Wilson Center’s Science & Technology Innovation Program

Archive for the ‘Governance’ Category

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Collaborating With an Invisible Team: Lessons from Online Ideation

In Governance, Guest Blogger, Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing on June 11, 2013 at 11:57 am

As of this afternoon, we have 79 conflicting opinions about the best way for citizen science to support environmental research. It’s entirely our fault—we asked.

As an AAAS fellow with EPA’s Office of Research and Development (ORD), I’ve spent the past few months immersed in the best of federal creativity. The ORD Innovation Team looks for new and better ways to solve environmental problems—and looks across the agency for ideas about how to do so. That means their brainstorming sessions don’t just involve a few people sitting around a table. Online ideation sessions help the team gather, and develop, the best suggestions. They also come with their own set of challenges.

Most online ideation platforms let you do three basic things:

  • Collect new ideas in response to a question or problem. Every person who logs onto the system can add their thoughts, and every idea appears as its own blog-like post.
  • Discuss and build on posted ideas. People critique, support, or add to what’s already been posted—these appear as comments on the original posts.
  • Vote on ideas. Suggestions with more interest get pushed toward the top of the list, allowing more people to see and comment on them. This also makes it easy to pick out, at the end of the session, the ideas that have garnered the most excitement.

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Project Open Data: Interview with Ben Balter

In Commons Lab, Foresight, Governance, News and Events, Technology and the Law on May 22, 2013 at 10:13 am

In our recent post on the Open Data Policy, we mentioned Project Open Data as an exciting manifestation of collaborative government concepts put into practice. To learn more, we reached out to GitHubber Ben Balter, former Presidential Innovation Fellow and previous contributor to the Commons Lab. Ben also provided input on agile development for our paper on the National Broadband Map.

How did GitHub become a part of this project?

I was working as a Presidential Innovation Fellow when the process to create the Open Data Policy began. Anyone within government is used to seeing documents circulate with no real idea of when it was edited, by whom, whether it was the most current version, and so on. This is very opaque. So while we’re working on open data policy, the process itself was very not open. Open source developers within the Innovation Fellows started talking about using GitHub to create the actual document. Lowering the barrier to entry was always the idea—we want people editing this and sharing their perspectives. Read the rest of this entry »

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New Open Data Rules Continue Push for Government Innovation

In Governance, Foresight, Commons Lab, Technology and the Law, News and Events on May 9, 2013 at 12:08 pm

low power

FCC Visualization of Low Power FM Availability, built on open data and explained on GitHub.

Today, the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy jointly released a new Open Data Policy directing agencies to implement specific structural reforms. In conjunction with an Executive Order prioritizing open and machine readable government information, these adjustments are forward looking and exciting. They speak to a general understanding that a deliberate approach to the way that data are processed and released can exponentially enhance their value.

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NEW REPORT: Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Disaster Management, Governance, Reports and Publications on April 22, 2013 at 10:58 am

priv_imgSeveral recent natural disasters have illustrated the need for humanitarian groups, volunteers and policymakers to understand privacy issues when searching for missing persons in the aftermath of these crises.

The Commons Lab and the Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP) at Fordham Law School have teamed up on a new report looking at these legal and policy issues. The report, “Privacy and Missing Persons after Natural Disasters,” can be found online here.

From the press release:

The report offers a roadmap to the legal and policy issues surrounding privacy and missing persons following natural disasters. It provides strategies that humanitarian organizations, private sector organizations, volunteers and policymakers can pursue to help those affected by major natural disasters.  For example, the report recommends that the United States government exercise existing legal authority to support appropriate sharing of personal information about missing persons following natural disasters.  More broadly, the report recommends that those developing technologies to share information about missing persons implement design principles that carefully balance privacy consistent with existing legal obligations. The report also calls on privacy policy makers, legislators, and regulators to take steps to clarify how privacy rules apply to missing persons activities in identified key areas so that missing persons activities can proceed without the threat of legal liability. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Future of Foresight

In Commons Lab, Foresight, Governance on April 9, 2013 at 11:37 am

The Government in the Lab blog has an interesting April 8 post looking at current government foresight efforts, including initiatives at the Coast Guard, Marine Corps, Air Force and Department of Veterans Affairs, among others at the federal and state levels. Thinking about the long-term future becomes particularly important when the short-term budget outlook is so bleak, the post concludes.

“Strategic foresight is not futurist forecasting, nor is it the sole purvey of Popular Science magazine, the World Future Society, or the Jetson Family,” the blog says. “It is about having the imagination to be prepared for what may come, regardless of which scenario occurs – it’s a mindset, not a process.” The post suggest the need for greater cross-agency work on foresight, emphasizing the need to show the value of foresight to policymakers (including the costs of not being prepared).

The post also references Leon Fuerth’s recent report on the subject, Anticipatory Governance. Fuerth visited the Wilson Center late last year to discuss the report, while the Science & Technology Innovation Program in January held a launch event for the Global Futures Intelligence System and the 2012 State of the Future report.

