Re: [Sunlight International] Help us build an evidence base on the social impact of open data!

[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Hi Julia;

One of the reasons I was inspired into working on 'access to' public & science & geomatics data which has since 2005+/- morphed into open data, was for the purpose of evidence based decision making in civil society organizations, such as social planning councils, homeless shelters, to support anti-poverty and social justice organizations, environmental groups and so on.  The 'access to' work has continues to move in that direction but in parallel to open data work, both are very different epistemic communities doing mutually complementary work in different domains, arenas and their incentive structures differ, open data having gained more power but not having necessarily brought about greater social good to the less fortunate in our communities.

Irrespective, with the proliferation of indices and benchmarks and valuation exercises combined with charters and the release of the 'most valued' datasets has meant a kind of distancing from evidence-based policy, data to empower the marginalized and deliberative democracy.

I did some work for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on the development of their Quality of Life Indicator System where we tracked since 1991 - present, over 100 indicators consisting of 100+ variables collected from all jurisdictions (scales) in Canada from 50 or so institutions, including the production of a municipal data collection tool, to collect standardized data on issues related to the cost of recreational programs, homeless shelters, social registry waiting lists, cost of a bus in relation to income from social welfare and so on.  This means lots of negotiating, cold calls, agreements, cajoling, digging and so on, each time.

Unfortunately, with the data in contemporary open data portals in Canada, there is no way to construct that indicator system.  Of course that has much to do with the open data focus on innovation, commercialization and the interest, often but no always of app developers, CTOs and open data advocates who are not data users in the public policy sense.

I would suggest we begin re-evaluating the quality of our open data initiatives on whether or not we can construct basic quality of life indicators from them, and whether or not the data in them actually go on to improve the quality of life in any marginal way for citizens in those jurisdictions.  Knowing to the millisecond when the next bus is coming from an app on my smart phone with the use of real-time data hardly constitutes a significant improvement in my day to day, let alone does it inform transit policy, routing and affordability of the transit system to the economically strained members of our society, nor does it improve the environment.  Yet near real-time data are the most highly valued and sought after datasets.

I wonder if as a strategy, we picked jurisdictionally specific or a renowned trans-national quality of life/well being indicator systems and evaluated open data initiatives based on whether or not we could construct the indicators might not be a more meaningful approach to evaluation.

Cheers

Tracey

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Julia Keserű <[hidden email]> wrote:

*** Sorry for the cross-post. ***

Hey everyone,

We need your help!

The Sunlight Foundation is looking for examples on the social impact of open data and digital transparency projects from around the world. This is a great opportunity to tell us what open data project you`re working on and how you think your initiative is making a change to our societies, beyond economic impact. Our new repository is part of a research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. (More info in the blog post below.)

Please submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's driving change.

Best and thanks,
Julia


http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2015/01/23/help-us-build-an-evidence-base-on-the-social-impact-of-open-data/

Help us build an evidence base on the social impact of open data!

by Júlia Keserű

• policy

JAN. 23, 2015, 8 A.M.

Photo by Flickr user Justin Grimes

Talking about the economic benefit of open data is one good way to describe open data’s impact, and provides a "great rationale" for the release of relevant data sets. However, open data’s impact does not lie solely in the economic sphere. Government openness may produce tremendous other benefits for our societies: increasing state or institutional responsiveness, reducing levels of corruption and clientelism, building new democratic spaces for citizens, empowering local and disadvantaged voices, or enhancing service delivery and effective service utilization.

But how effective open data and government transparency actually are at producing these social benefits is not yet at all evident. At a time when "fake government openness" and "open-washing" are increasingly seen as a risk to the transparency movement’s credibility, there is burning need for more evidence on how opening up government information helps us all use resources more “effectively, equitably and sustainably to meet people’s needs.” Developing indexes and comparative studies on a wide range of topics (e.g. budgets, thefreedom of the web, aid, perceived corruption, etc.) is a crucial first step, but in order to get more buy-in from our policy-makers and a critical mass of citizens, we need to look beyond those indexes and find other ways to analyze the effect of open data on societies.

