, it would be very risky to assert that tomorrow’s world will be more open than today’s. But even if we observe some interruptions, the principles of open democracy and open government have colonised public agendas: as we have tried to stress in our article, openness, participation, collaboration and innovation can have different meanings and degrees, but they succeeded in acquiring the status of policy issues.

And as you rightly point out, the way towards accountability and openness is not a public sector’s prerogative any more: many actors from civil society and industry have already mobilised in order to influence government agendas, public opinion, and to inform citizens. As the first open government policies start to produce practical effects on people’s everyday lives, we might expect that public awareness will rise, and that no individual will be able to ignore it.

Ed.: And does the EU have any supra-national influence, in terms of promoting general principles of openness, transparency etc.? Or is it strictly left to individual countries to open up (if they want), and in whatever direction they like? I would have thought the EU would be the ideal force to promote rational technocratic things like open government?

Emiliana / Donatella: The EU has the power of stressing some policy issues, and letting some others be “forgotten”. The complex legislative procedures of the EU, together with the trans-national conflictuality, produce policies with different degrees of enforcement. Generally speaking, some EU policies have a direct influence on national laws, whereas some others don’t, leaving with national governments the decision of whether or not to act. In the case of open government, we see that the EU has been particularly influential in setting the Digital Agenda for 2020 and now the Sustainable Future Agenda for 2030; in both documents, Europe encourages Member States to dialogue and collaborate with private actors and civil society, in order to achieve some objectives of economic development.

At the moment, initiatives like the Open Government Partnership — which runs outside the EU competence and involves many European countries — are tying up governments in trans-national networks converging on a set of principles and methods. Because of that Partnership, for example, countries like Italy and Spain have experimented with the first national co-drafting procedures.

Read the full article: De Blasio, E. and Selva, D. (2016) Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries. Policy & Internet 8 (3). DOI: doi:10.1002/poi3.118.

Emiliana De Blasio and Donatella Selva were talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Open government policies are spreading across Europe — but what are the expected benefits?

Open government policies are spreading across Europe, challenging previous models of the public sector, and defining new forms of relationship between government, citizens, and digital technologies. In their Policy & Internet article “Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries,” Emiliana De Blasio and Donatella Selva present a qualitative analysis of policy documents from France, Italy, Spain, and the UK, in order to map out the different meanings of open government, and how it is framed by different national governments.

As a policy agenda, open government can be thought of as involving four variables: transparency, participation, collaboration, and digital technologies in democratic processes. Although the variables are all interpreted in different ways, participation, collaboration, and digital technology provide the greatest challenge to government, given they imply a major restructuring of public administration, whereas transparency goals (i.e., the disclosure of open data and the provision of monitoring tools) do not. Indeed, transparency is mentioned in the earliest accounts of open government from the 1950s.

The authors show the emergence of competing models of open government in Europe, with transparency and digital technologies being the most prominent issues in open government, and participation and collaboration being less considered and implemented. The standard model of open government seems to stress innovation and openness, and occasionally of public–private collaboration, but fails to achieve open decision making, with the policy-making process typically rooted in existing mechanisms. However, the authors also see the emergence of a policy framework within which democratic innovations can develop, testament to the vibrancy of the relationship between citizens and the public administration in contemporary European democracies.

We caught up with the authors to discuss their findings:

Ed.: Would you say there are more similarities than differences between these countries’ approaches and expectations for open government? What were your main findings (briefly)?

Emiliana / Donatella: We can imagine the four European countries (France, Italy, Spain and the UK) as positioned in a continuum between a participatory frame and an economic/innovation frame: on the one side, we could observe that French policies focus on open government in order to strenghten and innovate the tradition of débat public; at the opposite side, the roots of the UK’s open government are in cost-efficiency, accountability and transparency arguments. Just between those two poles, Italian and Spanish policies situate open government in the context of a massive reform of the public sector, in order to reduce the administrative burden and to restore citizen trust in institutions. Two years after we wrote the article, we can observe that both in Italy and Spain something has changed, and participation has regained attention as a public policy issue.

Ed.: How much does policy around open data change according to who’s in power? (Obama and Trump clearly have very different ideas about the value of opening up government..). Or do civil services tend to smooth out any ideological differences around openness and transparency, even as parties enter and leave power?

Emiliana / Donatella: The case of open data is quite peculiar: it is one of the few policy issues directly addressed by the European Union Commission, and now by the transnational agreement on the G8 Open Data Charter, and for this reason we could say there is a homogenising trend. Moreover, opening up data is an ongoing process — started at least eight years ago — that will be too difficult for any new government to stop. As for openness and transparency in general, Cameron (and now May), Hollande, Monti (and then Renzi) and Rajoy’s governments, all wrote policies with a strong emphasis on innovation and openness as the key for a better future.

In fact, we observed that at the national level, the rhetoric of innovation and openness is bipartisan, and not dependent on political orientation — although the concrete policy instruments and implementation strategies might differ. It is also for this reason that governments tend to remain in the “comfort zone” of transparency and public-private partnerships: they still evocate a change in the relationship between public sector and civil society, but they don’t actually address this change.

Still, we should highlight that at the regional and local levels open data, transparency and participation policies are mostly promoted by liberal and/or left-leaning administrations.

Ed.: Your results for France (i.e. almost no mention of the digital economy, growth, or reform of public services) are basically the opposite of Macron’s (winning) platform of innovation and reform. Did Macron identify a problem in France; and might you expect a change as he takes control?

Emiliana / Donatella: Macron’s electoral programme is based on what he already did while in charge at the Ministry of Economy: he pursued a French digital agenda willing to attract foreign investments, to create digital productive hubs (the French Tech), and innovate the whole economy. Interestingly, however, he did not frame those policies under the umbrella of open government, preferring to speak about “modernisation”. The importance given by Macron to innovation in the economy and public sector finds some antecedents in the policies we analysed: the issue of “modernisation” was prominent and we expect it will be even more, now that he has gained the presidency.

Ed.: In your article you analyse policy documents, i.e. texts that set out hopes and intentions. But is there any sense of how much practical effect these have: particularly given how expensive it is to open up data? You note “the Spanish and Italian governments are especially focused on restoring trust in institutions, compensating for scandals, corruption, and a general distrust which is typical in Southern Europe” .. and yet the current Spanish government is still being rocked by corruption scandals.

Emiliana / Donatella: The efficacy of any kind of policies can vary depending on many factors — such as internal political context, international constraints, economic resources, and clarity of policy instruments. In addition, we should consider that at the national level, very few policies have an immediate consequence on citizens’ everyday lives. This is surely one of the worst problems of open government: from the one side, it is a policy agenda promoted in a top-down perspective — from international and/or national institutions; and from the other side, it fails to engage local communities in a purposeful dialogue. At such, open government policies appear to be self-reflective acts by governments, as paradoxical as this might be.

