Hackable Government

by David Fleming

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David is an economist, business association leader, cyclist and urbanist in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He blogs infrequently at http://dfleming.ca and tweets @northenddavid.

A little while ago, I wrote an article for Halifax's alt weekly The Coast about demographic trends in Nova Scotia and the need for a bold youth agenda in Nova Scotia. The article caught fire - after thousands of shares, tweets, and emails, it was clear it struck a nerve among my peers.

In the article, I listed a number of common themes I hear from young professionals that would make Halifax a place to flock to. Kent picked up on one - hackable and transparent governments - and asked me to elaborate on what I think its relationship to attracting people is, and to public service renewal.

There are a lot of signs, both above and below our border that people are disengaging from their political processes. The chasm between government and citizens has arguably never been bigger. In the past 50 years, we’ve gone from local government directories with people’s names on them to national or regional offices with 1-800 numbers. Government offices were once a place you could go to ask a question - now, many of them are fortresses of security, often located in inaccessible places like business parks. When you ask many public servants what they do, it’s a sea of inside baseball terms and acronyms - with no clear answer on what relevance that has to the asker.

I believe at our core most of us are hackers. Whether we’re programming sentry guns to spray squirrels in our backyards , building DIY greenhouses, or simply collecting other people’s good ideas - most of us aren’t content with staying at our current level of interactivity with the world around us. I believe, if we’re truly looking at public service renewal and ways to engage our citizens in the places they live, we need to give people the chance to be a part of the hacking of the public service.

On a tangible level, something as simple as freely releasing GPS data for busses has a momentous effect on the public interaction with service. Instead of waiting for busses on the hope that the planned schedule matches reality (which generally leads to a lot of frustration and distrust) - people can build tools so that people can avoid missing an early bus or standing out in the rain for one that’s late. They can build tools that provide specialized help to 1, 10, or 100 people with a common problem (such as the desire to intersect public transit and art venues to plan an event.) The only limit is the public’s desire to create an outcome. And, even better - with a more complete set of data, they can test, analyze and suggest ways to realistically improve the efficiency of that service from the perspective of a user.

The benefit of creating hackable governments is two-fold - one, people feel more agency and control over their public services - and two, governments get better information from its citizens about what they need. On both sides of the spectrum, it creates public engagement and liveability. Those are pretty great areas to focus on when looking at public service renewal - how can we use the amazing tools and power of the collective to get people back into solving public problems and creating good outcomes for each other? Instead of looking at public service renewal as an inner working of the government - how do we get it out into the public for design input?

In a future article (either here or on my personal blog), I’ll continue the conversation about how simple changes to things like information design and performance metrics can create huge changes in this area.

Redefining diversity in the search for ideas

by Tariq Piracha

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With Nick and Kent’s recent focus on a new way forward for policy development, I began thinking about the sourcing of design thinking from Nick’s piece, and the system for more reliable problem solving from Kent's piece. If we are to assume that policy making is to take this proposed course, who is the source of the design thinking? Where do the ideas come from?

Diversity, old school.

When I first joined the public service in 2001, I remember attending a Town Hall related to visible minorities and diversity in the public service. The question back then was not all that different from questions we see today: how to we attract and retain *diverse* talent for the public service?

The assumption is that there is value in a diversity of backgrounds and what those backgrounds can bring to the table. The focus for visible minority groups, of course, is to provide more opportunity for those who are otherwise shut out of the process due to the colour of their skin. 

And they weren't the only groups who focused on representation based on a particular demographic. Our meetings or consultations became an exercise in ensuring that we included a visible minority, a woman, a person with a disability, a member of First Nations, someone younger, someone older – the list goes on. A successful exercise in inclusiveness was a room filled with demographic diversity. 

However, if the nature of policy development is going to change (as Nick and Kent suggest), then it follows that a redefinition of diversity may be required. 

As Blueprint 2020 uses digital tools to bring public servants together across the country to envision a new future for the public service, the focus is on ideas. In short, government may need to shift from visible to invisible inclusiveness.  

A good idea is a good idea is a good idea

When I say “invisible inclusiveness”, I'm talking about a focus on the source of design thinking: tapping into a diversity of experience, opinion, and ideas.

It’s the notion that cognitive authority needs to supplant institutional or positional authority. We should be drawn to good ideas and we lose out if we retain biases of any kind that favour source (one's position or influence) over merit (of an idea).

It means a good idea is a good idea, no matter where it comes from and is treated as such. It means that there is value seeking out other voices and ideas (even dissenting ones). It is a belief in producing better outcomes through consultation, collaboration and cooperation. It is an acknowledgement that no one person has all the answers. 

The opportunity here is that one's value is determined by their contribution, not by the colour of their skin, the year they were born, or the nation to which they belong.

It’s asking for a change in culture, which is no easy task - there is still a long way to go. Collaboration and the use of collaborative tools, while increasing in use, are by no means pervasive in the public service. And the use of these tools and the culture that may be fostered through the use of these tools are no guarantee that racism, discrimination and exclusivity are going to disappear. 

However, if better policy outcomes and an effective public service are the goals for the public service, then the focus on finding the best ideas will truly need to shift from obsessing over who is getting a seat at the table to stepping out of the boardroom.

Building Distributed Capacity

By Kent Aitken

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Last week Nick laid out a model that blends public sentiment, data analytics, design thinking, and behavioural economics as the future of evidence-based policy (see: basically, that was the title). The opportunity cost of inaction, here, is far greater than the immediate financial investments required. The only disagreement I can muster is that I'd actually call it the future of governance, writ large.

But, we're in an era of intense scrutiny. Governments are no longer entirely opaque entities, and spending can be held not just to account but to undue pressure. And that pressure is greatest when spending doesn't lead to immediate and obvious public benefits, which is the case for pursuing the future as described above.

However, there are examples of governments spending money on complex investments - those that are long-term, hard-to-measure, and with widely distributed benefits. It's largely because there are strong communities that envision the long term that are bellowing for these investments, creating crucial pressure and accountability.


And these investments line up with the model Nick proposed. For public sentiment, the U.K. is building capacity through organizations like Sciencewise, dedicated to helping government consult with citizens on science and technology policy. For design thinking, there are a handful of examples, established to help policy makers apply techniques in their work. In the Behavioural Economics field, the U.K. are again the leaders with the Behavioural Insights Unit, and the U.S. appointed Cass Sunstein to a key role to make progress there. For Data Analytics? I welcome examples. But there is good news in the technology space, however, as on Monday a bill was proposed in the U.S. that would codify the national Chief Technology Officer role and establish a Digital Government Office.


These are all wise investments, the success of which can only be measured in the long-term and at the macro scale. None of those investments solve an easily definable problem; rather, they create a distributed capacity, a system for more reliable problem-solving.



So where do we go from here?

At the highest level, it's a question of ensuring that we can make important investments in complex solutions. Where the counterfactual is the key question, and the opportunity cost of inaction far outweighs immediate financial costs. And with closely watching stakeholders than can be hard to convince.


More concretely? There's a group of brilliant and dedicated public servants pursuing capacity-building for design thinking close to home. This is both a discrete capacity and a way to improve virtually every decision-making process, so I think this will go a long way towards better results. Design thinking is properly merciless in testing and discarding sub-optimal solutions.


But data analytics, behavioural economics, and understanding public sentiment require their own skillsets. And I think (and have for some time) that the opportunity cost of not exploring capacity-building in these areas is too great to be ignored.