Much of the existing literature seeking to measure the impact and effectiveness of transparency and open data accountability initiatives seem to face a common challenge: It is incredibly difficult to come up with definitive, evidence-based generalizations about how "x" type of initiatives produce "y" kinds of effects. The field has yet to coalesce around a theory of change, for one, and there are significant methodological challenges around comparability and unevenness of evidence.

At Sunlight, we would like to help change that. As a continuation of our work to provide examples of how opening up information makes a difference in communities across the U.S., we want to tackle some of these challenges through a new research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. Our goal is to build a strong evidence base that might empower further generalizations and to develop a few potential theories of change that capture the nuances, complexity and messiness of this broad agenda. With generous support from the Open Data for DevelopmentResearch Fund of the OGP Open Data Working Group, our research aims to identify the factors that increase the likelihood that open data initiatives will achieve their stated goals in a particular context. We also seek to understand why and how these factors lead to success or failure.

As a first step, we are asking you — the community of transparency and open government advocates, civic hackers, investigative journalists and policy makers — to provide us with illustrative examples of how open data and transparency projects are having impact on our societies.

Are you working on an open data project that improves the level of political participation and citizen engagement? Do you know any tech-based transparency project that you think might lead to change in social behavior? Is your transparency initiative aimed at decreasing the perception of corruption, fraud or waste. Has it led to more investigations or better investigative journalism? Are you aware of an open data initiative that improves public service delivery or social policies? From environmental through educational and public safety to health outcomes, we're looking for examples — both on the local and national level — that look beyond the direct economic benefits of open data and illustrate how government openness produces social benefits.

We realize that the definitions we use here are a bit broad, but our goal is to encourage everyone working in this field to help us build a strong evidence base that we can further filter and analyze. So please help us and submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's making a change in our societies. Any supporting documents (theories of change, articles, impact stories) in both your local language or in English are welcome too.

Access to government information and decision-making processes is a fundamental democratic principle. Open data and digital transparency are one important way of achieving that access. Help us make our case even stronger!

--

Júlia Keserű

International Policy Manager

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036 

<a href="tel:%281%29%20202-742-1520" value="[phone]" target="_blank">(1) 202-742-1520 *246

   

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[Gerry Tychon-2]

Hi Tracey ...

Just getting back to this older post for a second. You make a lot of good points. It would be good if indicator data collected was published as open data. Instead glossy brochures and publications with (many dreaded) pie charts are published. I have in some cases contacted organizations to get the actual data but usually there is resistance. I also wonder if there could be useful indicators that are non-traditional.

I did check the datalibre.ca site:

http://datalibre.ca/2008/06/04/this-is-civic-access-fcm-quality-of-life-reporting-system/

re "FCM Quality of Life Reporting System" but the links there no longer work. That is not surprising -- it has been some time since that material was posted.

As you suggest, perhaps we can all push for more quality of life indicators to be included in open data portals.

... gerry

On 27/01/2015 4:24 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

Hi Julia;

One of the reasons I was inspired into working on 'access to' public & science & geomatics data which has since 2005+/- morphed into open data, was for the purpose of evidence based decision making in civil society organizations, such as social planning councils, homeless shelters, to support anti-poverty and social justice organizations, environmental groups and so on.  The 'access to' work has continues to move in that direction but in parallel to open data work, both are very different epistemic communities doing mutually complementary work in different domains, arenas and their incentive structures differ, open data having gained more power but not having necessarily brought about greater social good to the less fortunate in our communities.

Irrespective, with the proliferation of indices and benchmarks and valuation exercises combined with charters and the release of the 'most valued' datasets has meant a kind of distancing from evidence-based policy, data to empower the marginalized and deliberative democracy.

I did some work for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on the development of their Quality of Life Indicator System where we tracked since 1991 - present, over 100 indicators consisting of 100+ variables collected from all jurisdictions (scales) in Canada from 50 or so institutions, including the production of a municipal data collection tool, to collect standardized data on issues related to the cost of recreational programs, homeless shelters, social registry waiting lists, cost of a bus in relation to income from social welfare and so on.  This means lots of negotiating, cold calls, agreements, cajoling, digging and so on, each time.