Ed.: Despite terrible, terrible things like the Trump administration’s apparent deletion of climate data, do you see a general trend towards increased datafication, accountability, and efficiency (perhaps even driven by industry, as well as NGOs)? Or are public administrations far too subject to political currents and individual whim?

Emiliana / Donatella: As we face turbulent times, it would be very risky to assert that tomorrow’s world will be more open than today’s. But even if we observe some interruptions, the principles of open democracy and open government have colonised public agendas: as we have tried to stress in our article, openness, participation, collaboration and innovation can have different meanings and degrees, but they succeeded in acquiring the status of policy issues.

And as you rightly point out, the way towards accountability and openness is not a public sector’s prerogative any more: many actors from civil society and industry have already mobilised in order to influence government agendas, public opinion, and to inform citizens. As the first open government policies start to produce practical effects on people’s everyday lives, we might expect that public awareness will rise, and that no individual will be able to ignore it.

Ed.: And does the EU have any supra-national influence, in terms of promoting general principles of openness, transparency etc.? Or is it strictly left to individual countries to open up (if they want), and in whatever direction they like? I would have thought the EU would be the ideal force to promote rational technocratic things like open government?

Emiliana / Donatella: The EU has the power of stressing some policy issues, and letting some others be “forgotten”. The complex legislative procedures of the EU, together with the trans-national conflictuality, produce policies with different degrees of enforcement. Generally speaking, some EU policies have a direct influence on national laws, whereas some others don’t, leaving with national governments the decision of whether or not to act. In the case of open government, we see that the EU has been particularly influential in setting the Digital Agenda for 2020 and now the Sustainable Future Agenda for 2030; in both documents, Europe encourages Member States to dialogue and collaborate with private actors and civil society, in order to achieve some objectives of economic development.

At the moment, initiatives like the Open Government Partnership — which runs outside the EU competence and involves many European countries — are tying up governments in trans-national networks converging on a set of principles and methods. Because of that Partnership, for example, countries like Italy and Spain have experimented with the first national co-drafting procedures.

Read the full article: De Blasio, E. and Selva, D. (2016) Why Choose Open Government? Motivations for the Adoption of Open Government Policies in Four European Countries. Policy & Internet 8 (3). DOI: doi:10.1002/poi3.118.

Emiliana De Blasio and Donatella Selva were talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Back to the bad old days, as civil service infighting threatens UK’s only hope for digital government

GDS-TheConversationTechnology and the public sector have rarely been happy bedfellows in the UK, where every government technology project seems doomed to arrive late, unperform and come in over budget. The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to drag the civil service into the 21st century, making services “digital by default”, cheaper, faster, and easier to use. It quickly won accolades for its approach and early cost savings.

But then its leadership departed, not once or twice but three times – the latter two within the last few months. The largest government departments have begun to reassert their authority over GDS expert advice, and digital government looks likely to be dragged back towards the deeply dysfunctional old ways of doing things. GDS isn’t perfect, but to erase the progress it has put in place would be a terrible loss.

The UK government’s use of technology has previously lagged far behind other countries. Low usage of digital services rendered them expensive and inefficient. Digital operations were often handicapped by complex networks of legacy systems, some dating right back to the 1970s. The development of the long-promised “digital era governance” was mired in a series of mega contracts: huge in terms of cost, scope and timescale, bigger than any attempted by other governments worldwide, and to be delivered by the same handful of giant global computer consulting firms that rarely saw any challenge to their grip on public contracts. Departmental silos ensured there were no economies of scale, shared services failed, and the Treasury negotiated with 24 departments individually for their IT expenditure.

Some commentators (including this one) were a little sceptical on our first encounter with GDS. We had seen it before: the Office of the e-Envoy set up by Tony Blair in 1999, superseded by the E-government Unit (2004-7), and then Directgov until 2010.

Successes and failures

In many ways GDS has been a success story, with former prime minister David Cameron calling it one of the “great unsung triumphs of the last parliament” with a claimed £1.7 billion cost savings. Treasury negotiates with GDS, rather than with 24 departments, and GDS has been involved in every hiring decision for senior digital staff, raising the quality of digital expertise.

The building blocks of the GDS’ promised “government as a platform” approach have appeared: Verify, a federated identity system that doesn’t rely on ID cards or centralised identity databases, Govpay, which makes it easier to make payments to the government, and Notify, which allows government agencies to keep citizens informed of progress on services.

GDS tackled the overweening power of the huge firms that have dominated government IT in the past, and has given smaller departments and agencies the confidence to undertake some projects themselves, bringing expertise back in-house, embracing open source, and washing away some of the taint of failure from previous government IT projects.

There has even been a procession of visitors from overseas coming to investigate, and imitations have spawned across the world, from the US to Australia.

But elsewhere GDS has really only chipped away at monolithic government IT. For example, GDS and the Department for Work and Pensions failed to work together on Universal Credit. Instead, the huge Pathfindersystem that underpinned the Universal Credit trial phase was supplied by HP, Accenture, IBM and BT and ran into serious trouble at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. The department is now building a new system in parallel, with GDS advice, that will largely replace it.

The big systems integrators are still waiting in the wings, poised to renew their influence in government. Francis Maude, who as cabinet minister created GDS, recently admitted that if GDS had undertaken faster and more wholescale reform of legacy systems, it wouldn’t be under threat now.

The risks of centralisation

An issue GDS never tackled is one that has existed right from the start: is it an army, or is it a band of mercenaries working in other departments? Should GDS be at the centre, building and providing systems, or should it just help others to do so, building their expertise? GDS has done both, but the emphasis has been on the former, most evident through putting the government portal GOV.UK at the centre of public services.

Heading down a centralised route was always risky, as the National Audit Office observed of its forerunner direct.gov in 2007. Many departments resented the centralisation of GOV.UK, and the removal of their departmental websites, but it’s likely they’re used to it now, even relieved that it’s no longer their problem. But a staff of 700 with a budget of £112m (from 2015) was always going to look vulnerable to budget cuts.

Return of the Big Beasts

If GDS is diminished or disbanded, any hope of creating effective digital government faces two threats.

A land-grab from the biggest departments – HMRC, DWP and the Home Office, all critics of the GDS – is one possibility. There are already signs of a purge of the digital chiefs put in place by GDS, despite the National Audit Office citing continuity of leadership as critical. This looks like permanent secretaries in the civil service reasserting control over their departments’ digital operations – which will inevitably bring a return to siloed thinking and siloed data, completely at odds with the idea of government as a platform. While the big beasts can walk alone, without GDS the smaller agencies will struggle.