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Visualizing Sequestration with Collaborative Tools and Open Data

In Commons Lab, Governance, News and Events on March 6, 2013 at 10:43 am
Mapbox Visualization

Mapbox Visualization of Sequestration Cuts

Faced with deep spending cuts due to sequestration, the White House recently released documents detailing state by state expenditure reductions. However, they were presented in PDFs, not a machine readable format. With minimal effort, two separate maps (here and here) have been built on collaborative platforms for no taxpayer cost. As this explanation details, these projects run on easily accessible tools. After some quick data entry, a series of simple and automated scripts allowed the sequestration cuts to appear in an interactive visual format. Presenting civic information in ways that simply convey the contours of a problem engages a larger audience on complex issues. These maps demonstrate the power of open government data.

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The Specter of “Preemptive Government”

In Commons Lab, Crowdsourcing, Foresight, Governance on March 4, 2013 at 12:22 pm

Last week, reporter Alex Howard published an interview on O’Reilly’s Strata blog that discusses a new use of Big Data in the form of “preemptive government.” This concept refers to emerging technologies that are able to sift through large, heterogeneous datasets and make predictive judgements about everything from crime to building or business code violations.

The phrase “preemptive government” itself sounds like it was torn from the pages of a Philip K. Dick story, with government agents targeting potential violators of the law before any violation occurs. In the piece, former Indianapolis mayor (and former New York City deputy mayor) Stephen Goldsmith acknowledges that the concept raises some very thorny ethical questions, particularly around disproportionate police attention and profiling. Issues around data collection, retention and usage all bear on how such preemptive governance would be conducted. From a conceptual standpoint, preemptive governance could be construed as a new form of surreptitious surveillance.

But it could be a two-way street. As Goldsmith acknowledges, inasmuch as preemptive governance relies on crowdsourced forms of data production, it can enable citizens to participate in the ways their environments are governed. Much like how participatory Geographic Information Systems (PGIS) to some degree enabled citizens to use technologies to influence urban administration, crowdsourcing data production opens new connections between citizens and their government. Also, like PGIS, this process is likely to be fraught with social and political challenges that bear exploring, in particular how marginalized communities are impacted.

Research is needed to understand whether Big Data, crowdsourcing, and, perhaps, preemptive government can increase government efficiency, and how this impacts different social groups. Are some people marginalized by these processes? Are others given a greater voice in governance? What kinds of problems can these processes address?

In the meantime, policymakers could look to these technologies as ways to improve operations and to increase transparency, while figuring out how to navigate legal and social frameworks of privacy and confidentiality. In an ideal world, these technologies can be leveraged to empower everyday people to positively influence the ways they are governed.

About the author

Ryan Burns, PhC, is a doctoral candidate in geography at University of Washington-Seattle. He is currently serving as a research assistant with the Commons Lab of the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is studying the social and political implications of geographic technologies, particularly the ways new mapping and social media technologies are being integrated into disaster management strategies.

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GovLoop Interview with Zack Bastian on IT Reform

In Commons Lab, Governance, Technology and the Law on January 22, 2013 at 3:58 pm

As the House Oversight & Government Reform Committee starts looking at federal IT reform, please take a few minutes to check out the Commons Lab’s recent work on the issue. Chris Dorobek of DorobekINSIDER recently interviewed the Commons Lab’s Zachary Bastian on the issues surrounding Federal IT reform. Check it out here. You can also read Zack’s paper Too Big to Succeed on Scribd. And don’t forget to check out our post by Ben Balter on the vital IT reform issue of agile development.

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Federal Agility: A Cultural Solution to a Technical Problem

In Commons Lab, Governance, Guest Blogger, Technology and the Law on January 8, 2013 at 8:29 am

Editor’s note: In our recently posted transitional brief, Too Big to Succeed, we called attention to agile development as an opportunity for cost savings and improved outcomes. This week, we dive deeper in the topic with guest blogger Benjamin Balter. 

As the talks surrounding the fiscal cliff have illustrated, never before has it been so vital that the federal government do more with less. Across the District, government agencies are tightening their belts considerably, but the challenge is not simply about trimming budgets or spending less. In many cases, the problem is a matter of spending smarter.

While the federal information technology (IT) infrastructure is beginning to show its age — losing its ability to serve federal employees and thus more broadly the American public — federal approaches to IT procurement and management are increasingly proving themselves to be equally anachronistic. Traditional heavyweight philosophies known most commonly as waterfall development simply move too slowly for today’s quickly changing federal IT landscape. By the time projects reach completion, all too often, the underlying technology has evolved or the customer’s needs have fundamentally changed. As a result, what is delivered often does not even resemble what is ultimately needed. If we wish to create the efficient government of the 21st century, we must jettison traditional approaches to IT project management and adopt a more agile philosophy.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Too Big to Succeed: The Need for Federal IT Reform

In Commons Lab, Governance, Technology and the Law on December 11, 2012 at 12:16 pm

The following is part of a special series of policy briefs by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars running until inauguration day. This piece, written by Commons Lab Early Career Scholar Zachary Bastian, tackles the need for reform in federal information technology.

As the world has become more dependent on information technology (IT), so has the federal government and its constituencies. Leveraged effectively, technical tools can engage the public, create cost savings, and improve outcomes. These benefits are obscured by regular reminders that federal IT is fundamentally flawed. It is too big to succeed. For IT to become sustainable, the federal government must enable change in three categories: 1) embracing agile development, modular contracting, and open-source software, 2) prioritizing small business participation, and 3) shifting the federal IT culture towards education and experimentation. The adoption of these reforms is vital. The current state of federal IT undermines good work through inefficiency and waste.

Click here to read the remainder of this brief on Scribd.

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