On the value of open data

by Kent Aitken

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I spent the first week of October not going to the International Open Data Conference in Madrid. We lucked out, hosting it in Ottawa last year - it's the annual meet-up, stock-take, and direction-setting for a potent concept in modern governance (that is, not a new concept, but modern from an implementation point of view). Namely, that governments should be releasing the research, data, and briefing documents that underpin public decisions. When we specifically refer to open data, it's about the datasets - rows and columns of values - that governments collect, create, and draw on, and releasing them in machine-readable formats.That is, a stack of paper doesn't work; people outside government get to work with, crunch, and analyze the data too.

Alex Howard, a stalwart of the open data scene who works with the Sunlight Foundation, laid out a fantastic overview of both the conference and the state of the open data "movement." I have one point of disagreement, though. Howard writes:

"the deadline for more evidence is getting close. Politicians will always question transparency, which puts a premium on demonstrating why it matters in terms that the public understands and can apply in their lives." 

I instead see two possible routes for the future of open data. One is the value route, where governments firmly decide that it’s worth the cost and effort (through research, case studies, surveys, and notoriously hard-to-pin-down usage data). The second route would be governments start to talk about it like Access to Information (ATI) laws or, in Canada, Official Languages. The framing here becomes about obligation, expectation, and legal duty - not a cost to be debated. We don't concern ourselves with the pros and cons of releasing things in both official languages; we do it because it's just what we do.

And yes, there's a cost to putting open data on that same plane of existence, and it involves re-tooling decades of information management systems to get there. In the meantime, however, we have the most expensive model: internal information architectures, open data registries, and Access to Information flows. We'll always have all three, but right now many documents will exist in each system, where the long-term for open data is minimizing the duplication and triplication. 

Right now the lifecycle for records includes internal use followed by eventual release, sometimes being requested via ATI in between. Once documents and data start going straight to the open-to-the-public storage solution, a couple things will happen:

1. The costs will go down
2. Analysts in other parts of that same government will be able to find and use that data and information sooner (including knowing that it exists in the first place)
3. When people work in government want to work with those outside, they can simply link to the already-open data they're working with (this is one of the ways open data overlaps with open dialogue and citizen engagement)

What is open government?

by Kent Aitken

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Note: if you've never noticed it, now might be a good time to briefly divert your gaze to the disclaimer on the right.

I've probably answered that question - What is open government? - a thousand times in the last couple years. With varying degrees of clarity and convincingness.

This is an attempt at a more universal, albeit less concise, version.

First, some competing definitions

It's an occasionally murky concept, and gets defined differently in different countries, by different people:

"Open government is the governing doctrine which holds that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight."

[Wikipedia]

"[Government that is] sustainably more transparent, more accountable, and more responsive to their own citizens, with the ultimate goal of improving the quality of governance, as well as the quality of services that citizens receive."

[Open Government Partnership]

My go-to today might be something like this: open government is a commitment to making data and information about government operations and decisions open to citizens, and creating opportunities for people to engage in public decisions that interest or impact them.

But that still doesn't really connect the dots between the ideas that make up open government, so I'm proposing another lens.

The government-citizen relationship

Let's think about information flows between government and stakeholders.

Actually, that's a bit unwieldy. Let's collapse the left side into a simpler ecosystem, while recognizing that there's a lot going on in there. 

There have always been information flows. There was never a point where government was completely closed then suddenly became open. In the 1800s Canada conducted the census to get information from Canadians, created awareness campaigns to encourage people to move west, kept parliamentary records in Hansard, and published changes to laws in the Canada Gazette.

None of which we'd consider "open government" today. But it's part of the ecosystem of information flows on which we're building.

Really, anything that was once "open government" over time eventually just gets called "government." Which is why we'll skip right past huge advances like Access to Information laws to get to 2012-ish. The modern push for open government might look something like this:

Since the digital age, governments have provided far more information about programs, policies, and services. This could be web content, emails, or publications. However, the ability for digital communication also created demand, so governments have started releasing the raw data behind research and statements, collecting more public feedback on policy, and posting documents for the sake of transparency, like expense reports.