The other threat is the big companies, poised in the wings to renew their influence on government should GDS controls on contract size be removed. It has already begun: the ATLAS consortium led by HP has already won two Ministry of Defence contracts worth £1.5 billion since founding GDS chief Mike Bracken resigned.

It’s hard to see how government as a platform can be taken forward without expertise and capacity at the centre – no single department would have the incentive to do so. Canada’s former chief information officer recently attributed Canada’s decline as a world leader in digital government to the removal of funds dedicated to allowing departmental silos to work together. Even as the UN declares the UK to be the global leader for implementing e-government, unless the GDS can re-establish itself the UK may find the foundations it has created swept away – at a time when using digital services to do more with less is needed more than ever.

This was first posted on The Conversation.

Back to the bad old days, as civil service infighting threatens UK’s only hope for digital government

GDS-TheConversationTechnology and the public sector have rarely been happy bedfellows in the UK, where every government technology project seems doomed to arrive late, unperform and come in over budget. The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to drag the civil service into the 21st century, making services “digital by default”, cheaper, faster, and easier to use. It quickly won accolades for its approach and early cost savings.

But then its leadership departed, not once or twice but three times – the latter two within the last few months. The largest government departments have begun to reassert their authority over GDS expert advice, and digital government looks likely to be dragged back towards the deeply dysfunctional old ways of doing things. GDS isn’t perfect, but to erase the progress it has put in place would be a terrible loss.

The UK government’s use of technology has previously lagged far behind other countries. Low usage of digital services rendered them expensive and inefficient. Digital operations were often handicapped by complex networks of legacy systems, some dating right back to the 1970s. The development of the long-promised “digital era governance” was mired in a series of mega contracts: huge in terms of cost, scope and timescale, bigger than any attempted by other governments worldwide, and to be delivered by the same handful of giant global computer consulting firms that rarely saw any challenge to their grip on public contracts. Departmental silos ensured there were no economies of scale, shared services failed, and the Treasury negotiated with 24 departments individually for their IT expenditure.

Some commentators (including this one) were a little sceptical on our first encounter with GDS. We had seen it before: the Office of the e-Envoy set up by Tony Blair in 1999, superseded by the E-government Unit (2004-7), and then Directgov until 2010.

Successes and failures

In many ways GDS has been a success story, with former prime minister David Cameron calling it one of the “great unsung triumphs of the last parliament” with a claimed £1.7 billion cost savings. Treasury negotiates with GDS, rather than with 24 departments, and GDS has been involved in every hiring decision for senior digital staff, raising the quality of digital expertise.

The building blocks of the GDS’ promised “government as a platform” approach have appeared: Verify, a federated identity system that doesn’t rely on ID cards or centralised identity databases, Govpay, which makes it easier to make payments to the government, and Notify, which allows government agencies to keep citizens informed of progress on services.

GDS tackled the overweening power of the huge firms that have dominated government IT in the past, and has given smaller departments and agencies the confidence to undertake some projects themselves, bringing expertise back in-house, embracing open source, and washing away some of the taint of failure from previous government IT projects.

There has even been a procession of visitors from overseas coming to investigate, and imitations have spawned across the world, from the US to Australia.

But elsewhere GDS has really only chipped away at monolithic government IT. For example, GDS and the Department for Work and Pensions failed to work together on Universal Credit. Instead, the huge Pathfindersystem that underpinned the Universal Credit trial phase was supplied by HP, Accenture, IBM and BT and ran into serious trouble at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds. The department is now building a new system in parallel, with GDS advice, that will largely replace it.

The big systems integrators are still waiting in the wings, poised to renew their influence in government. Francis Maude, who as cabinet minister created GDS, recently admitted that if GDS had undertaken faster and more wholescale reform of legacy systems, it wouldn’t be under threat now.

The risks of centralisation

An issue GDS never tackled is one that has existed right from the start: is it an army, or is it a band of mercenaries working in other departments? Should GDS be at the centre, building and providing systems, or should it just help others to do so, building their expertise? GDS has done both, but the emphasis has been on the former, most evident through putting the government portal GOV.UK at the centre of public services.

Heading down a centralised route was always risky, as the National Audit Office observed of its forerunner direct.gov in 2007. Many departments resented the centralisation of GOV.UK, and the removal of their departmental websites, but it’s likely they’re used to it now, even relieved that it’s no longer their problem. But a staff of 700 with a budget of £112m (from 2015) was always going to look vulnerable to budget cuts.

Return of the Big Beasts

If GDS is diminished or disbanded, any hope of creating effective digital government faces two threats.

A land-grab from the biggest departments – HMRC, DWP and the Home Office, all critics of the GDS – is one possibility. There are already signs of a purge of the digital chiefs put in place by GDS, despite the National Audit Office citing continuity of leadership as critical. This looks like permanent secretaries in the civil service reasserting control over their departments’ digital operations – which will inevitably bring a return to siloed thinking and siloed data, completely at odds with the idea of government as a platform. While the big beasts can walk alone, without GDS the smaller agencies will struggle.

The other threat is the big companies, poised in the wings to renew their influence on government should GDS controls on contract size be removed. It has already begun: the ATLAS consortium led by HP has already won two Ministry of Defence contracts worth £1.5 billion since founding GDS chief Mike Bracken resigned.

It’s hard to see how government as a platform can be taken forward without expertise and capacity at the centre – no single department would have the incentive to do so. Canada’s former chief information officer recently attributed Canada’s decline as a world leader in digital government to the removal of funds dedicated to allowing departmental silos to work together. Even as the UN declares the UK to be the global leader for implementing e-government, unless the GDS can re-establish itself the UK may find the foundations it has created swept away – at a time when using digital services to do more with less is needed more than ever.

This was first posted on The Conversation.

Alan Turing Institute and OII: Summit on Data Science for Government and Policy Making

The benefits of big data and data science for the private sector are well recognised. So far, considerably less attention has been paid to the power and potential of the growing field of data science for policy-making and public services. On Monday 14th March 2016 the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Alan Turing Institute (ATI) hosted a Summit on Data Science for Government and Policy Making, funded by the EPSRC. Leading policy makers, data scientists and academics came together to discuss how the ATI and government could work together to develop data science for the public good. The convenors of the Summit, Professors Helen Margetts (OII) and Tom Melham (Computer Science), report on the day’s proceedings.

The Alan Turing Institute will build on the UK’s existing academic strengths in the analysis and application of big data and algorithm research to place the UK at the forefront of world-wide research in data science. The University of Oxford is one of five university partners, and the OII is the only partnering department in the social sciences. The aim of the summit on Data Science for Government and Policy-Making was to understand how government can make better use of big data and the ATI – with the academic partners in listening mode.

We hoped that the participants would bring forward their own stories, hopes and fears regarding data science for the public good. Crucially, we wanted to work out a roadmap for how different stakeholders can work together on the distinct challenges facing government, as opposed to commercial organisations. At the same time, data science research and development has much to gain from the policy-making community. Some of the things that government does – collect tax from the whole population, or give money away at scale, or possess the legitimate use of force – it does by virtue of being government. So the sources of data and some of the data science challenges that public agencies face are unique and tackling them could put government working with researchers at the forefront of data science innovation.

During the Summit a range of stakeholders provided insight from their distinctive perspectives; the Government Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir Mark Walport; Deputy Director of the ATI, Patrick Wolfe; the National Statistician and Director of ONS, John Pullinger; Director of Data at the Government Digital Service, Paul Maltby. Representatives of frontline departments recounted how algorithmic decision-making is already bringing predictive capacity into operational business, improving efficiency and effectiveness.

Discussion revolved around the challenges of how to build core capability in data science across government, rather than outsourcing it (as happened in an earlier era with information technology) or confining it to a data science profession. Some delegates talked of being in the ‘foothills’ of data science. The scale, heterogeneity and complexity of some government departments currently works against data science innovation, particularly when larger departments can operate thousands of databases, creating legacy barriers to interoperability. Out-dated policies can work against data science methodologies. Attendees repeatedly voiced concerns about sharing data across government departments, in some case because of limitations of legal protections; in others because people were unsure what they can and cannot do.

The potential power of data science creates an urgent need for discussion of ethics. Delegates and speakers repeatedly affirmed the importance of an ethical framework and for thought leadership in this area, so that ethics is ‘part of the science’. The clear emergent option was a national Council for Data Ethics (along the lines of the Nuffield Council for Bioethics) convened by the ATI, as recommended in the recent Science and Technology parliamentary committee report The big data dilemma and the government response. Luciano Floridi (OII’s professor of the philosophy and ethics of information) warned that we cannot reduce ethics to mere compliance. Ethical problems do not normally have a single straightforward ‘right’ answer, but require dialogue and thought and extend far beyond individual privacy. There was consensus that the UK has the potential to provide global thought leadership and to set the standard for the rest of Europe. It was announced during the Summit that an ATI Working Group on the Ethics of Data Science has been confirmed, to take these issues forward.

So what happens now?

Throughout the Summit there were calls from policy makers for more data science leadership. We hope that the ATI will be instrumental in providing this, and an interface both between government, business and academia, and between separate Government departments. This Summit showed just how much real demand – and enthusiasm – there is from policy makers to develop data science methods and harness the power of big data. No-one wants to repeat with data science the history of government information technology – where in the 1950s and 60s, government led the way as an innovator, but has struggled to maintain this position ever since. We hope that the ATI can act to prevent the same fate for data science and provide both thought leadership and the ‘time and space’ (as one delegate put it) for policy-makers to work with the Institute to develop data science for the public good.

So since the Summit, in response to the clear need that emerged from the discussion and other conversations with stakeholders, the ATI has been designing a Policy Innovation Unit, with the aim of working with government departments on ‘data science for public good’ issues. Activities could include:

  • Secondments at the ATI for data scientists from government
  • Short term projects in government departments for ATI doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers
  • Developing ATI as an accredited data facility for public data, as suggested in the current Cabinet Office consultation on better use of data in government
  • ATI pilot policy projects, using government data
  • Policy symposia focused on specific issues and challenges
  • ATI representation in regular meetings at the senior level (for example, between Chief Scientific Advisors, the Cabinet Office, the Office for National Statistics, GO-Science).
  • ATI acting as an interface between public and private sectors, for example through knowledge exchange and the exploitation of non-government sources as well as government data
  • ATI offering a trusted space, time and a forum for formulating questions and developing solutions that tackle public policy problems and push forward the frontiers of data science
  • ATI as a source of cross-fertilization of expertise between departments
  • Reviewing the data science landscape in a department or agency, identifying feedback loops – or lack thereof – between policy-makers, analysts, front-line staff and identifying possibilities for an ‘intelligent centre’ model through strategic development of expertise.

The Summit, and a series of Whitehall Roundtables convened by GO-Science which led up to it, have initiated a nascent network of stakeholders across government, which we aim to build on and develop over the coming months. If you are interested in being part of this, please do be in touch with us

Helen Margetts, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (director@oii.ox.ac.uk)

Tom Melham, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford

Exploring the Ethics of Monitoring Online Extremism

(Part 2 of 2) The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. In the second of a two-part post, Josh Cowls and Ian Brown discuss the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen. Read the first post.

Surveillance in NYC's financial district. Photo by Jonathan McIntosh (flickr).
Surveillance in NYC’s financial district. Photo by Jonathan McIntosh (flickr).

Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorized in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet?

Josh: I think that is right – many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US).. A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing!

Ed: So do you think that concepts like proportionality and justification need to be updated for online spaces?

Josh: I think that at a very basic level they are still useful. People know what we mean when we talk about something being necessary and proportionate, and about the importance of having oversight. I think we also have a good idea about what it means to be non-discriminatory when applying the law, though this is one of those areas that can quickly get quite tricky. Consider the use of online data sources to identify people. On the one hand, the Internet is ‘blind’ in that it does not automatically codify social demographics. In this sense it is not possible to profile people in the same way that we can offline. On the other hand, it is in some ways the complete opposite. It is very easy to directly, and often invisibly, create really firm systems of discrimination – and, most problematically, to do so opaquely.

This is particularly challenging when we are dealing with extremism because, as we pointed out in the report, extremists are generally pretty unremarkable in terms of demographics. It perhaps used to be true that extremists were more likely to be poor or to have had challenging upbringings, but many of the people going to fight for the Islamic State are middle class. So we have fewer demographic pointers to latch onto when trying to find these people. Of course, insofar as there are identifiers they won’t be released by the government. The real problem for society is that there isn’t very much openness and transparency about these processes.

Ed: Governments are increasingly working with the private sector to gain access to different types of information about the public. For example, in Australia a Telecommunications bill was recently passed which requires all telecommunication companies to keep the metadata – though not the content data – of communications for two years. A lot of people opposed the Bill because metadata is still very informative, and as such there are some clear concerns about privacy. Similar concerns have been expressed in the UK about an Investigatory Powers Bill that would require new Internet Connection Records about customers, online activities.  How much do you think private corporations should protect people’s data? And how much should concepts like proportionality apply to them?

Ian: To me the distinction between metadata and content data is fairly meaningless. For example, often just knowing when and who someone called and for how long can tell you everything you need to know! You don’t have to see the content of the call. There are a lot of examples like this which highlight the slightly ludicrous nature of distinguishing between metadata and content data. It is all data. As has been said by former US CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, “we kill people based on metadata.”