However, while there are new formats and documents to release, there are also just fundamentally different types of information. For example, consider data on water levels and invasive aquatic species, the first line in the following diagram. It's been available to citizens for a few years. 

But, while people outside government can use that data, more people can use that data better with a few other links made between Country and Government. In this case, a group called Aquahacking was able to express their needs to government (Environment and Climate Change Canada), who showed up to present and provide context and clarifying information about how the data was collected. To close the loop, the Water Rangers system can now provide reliable measurements back into the data collection process, by enabling kayakers and beach-goers to do citizen science.

Open government is about adding more information flows, to more people, in more ways that are more appropriate to needs (see: Innovation is Information). This is both about government releasing information, as well as creating new opportunities for citizens to provide ideas, concerns, and expertise into public decisions.

On that note, there's another expansion to the model that's taking place. The information flows were once largely between small groups in those two circles, Country and Government: lobbyists, the well-connected, and bigger businesses and NGOs for the former and parliamentarians, communications shops, and top executives for the latter. Now those circles look more like this, with many more information flows between many more nodes throughout the ecosystem.




But we'll collapse the model again for simplicity, and end on this: dense, layered, multi-channel information flows between country and government. For a given policy issue, it could be something like this:

Open government really describes a period of acceleration. It's a term than connects these information flows and expresses a commitment to adding more while strengthening the ones that exist. Not just data and information, but more abstract concepts like context, reliability, rationale, understanding, lived experience, trust, and simplicity. Going both ways and back-and-forth.

Which means the question isn't "How do we open government?" but perhaps: "What do we actually need?" "What can we do better?" "What do we open next?"

10 Takeaways from the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum

by Nick Charney

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Last week I attended the Canadian Open Dialogue Forum (See: Defining Open Dialogue); by all accounts the event was well run, interesting and full of familiar faces. On Wednesday Kent reflected a bit of what he heard at the Forum (See: Culture and Risk) and I wanted to do the same.

1. The show of political support was impressive

There were two federal ministers and six provincial ministers from Ontario in attendance; all of whom seemed to be saying the right things.

We don't need a "fearful, cover-your-ass" culture in the public service, @scottbrison said today. #cdnpoli #ottnewshttps://t.co/tMgcSLoZE0

— CBC Ottawa (@CBCOttawa) March 31, 2016

2. Ontario has a new public engagement framework

Check it out here.

3. 'Evergreen Policy' was something that was discussed, albeit not enough

There was a lot of discussion about being open by default but far less discussion about evergreen policy; the notion that times change and with them so should our policy approaches. Today's policies may not serve tomorrows interests and we need to do more work in updating our approaches wherever they are falling behind; ideally this is a shift from reactive (we've fallen behind!) to proactive (we know the world is changing, let's get out in front of it!). This is something I've touched on previously and see it as akin to the cradle-to-cradle design (See: Now What -- circa 2010 -- and Redux: Vizualizing the Entire Treasury Board Policy Suite).

4. Corporate interests can but do not necessarily always align with the public interest

3rd party software btwn government + citizens is a key governance issue; corporate interests do not always align w/public interests #codf16

— Nicholas Charney (@nickcharney) March 31, 2016

Or at least that was my observation. My tweet got some traction so it got put to the panel, one of whom "disagreed with the premise of my question" (which wasn't really a question) and proceeded to frame a response in terms of consumer interests, to which I simply replied that I disagreed with the premise of the answer. Another panellist said that it was an old school view (which was the first time I've ever been called such). That said, on day two a corporate voice managed to frame up the discussion better than it was framed on day one and was speaking in terms of high tides raising all boats.

5. The logic of crowdsourcing and the logic of policy making are difficult to reconcile

Intuitively I think most people can see this makes sense, but this paper is probably worth a look if you want to know more.

6. The technology may be sufficiently developed to realize open government but our capacity to wield that technology, less so

We likely need to work on capacity, within government and civil society writ large.

7. Transparency and openness are deeply political issues

We need to stop pretending otherwise.