One issue that we identified in the report is the increased onus on companies to monitor online spaces, and all of the legal entanglements that come from this given that companies might not be based in the same country as the users. One of our interviewees called this new international situation a ‘very different ballgame’. Working out how to deal with problematic online content is incredibly difficult, and some huge issues of freedom of speech are bound up in this. On the one hand, there is a government-led approach where we use the law to take down content. On the other hand is a broader approach, whereby social networks voluntarily take down objectionable content even if it is permissible under the law. This causes much more serious problems for human rights and the rule of law.

Read the full report: Brown, I., and Cowls, J., (2015) Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Publications.

Ian Brown is Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the OII. His research is focused on surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Internet regulation.

Josh Cowls is a a student and researcher based at MIT, working to understand the impact of technology on politics, communication and the media.

Josh and Ian were talking to Blog Editor Bertie Vidgen.

Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material

The Internet serves not only as a breeding ground for extremism, but also offers myriad data streams which potentially hold great value to law enforcement. The report by the OII’s Ian Brown and Josh Cowls for the VOX-Pol project: Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material explores the complexities of policing the web for extremist material, and its implications for security, privacy and human rights. Josh Cowls discusses the report with blog editor Bertie Vidgen.*

*please note that the views given here do not necessarily reflect the content of the report, or those of the lead author, Ian Brown.

In terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. Image by Miguel Discart (Flickr).

 

Ed: Josh, could you let us know the purpose of the report, outline some of the key findings, and tell us how you went about researching the topic?

Josh: Sure. In the report we take a step back from the ground-level question of ‘what are the police doing?’ and instead ask, ‘what are the ethical and political boundaries, rationale and justifications for policing the web for these kinds of activity?’ We used an international human rights framework as an ethical and legal basis to understand what is being done. We also tried to further the debate by clarifying a few things: what has already been done by law enforcement, and, really crucially, what the perspectives are of all those involved, including lawmakers, law enforcers, technology companies, academia and many others.

We derived the insights in the report from a series of workshops, one of which was held as part of the EU-funded VOX-Pol network. The workshops involved participants who were quite high up in law enforcement, the intelligence agencies, the tech industry civil society, and academia. We followed these up with interviews with other individuals in similar positions and conducted background policy research.

Ed: You highlight that many extremist groups (such as Isis) are making really significant use of online platforms to organize, radicalize people, and communicate their messages.

Josh: Absolutely. A large part of our initial interest when writing the report lay in finding out more about the role of the Internet in facilitating the organization, coordination, recruitment and inspiration of violent extremism. The impact of this has been felt very recently in Paris and Beirut, and many other places worldwide. This report pre-dates these most recent developments, but was written in the context of these sorts of events.

Given the Internet is so embedded in our social lives, I think it would have been surprising if political extremist activity hadn’t gone online as well. Of course, the Internet is a very powerful tool and in the wrong hands it can be a very destructive force. But other research, separate from this report, has found that the Internet is not usually people’s first point of contact with extremism: more often than not that actually happens offline through people you know in the wider world. Nonetheless it can definitely serve as an incubator of extremism and can serve to inspire further attacks.

Ed: In the report you identify different groups in society that are affected by, and affecting, issues of extremism, privacy, and governance – including civil society, academics, large corporations and governments

Josh: Yes, in the later stages of the report we do divide society into these groups, and offer some perspectives on what they do, and what they think about counter-extremism. For example, in terms of counter-speech there are different roles for government, civil society, and industry. There is this idea that ISIS are really good at social media, and that that is how they are powering a lot of their support; but one of the people that we spoke to said that it is not the case that ISIS are really good, it is just that governments are really bad!

We shouldn’t ask government to participate in the social network: bureaucracies often struggle to be really flexible and nimble players on social media. In contrast, civil society groups tend to be more engaged with communities and know how to “speak the language” of those who might be vulnerable to radicalization. As such they can enter that dialogue in a much more informed and effective way.

The other tension, or paradigm, that we offer in this report is the distinction between whether people are ‘at risk’ or ‘a risk’. What we try to point to is that people can go from one to the other. They start by being ‘at risk’ of radicalization, but if they do get radicalized and become a violent threat to society, which only happens in the minority of cases, then they become ‘a risk’. Engaging with people who are ‘at risk’ highlights the importance of having respect and dialogue with communities that are often the first to be lambasted when things go wrong, but which seldom get all the help they need, or the credit when they get it right. We argue that civil society is particularly suited for being part of this process.

Ed: It seems like the things that people do or say online can only really be understood in terms of the context. But often we don’t have enough information, and it can be very hard to just look at something and say ‘This is definitely extremist material that is going to incite someone to commit terrorist or violent acts’.

Josh: Yes, I think you’re right. In the report we try to take what is a very complicated concept – extremist material – and divide it into more manageable chunks of meaning. We talk about three hierarchical levels. The degree of legal consensus over whether content should be banned decreases as it gets less extreme. The first level we identified was straight up provocation and hate speech. Hate speech legislation has been part of the law for a long time. You can’t incite racial hatred, you can’t incite people to crimes, and you can’t promote terrorism. Most countries in Europe have laws against these things.

The second level is the glorification and justification of terrorism. This is usually more post-hoc as by definition if you are glorifying something it has already happened. You may well be inspiring future actions, but that relationship between the act of violence and the speech act is different than with provocation. Nevertheless, some countries, such as Spain and France, have pushed hard on criminalising this. The third level is non-violent extremist material. This is the most contentious level, as there is very little consensus about what types of material should be called ‘extremist’ even though they are non-violent. One of the interviewees that we spoke to said that often it is hard to distinguish between someone who is just being friendly and someone who is really trying to persuade or groom someone to go to Syria. It is really hard to put this into a legal framework with the level of clarity that the law demands.

There is a proportionality question here. When should something be considered specifically illegal? And, then, if an illegal act has been committed what should the appropriate response be? This is bound to be very different in different situations.

Ed: Do you think that there are any immediate or practical steps that governments can take to improve the current situation? And do you think that there any ethical concerns which are not being paid sufficient attention?

Josh: In the report we raised a few concerns about existing government responses. There are lots of things beside privacy that could be seen as fundamental human rights and that are being encroached upon. Freedom of association and assembly is a really interesting one. We might not have the same reverence for a Facebook event plan or discussion group as we would a protest in a town hall, but of course they are fundamentally pretty similar.