8. Public service anonymity needs a rethink in the digital era

See: On Partisanship and Anonymity in the Internet Era.

9. We are dealing with a lot of legacy issues that are built into our current institutions

If we started from scratch today, would the machinery of government look the same as it does today? Probably not. We need to be thinking hard about how to get from here to there, but maybe we should start with a discussion about what there actually looks like.

10. The technology worked well

Kudos to the Publivate team for integrating a crowdsourcing platform into a live event in a seamless way, I haven't seen it done well before and they knocked it out of the park.

Bonus: Tweetable tweet goes to ... Ailish Campbell 

Love this. "Canadians are like type-O blood, you can add us to any organization and we make things better" - @Ailish_Campbell #codf16

— Nicholas Charney (@nickcharney) April 1, 2016

Building Trust and Transparency Through Failure

by Melissa Tullio

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A couple of weeks ago, I attended a communications conference. The theme was "Think, Think, Nudge, Nudge": how we might start applying some behavioural insights techniques in our work to deliver more impact/meaning in our messaging to audiences (not to mention using a more evidence-based approach to do things). Ontario's own behavioural insights team was brought in to present how they've used randomized control trials to improve outcomes for various Ontario ministries, and speakers from ideas42 provided a couple of hands on workshops for us to learn some of the methods.

The keynote speaker was Michael I. Norton from Harvard Business School, who delivered an amusing and thought provoking talk that gave loads of examples illustrating how people react in the randomized control trials he's run. An example that really stuck with me was the results from a prototype of Boston's Citizens Connect app. It's kind of a "fix your street" for Boston, where citizens can report potholes, graffiti, and other broken things in the city. The data is uploaded to a map, which shows the status of each of the submissions - the prototype had red flags for open tickets, yellow for recently opened, and blue for closed tickets.

The test worked like this. They showed three versions of the app to people. The first didn't provide an illustration showing that the city was taking action on the open tickets - it was probably just a form for people to submit problems to the city. The second showed only the closed tickets, which cast the city in a positive light (but wasn't necessarily the most honest). The third showed all the open tickets and closed tickets (the open tickets greatly outnumbered the closed tickets, which may leave a negative impression of the city). A key insight that came out of the test was that even the map showing all of the open, red tickets was received more positively by people than the version that showed nothing at all.

What's going on here?

Michael's research on consumer behaviour shows that people like to see the work. Transparency in the processes that we're using to deliver a service builds credibility and trust in the institutions we rely on. As a consumer, this seems pretty intuitive to me. It feels a lot better seeing the person behind the glass preparing the burger with fresh ingredients than to order it through an intercom and pick it up a few minutes later like some human vending machine.

In a previous blog post (See: Open Gov, Values and the Social Contract), I talked about values, and mentioned how we can't say, as government, that we're open, if we don't then follow through and act in an open way. Ryan left a really interesting comment on that post: "not everything can (or dare I say, should) be 100% open 100% of the time." I agree with this; transparency isn't about revealing everything, but revealing what we can in the context of protecting citizens' privacy (we're not a burger joint). And, as behavioural insights evidence shows us, it's also about revealing, when we're able to reveal things, both the bad and the good outcomes of the things we're trying (e.g., the map showing the red flags as well as the blue ones).

Vulnerability as a Value

This all left me thinking about a value we're not so great at demonstrating in government: vulnerability. I'm willing to bet that every public servant working inside government today has felt risk aversion from colleagues or superiors in some form. We're afraid to fail, and even more afraid to show that we've failed. We cringe at the thought of ending up as a headline in the morning paper because of a mistake we made (I literally just got goosebumps thinking about this).

But what if the spaces we built inside government supported experimentation? Kent's recent post proposes that we're already experimenting, and I think it's true. The part we're missing is transparency - showing people that we don't have all the answers, and we need their help to figure stuff out.

What if we let users/citizens into the experiments? What if we had spaces to try stuff out before launching programs/policies that might fail anyway, regardless of how much thought we've put into them to avoid failure? And what if one of the guiding values for playing in those spaces were vulnerability - demonstrating to ourselves, and people who rely on us for services, that failure is OK, as long as we learn and build something better from it?

Is it reasonable to believe that transparently demonstrating to people that we're good at failure can build trust between us and the people we deliver services to? And if you agree, how might we move the culture towards embracing vulnerability as a value?

Blending Public Sentiment, Data Analytics, Design Thinking and Behavioural Economics

by Nick Charney

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The Thinker by Darwin Bell

Last year I wrote a lengthy piece that argued that understanding the future of evidence based policy meant understanding the confluence of big data and social media (See: Big Data, Social Media and the Long Tail of Public Policy). Today I want to further qualify my statements, and refine my conceptual model to reflect some of my more recent thinking.


Project Copernicus

To be fair the conceptual model – which I've decided to nickname Project Copernicus (See: Towards Copernicus if you don't get the reference) – is very much a moving target; and while it ebbs and flows as I come into contact with new (to me) thinking, it's very much about leaning into the hard stuff (See: Lean into it) and "building a better telescope" (See: Complexity is a Measurement Problem).


To recap quickly and push forward

At the outset of the aforementioned piece I offered up a TL;DR summation that was essentially:

Social Media + Big Data Analytics = Future of Public Policy

And feel that refining that statement is as good as a place to start as any; here's my latest thinking:

(Public Sentiment + Data Analytics) / (Design Thinking + Behavioural Economics) = Future of Evidence Based Policy

In a sense its a rather simple, back-to-basics model that argues that the sum of what the public wants (sentiment) and what the evidence suggests is possible (data) is best achieved through policy interventions that are highly contextualized and can be empirically tested, tweaked, and maximized (design thinking + behavioural economics) while simultaneously creating new data to support or refute it and facing real-time and constantly shifting public scrutiny.


I have a number of reasons for nuancing the model

• Public Sentiment is broader than social media and it is incumbent on policy makers to be as inclusive as possible when incorporating sentiment. Focusing on social media ignores issues of the digital divide and unduly privileges those with greater digital literacy. This may be one of the reasons that the Deputy Minister's Committee on Social Media and Policy Development was recast as the Deputy Minister's Committee on Policy Innovation; social media may be innovative but it doesn't necessarily follow that innovative ideas flow from social media.
• Data Analytics is broader than Big Data and includes both linked data and open data. These don't necessarily always fall into the category of big data on their own but will play an important role as more and more data sources start to rub up against each other. 
• Design Thinking combines empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the particular context
• Behavioural Economics brings sentiment, analytics, and design to ground by emphasizing what people actually do when faced with a given situation (rather than what we think they ought to do)
• Evidence Based is an important qualifier and cannot be narrowly construed as relating to only one of the variables on the left side of the equation; evidence comes in many forms and it is up to policy makers and elected officials to determine how to weigh the different sources of evidence (variables in the equation above) against each other in a given set of circumstances.

On Savvy Policy Makers

Savvy policy makers (and for that matter, elected officials) are likely the ones able (and willing) to chart their policy directions against this type of model; the one's who can say with confidence:

"Here is what we've heard from the public, here is what the evidence supports, and here is the most policy intervention we have determined to be the most efficacious. However, it is one we will continue to refine over time, as it creates new data, and is forced to stand up to real world public scrutiny"

When was the last time you heard someone qualify a policy position with that kind of preamble?

The Importance Of Being Earnest (And Open)

by Kent Aitken

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For many readers, my last post on collaboration [see: Collaboration: Overhyped and Underappreciated] may have seemed about five years late. But the evolving understanding of collaboration is still huge for government leaders and industry executives.

And so, even in recognizing that I'm preaching to the choir, I have a little more exploring to do. I wrote this:

I think the most amazing thing about effective collaborative platforms is often not the mechanism for collaboration, but rather the mechanism for finding others who are interested in the same thing. It's easier to get past our natural incredulity: “I can't imagine how I can contribute to X,” or, “I can't imagine who'd be interested in Y.”