The wider danger here is the issue of mission creep. Once you have systems in place that can do potentially very powerful analytical investigatory things then there is a risk that we could just keep extending them. If something can help us fight terrorism then should we use it to fight drug trafficking and violent crime more generally? It feels to me like there is a technical-military-industrial complex mentality in government where if you build the systems then you just want to use them. In the same way that CCTV cameras record you irrespective of whether or not you commit a violent crime or shoplift, we need to ask whether the same panoptical systems of surveillance should be extended to the Internet. Now, to a large extent they are already there. But what should we train the torchlight on next?

This takes us back to the importance of having necessary, proportionate, and independently authorized processes. When you drill down into how rights privacy should be balanced with security then it gets really complicated. But the basic process-driven things that we identified in the report are far simpler: if we accept that governments have the right to take certain actions in the name of security, then, no matter how important or life-saving those actions are, there are still protocols that governments must follow. We really wanted to infuse these issues into the debate through the report.

Read the full report: Brown, I., and Cowls, J., (2015) Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Publications.

Josh Cowls is a a student and researcher based at MIT, working to understand the impact of technology on politics, communication and the media.

Josh Cowls was talking to Blog Editor Bertie Vidgen.

Do Finland’s digitally crowdsourced laws show a way to resolve democracy’s “legitimacy crisis”?

There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. In his article The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation, Taneli Heikka (University of Jyväskylä) discusses the digitally crowdsourced law for same-sex marriage that was passed in Finland in 2014, analysing how the campaign used new digital tools and created practices that affect democratic citizenship and power making.

Ed: There is much discussion about a perceived “legitimacy crisis” in democracy. For example, less than half of the Finnish electorate under 40 choose to vote. In your article you argue that Finland’s 2012 Citizens’ Initiative Act aimed to address this problem by allowing for the crowdsourcing of ideas for new legislation. How common is this idea? (And indeed, how successful?)

Taneli: The idea that digital participation could counter the “legitimacy crisis” is a fairly common one. Digital utopians have nurtured that idea from the early years of the internet, and have often been disappointed. A couple of things stand out in the Finnish experiment that make it worth a closer look.

First, the digital crowdsourcing system with strong digital identification is a reliable and potentially viral campaigning tool. Most civic initiative systems I have encountered rely on manual or otherwise cumbersome, and less reliable, signature collection methods.

Second, in the Finnish model, initiatives that break the threshold of 50,000 names must be treated in the Parliament equally to an initiative from a group of MPs. This gives the initiative constitutional and political weight.

Ed: The Act led to the passage of Finland’s first equal marriage law in 2014. In this case, online platforms were created for collecting signatures as well as drafting legislation. An NGO created a well-used platform, but it subsequently had to shut it down because it couldn’t afford the electronic signature system. Crowds are great, but not a silver bullet if something as prosaic as authentication is impossible. Where should the balance lie between NGOs and centrally funded services, i.e. government?

Taneli: The crucial thing in the success of a civic initiative system is whether it gives the people real power. This question is decided by the legal framework and constitutional basis of the initiative system. So, governments have a very important role in this early stage – designing a law for truly effective citizen initiatives.

When a framework for power-making is in place, service providers will emerge. Should the providers be public, private or third sector entities? I think that is defined by local political culture and history.

In the United States, the civic technology field is heavily funded by philanthropic foundations. There is an urge to make these tools commercially viable, though no one seems to have figured out the business model. In Europe there’s less philanthropic money, and in my experience experiments are more often government funded.

Both models have their pros and cons, but I’d like to see the two continents learning more from each other. American digital civic activists tell me enviously that the radically empowering Finnish model with a government-run service for crowdsourcing for law would be impossible in the US. In Europe, civic technologists say they wish they had the big foundations that Americans have.

Ed: But realistically, how useful is the input of non-lawyers in (technical) legislation drafting? And is there a critical threshold of people necessary to draft legislation?

Taneli: I believe that input is valuable from anyone who cares to invest some time in learning an issue. That said, having lawyers in the campaign team really helps. Writing legislation is a special skill. It’s a pity that the co-creation features in Finland’s Open Ministry website were shut down due to a lack of funding. In that model, help from lawyers could have been made more accessible for all campaign teams.

In terms of numbers, I don’t think the size of the group is an issue either way. A small group of skilled and committed people can do a lot in the drafting phase.

Ed: But can the drafting process become rather burdensome for contributors, given professional legislators will likely heavily rework, or even scrap, the text?

Taneli: Professional legislators will most likely rework the draft, and that is exactly what they are supposed to do. Initiating an idea, working on a draft, and collecting support for it are just phases in a complex process that continues in the parliament after the threshold of 50,000 signatures is reached. A well-written draft will make the legislators’ job easier, but it won’t replace them.

Ed: Do you think there’s a danger that crowdsourcing legislation might just end up reflecting the societal concerns of the web-savvy – or of campaigning and lobbying groups

Taneli: That’s certainly a risk, but so far there is little evidence of it happening. The only initiative passed so far in Finland – the Equal Marriage Act – was supported by the majority of Finns and by the majority of political parties, too. The initiative system was used to bypass a political gridlock. The handful of initiatives that have reached the 50,000 signatures threshold and entered parliamentary proceedings represent a healthy variety of issues in the fields of education, crime and punishment, and health care. Most initiatives seem to echo the viewpoint of the ‘ordinary people’ instead of lobbies or traditional political and business interest groups.

Ed: You state in your article that the real-time nature of digital crowdsourcing appeals to a generation that likes and dislikes quickly; a generation that inhabits “the space of flows”. Is this a potential source of instability or chaos? And how can this rapid turnover of attention be harnessed efficiently so as to usefully contribute to a stable and democratic society?

Taneli: The Citizens’ Initiative Act in Finland is one fairly successful model to look at in terms of balancing stability and disruptive change. It is a radical law in its potential to empower the individual and affect real power-making. But it is by no means a shortcut to ‘legislation by a digital mob’, or anything of that sort. While the digital campaigning phase can be an explosive expression of the power of the people in the ‘time and space of flows’, the elected representatives retain the final say. Passing a law is still a tedious process, and often for good reasons.

Ed: You also write about the emergence of the “mediating citizen” – what do you mean by this?

Taneli: The starting point for developing the idea of the mediating citizen is Lance Bennett’s AC/DC theory, i.e. the dichotomy of the actualising and the dutiful citizen. The dutiful citizen is the traditional form of democratic citizenship – it values voting, following the mass media, and political parties. The actualising citizen, on the other hand, finds voting and parties less appealing, and prefers more flexible and individualised forms of political action, such as ad hoc campaigns and the use of interactive technology.

I find these models accurate but was not able to place in this duality the emerging typologies of civic action I observed in the Finnish case. What we see is understanding and respect for parliamentary institutions and their power, but also strong faith in one’s skills and capability to improve the system in creative, technologically savvy ways. I used the concept of the mediating citizen to describe an actor who is able to move between the previous typologies, mediating between them. In the Finnish example, creative tools were developed to feed initiatives in the traditional power-making system of the parliament.

Ed: Do you think Finland’s Citizens Initiative Act is a model for other governments to follow when addressing concerns about “democratic legitimacy”?

Taneli: It is an interesting model to look at. But unfortunately the ‘legitimacy crisis’ is probably too complex a problem to be solved by a single participation tool. What I’d really like to see is a wave of experimentation, both on-line and off-line, as well as cross-border learning from each other. And is that not what happened when the representative model spread, too?

Read the full article: Heikka, T., (2015) The Rise of the Mediating Citizen: Time, Space, and Citizenship in the Crowdsourcing of Finnish Legislation. Policy and Internet 7 (3) 268–291.

Taneli Heikka is a journalist, author, entrepreneur, and PhD student based in Washington.

Taneli Heikka was talking to Blog Editor Pamina Smith.

Assessing crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project

Ed: Given the “crisis in democratic accountability”, methods to increase citizen participation are in demand. To this end, your team developed some interactive crowdsourcing technologies to collect public opinion around an urban renovation project in Oulu, Finland. What form did the consultation take, and how did you assess its impact?

Simo: Over the years we’ve deployed various types of interactive interfaces on a network of public displays. In this case it was basically a network of interactive screens deployed in downtown Oulu, next to where a renovation project was happening that we wanted to collect feedback about. We deployed an app on the screens, that allowed people to type feedback direcly on the screens (on-screen soft keyboard), and submit feedback to city authorities via SMS, Twitter and email. We also had a smiley-based “rating” system there, which people could us to leave quick feedback about certain aspects of the renovation project.

We ourselves could not, and did not even want to, assess the impact — that’s why we did this in partnership with the city authorities. Then, together with the city folks we could better evaluate if what we were doing had any real-world value whatsoever. And, as we discuss, in the end it did!

Ed: How did you go about encouraging citizens to engage with touch screen technologies in a public space — particularly the non-digitally literate, or maybe people who are just a bit shy about participating?

Simo: Actually, the whole point was that we did not deliberately encourage them by advertising the deployment or by “forcing” anyone to use it. Quite to the contrary: we wanted to see if people voluntarily used it, and the technologies that are an integral part of the city itself. This is kind of the future vision of urban computing, anyway. The screens had been there for years already, and what we wanted to see is if people find this type of service on their own when exploring the screens, and if they take the opportunity to then give feedback using them. The screens hosted a variety of other applications as well: games, news, etc., so it was interesting to also gauge how appealing the idea of public civic feedback is in comparison to everything else that was being offered.

Ed: You mention that using SMS to provide citizen feedback was effective in filtering out noise since it required a minimal payment from citizens — but it also created an initial barrier to participation. How do you increase the quality of feedback without placing citizens on different-level playing fields from the outset — particularly where technology is concerned?

Simo: Yes, SMS really worked well in lowering the amount of irrelevant commentary and complete nonsense. And it is true that SMS already introduces a cost, and even if the cost is miniscule, it’s still a cost to the citizen — and just voicing one’s opinions should of course be free. So there’s no correct answer here — if the channel is public and publicly accessible to anyone, there will be a lot of noisy input. In such cases moderation is a heavy task, and to this end we have been exploring crowdsourcing as well. We can make the community moderate itself. First, we need to identify the users who are genuinely concerned or interested about the issues being explored, and then funnel those users to moderate the discussion / output. It is a win-win situation — the people who want to get involved are empowered to moderate the commentary from others, for implicit rewards.

Ed: For this experiment on citizen feedback in an urban space, your team assembled the world’s largest public display network, which was available for research purposes 24/7. In deploying this valuable research tool, how did you guarantee the privacy of the participants involved, given that some might not want to be seen submitting very negative comments? (e.g. might a form of social pressure be the cause of relatively low participation in the study?)

Simo: The display network was not built only for this experiment, but we have run hundreds of experiments on it, and have written close to a hundred academic papers about them. So, the overarching research focus, really, is on how we can benefit citizens using the network. Over the years we have been able to systematically study issues such as social pressure, group use, effects of the public space, or, one might say “stage”, etc. And yes, social pressure does affect a lot, and for this allowing people participate via e.g. SMS or email helps a lot. That way the users won’t be seen sending the input directly.

Group use is another thing: in groups people don’t feel pressure from the “outside world” so much and are willing to interact with our applications (such as the one documented in this work), but, again, it affects the feedback quality. Groups don’t necessarily tell the truth as they aim for consensus. So the individual, and very important, opinions may not become heard. Ultimately, this is all just part of the game we must deal with, and the real question becomes how to minimize those negative effects that the public space introduces. The positives are clear: everyone can participate, easily, in the heart of the city, and whenever they want.

Ed: Despite the low participation, you still believe that the experimental results are valuable. What did you learn?

Simo: The question in a way already reveals the first important point: people are just not as interested in these “civic” things as they might claim in interviews and pre-studies. When we deploy a civic feedback prototype as the “only option” on a public gizmo (a display, some kind of new tech piece, etc.), people out of curiosity use it. Now, in our case, we just deploy it “as is”, as part of the city infrastructure for people to use if, and only if, they want to use it. So, the prototype competes for attention against smartphones, other applications on the displays, the cluttered city itself… everything!

When one reads many academic papers on interactive civic engagement prototypes, the assumptions are set very high in the discussion: “we got this much participation in this short time”, etc., but that’s not the entire truth. Leave the thing there for months and see if it still interests people! We have done the same, deployed a prototype for three days, gotten tons of interaction, published it, and learned only afterwards that “oh, maybe we were a bit optimistic with the efficiency” when the use suddenly dropped to minimum. It’s just not that easy and the application require frequent updates to keep user interest longitudinally.

Also, the radical differences in the feedback channels were surprising, but we already talked about that a bit earlier.

Ed: Your team collaborated with local officials, which is obviously valuable (and laudable), but it can potentially impose an extra burden on academics. For example, you mention that instead of employing novel feedback formats (e.g. video, audio, images, interactive maps), your team used only text. But do you think working with public officials benefitted the project as a whole, and how?

Simo: The extra burden is a necessity if one wants to really claim authentic success in civic engagement. In our opinion, it only happens between citizens and the city, not between citizens and researchers. We do not wish to build these deployments for the sake of an academic article or two: the display infrastructure is there for citizens and the city, and if we don’t educate the authorities on how to use it then nobody will. Advertisers would be glad to take over the entire real estate there, so in a way this project is just a part of the bigger picture. Which is making the display infrastructure “useful” instead of just a gimmick to kill time with (games) or for advertising.