I want to expand on the value of finding others with similar interests - and part of it is leaving rough edges of your life, for others to latch on to.

Small Talk

Here's the simplest example. You get asked this question near daily: “What have you been up to?” And, broadly speaking, there are two possible answers: “Not much,” or “Something.”

“Not much.” It's almost certainly untrue, but it's easy and doesn't impose any social duty to investigate on your listener. It's also boring and unlikely to lead to more interesting conversation.

On the other hand, “I've been really busy volunteering with a conference” or “I spent the weekend rock climbing” leave rough edges for others to latch onto, to identify commonalities, and to create conversations around. It's the cocktail party game: we engage in small talk in an effort to hit something really worth talking about. It's not much fun spending a few hours learning what every attendee thinks of the last few days of weather.

Professional Rough Edges

This principle easily expands into professional lives. You can blog, attend conferences, contribute to employee networks, engage on Twitter, discuss ideas at speaker events, or get involved with working groups. Anything you do whereby your ideas become known – whether right or wrong – gives potential collaborators better information on whom to productively involve in future problem solving. These rough edges give people a reasonable context to offer advice, insight, research, or perspective. It's the equivalent of the cocktail party's “Oh really! Did you hear that rock climbing at ______ is half price on Tuesdays now?”

You don't know what you don't know. So, you want to give other people – other people being a demographic that knows a metric boatload more than you – opportunities to help you fill those gaps. But, to open that door, make it apparent what it is that you're interested in and working on. Be open.

Open Living

Being open about ourselves leads to connections and results.

I could write the value proposition, if not a reasonable facsimile of a résumé, for dozens of colleagues based solely on their contributions to community platforms (we can even exclude LinkedIn profiles). Anyone can show you a paper degree; now we publicly embody* our expertise and interests, over time. The difference is that I know, beyond a doubt, that my colleagues didn't earn their degrees with 51% averages – they are experts who care deeply about their fields.

From an organizational perspective, it matters that I can do this. It facilitates productive teamwork and advice-seeking. From a personal perspective, this is important because hiring managers can do this. 2013 is the year of social HR.

Technology doesn't change the foundational principles behind the importance of being open – networking and reputation-building have always been crucial. But it does change the application. In a hierarchy, credit and expertise recognition are muddied by the game of telephone that information gets run through from officers to executives. Open platforms are disruptive here, making it increasingly clear who the contributors are.

Open Government

I'm barely even going to touch open government, because there are so many people with a better understanding. But increasingly, it's hard to ignore the case for open government and stakeholder engagement. My short version, in the context of this piece: the more that government is open about what it's thinking, planning, or researching, the easier it is for appropriate stakeholders to latch on and help said government improve its strategy, build legitimacy for ideas, and avoid potential pitfalls. As Un Tacons commented on my last post, the greatest potential for collaboration is providing clarity on complexity. Or, as Einstein put it:

“If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it."

Multiple eyes are particularly useful for figuring out exactly how wicked the problem you're facing really is.

In Sum

High school was a long time ago, and we can stop trying to be cool and detached. Own up to what you care about, and recognize the value of erring on the side of oversharing. In a hyperconnected world, the Venn diagram of whose business is what is messy and mobile. Accept, and appreciate, those ideas offered in good faith.

Economically, it's building positive-sum games out of even-sum games. It's analogous to $20,000 of GDP representing a car purchase. If privately owned, it creates $20,000 worth of value, for one person. If shared through a service like Vrtucar, the increase in GDP doesn't reflect the real-world value that many people get out of that one car. Just by being open about their needs and interests: “I need a car for four hours on Sunday.” That's it.

More importantly – and this applies to my post on collaboration, as well – if we can derive value from openness and collaboration (and we can, massively), and don't, it's an economic opportunity cost. We may as well be burning money.

So be open. Leave some rough edges.

*I debated different words here: prove, or demonstrate. But I want to make the point that it's not, necessarily, a conscious effort. Some people use open platforms to market themselves; others, more convincingly, contribute to communities and, in doing so, cannot help but prove their expertise.