And yes, the burden is real, but also because of this we could document what we have learned about dealing with authorities: how it is first easy to sell these prototypes to them, but sometimes hard to get commitment, etc. And it is not just this prototype — we’ve done a number of other civic engagement projects where we have noticed the same issues mentioned in the paper as well.

Ed: You also mention that as academics and policymakers you had different notions of success: for example in terms of levels of engagement and feedback of citizens. What should academics aspiring to have a concrete impact on society keep in mind when working with policymakers?

Simo: It takes a lot of time to assess impact. Policymakers will not be able to say after only a few weeks (which is the typical length of studies in our field) if the prototype has actual value to it, or if it’s just a “nice experiment”. So, deploy your strategy / tech / anything you’re doing, write about it, and let it sit. Move on with the life, and then revisit it after months to see if anything has come out of it! Patience is key here.

Ed: Did the citizen feedback result in any changes to the urban renovation project they were being consulted on?

Simo: Not the project directly: the project naturally was planned years ahead and the blueprints were final at that point. The most remarkable finding for us (and the authorities) was that after moderating the noise out from the feedback, the remaining insight was pretty much the only feedback that they ever directly got from citizens. Finns tend to be a bit on the shy side, so people won’t just pick up the phone and call the local engineering department and speak out. Not sure if anyone does, really? So they complain and chat on forums and coffee tables. So it would require active work for the authorities to find and reach out to these people.

With the display infrastructure, which was already there, we were able to gauge the public opinion that did not affect the construction directly, but indirectly affected how the department could manage their press releases, which things to stress in public communications, what parts of PR to handle differently in the next stage of the renovation project etc.

Ed: Are you planning any more experiments?

Simo: We are constantly running quite a few experiments. On the civic engagement side, for example, we are investigating how to gamify environmental awareness (recycling, waste management, keeping the environment clean) for children, as well as running longer longitudinal studies to assess the engagement of specify groups of people (e.g., children and the elderly).

Read the full article: Hosio, S., Goncalves, J., Kostakos, V. and Riekki, J. (2015) Crowdsourcing Public Opinion Using Urban Pervasive Technologies: Lessons From Real-Life Experiments in Oulu. Policy and Internet 7 (2) 203–222.

Simon Hosio is a research scientist (Dr. Tech.) at the University of Oulu, in Finland. Core topics of his research are smart city tech, crowdsourcing, wisdom of the crowd, civic engagement, and all types of “mobile stuff” in general.

Simo Hosio was talking to blog editor Pamina Smith.

How do the mass media affect levels of trust in government?

Caption
The South Korean Government, as well as the Seoul Metropolitan Government have gone to great lengths to enhance their openness, using many different ICTs. Seoul at night by jonasginter.
Ed: You examine the influence of citizens’ use of online mass media on levels of trust in government. In brief, what did you find?

Greg: As I explain in the article, there is a common belief that mass media outlets, and especially online mass media outlets, often portray government in a negative light in an effort to pique the interest of readers. This tendency of media outlets to engage in ‘bureaucracy bashing’ is thought, in turn, to detract from the public’s support for their government. The basic assumption underpinning this relationship is that the more negative information on government there is, the more negative public opinion. However, in my analyses, I found evidence of a positive indirect relationship between citizens’ use of online mass media outlets and their levels of trust in government. Interestingly, however, the more frequently citizens used online mass media outlets for information about their government, the weaker this association became. These findings challenge conventional wisdom that suggests greater exposure to mass media outlets will result in more negative perceptions of the public sector.

Ed: So you find that that the particular positive or negative spin of the actual message may not be as important as the individuals’ sense that they are aware of the activities of the public sector. That’s presumably good news — both for government, and for efforts to ‘open it up’?

Greg: Yes, I think it can be. However, a few important caveats apply. First, the positive relationship between online mass media use and perceptions of government tapers off as respondents made more frequent use of online mass media outlets. In the study, I interpreted this to mean that exposure to mass media had less of an influence upon those who were more aware of public affairs, and more of an influence upon those who were less aware of public affairs. Therefore, there is something of a diminishing returns aspect to this relationship. Second, this study was not able to account for the valence (ie how positive or negative the information is) of information respondents were exposed to when using online mass media. While some attempts were made to control for valance by adding different control variables, further research drawing upon experimental research designs would be useful in substantiating the relationship between the valence of information disseminated by mass media outlets and citizens’ perceptions of their government.

Ed: Do you think governments are aware of this relationship — ie that an indirect effect of being more open and present in the media, might be increased citizen trust — and that they are responding accordingly?

Greg: I think that there is a general idea that more communication is better than less communication. However, at the same time there is a lot of evidence to suggest that some of the more complex aspects of the relationship between openness and trust in government go unaccounted for in current attempts by public sector organizations to become more open and transparent. As a result, this tool that public organizations have at their disposal is not being used as effectively as it could be, and in some instances is being used in ways that are counterproductive–that is, actually decreasing citizen trust in government. Therefore, in order for governments to translate greater openness into greater trust in government, more refined applications are necessary.

Ed: I know there are various initiatives in the UK — open government data / FoIs / departmental social media channels etc. — aimed at a general opening up of government processes. How open is the Korean government? Is a greater openness something they might adopt (or are adopting?) as part of a general aim to have a more informed and involved — and therefore hopefully more trusting — citizenry?

Greg: The South Korean Government, as well as the Seoul Metropolitan Government have gone to great lengths to enhance their openness. Their strategy has made use of different ICTs, such as e-government websites, social media accounts, non-emergency call centers, and smart phone apps. As a result, many now say that attempts by the Korean Government to become more open are more advanced than in many other areas of the developed world. However, the persistent issue in South Korea, as elsewhere, is whether these attempts are having the intended impact. A lot of empirical research has found, for example, that various attempts at becoming more open by many governments around the world have fallen short of creating a more informed and involved citizenry.

Ed: Finally — is there much empirical work or data in this area?

Greg: While there is a lot of excellent empirical research from the field of political science that has examined how mass media use relates to citizens’ perceptions of politicians, political preferences, or their levels of political knowledge, this topic has received almost no attention at all in public management/administration. This lack of discussion is surprising, given mass media has long served as a key means of enhancing the transparency and accountability of public organizations.

Read the full article: Porumbescu, G. (2013) Assessing the Link Between Online Mass Media and Trust in Government: Evidence From Seoul, South Korea. Policy & Internet 5 (4) 418-443.

Greg Porumbescu was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Gregory Porumbescu is an Assistant Professor at the Northern Illinois University Department of Public Administration. His research interests primarily relate to public sector applications of information and communications technology, transparency and accountability, and citizens’ perceptions of public service provision.