Unfortunately, with the data in contemporary open data portals in Canada, there is no way to construct that indicator system.  Of course that has much to do with the open data focus on innovation, commercialization and the interest, often but no always of app developers, CTOs and open data advocates who are not data users in the public policy sense.

I would suggest we begin re-evaluating the quality of our open data initiatives on whether or not we can construct basic quality of life indicators from them, and whether or not the data in them actually go on to improve the quality of life in any marginal way for citizens in those jurisdictions.  Knowing to the millisecond when the next bus is coming from an app on my smart phone with the use of real-time data hardly constitutes a significant improvement in my day to day, let alone does it inform transit policy, routing and affordability of the transit system to the economically strained members of our society, nor does it improve the environment.  Yet near real-time data are the most highly valued and sought after datasets.

I wonder if as a strategy, we picked jurisdictionally specific or a renowned trans-national quality of life/well being indicator systems and evaluated open data initiatives based on whether or not we could construct the indicators might not be a more meaningful approach to evaluation.

Cheers

Tracey

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Julia Keserű <[hidden email]> wrote:

*** Sorry for the cross-post. ***

Hey everyone,

We need your help!

The Sunlight Foundation is looking for examples on the social impact of open data and digital transparency projects from around the world. This is a great opportunity to tell us what open data project you`re working on and how you think your initiative is making a change to our societies, beyond economic impact. Our new repository is part of a research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. (More info in the blog post below.)

Please submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's driving change.

Best and thanks,
Julia


http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2015/01/23/help-us-build-an-evidence-base-on-the-social-impact-of-open-data/

Help us build an evidence base on the social impact of open data!

by Júlia Keserű

• policy

JAN. 23, 2015, 8 A.M.

Photo by Flickr user Justin Grimes

Talking about the economic benefit of open data is one good way to describe open data’s impact, and provides a "great rationale" for the release of relevant data sets. However, open data’s impact does not lie solely in the economic sphere. Government openness may produce tremendous other benefits for our societies: increasing state or institutional responsiveness, reducing levels of corruption and clientelism, building new democratic spaces for citizens, empowering local and disadvantaged voices, or enhancing service delivery and effective service utilization.

But how effective open data and government transparency actually are at producing these social benefits is not yet at all evident. At a time when "fake government openness" and "open-washing" are increasingly seen as a risk to the transparency movement’s credibility, there is burning need for more evidence on how opening up government information helps us all use resources more “effectively, equitably and sustainably to meet people’s needs.” Developing indexes and comparative studies on a wide range of topics (e.g. budgets, thefreedom of the web, aid, perceived corruption, etc.) is a crucial first step, but in order to get more buy-in from our policy-makers and a critical mass of citizens, we need to look beyond those indexes and find other ways to analyze the effect of open data on societies.

Much of the existing literature seeking to measure the impact and effectiveness of transparency and open data accountability initiatives seem to face a common challenge: It is incredibly difficult to come up with definitive, evidence-based generalizations about how "x" type of initiatives produce "y" kinds of effects. The field has yet to coalesce around a theory of change, for one, and there are significant methodological challenges around comparability and unevenness of evidence.

At Sunlight, we would like to help change that. As a continuation of our work to provide examples of how opening up information makes a difference in communities across the U.S., we want to tackle some of these challenges through a new research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. Our goal is to build a strong evidence base that might empower further generalizations and to develop a few potential theories of change that capture the nuances, complexity and messiness of this broad agenda. With generous support from the Open Data for DevelopmentResearch Fund of the OGP Open Data Working Group, our research aims to identify the factors that increase the likelihood that open data initiatives will achieve their stated goals in a particular context. We also seek to understand why and how these factors lead to success or failure.

As a first step, we are asking you — the community of transparency and open government advocates, civic hackers, investigative journalists and policy makers — to provide us with illustrative examples of how open data and transparency projects are having impact on our societies.

Are you working on an open data project that improves the level of political participation and citizen engagement? Do you know any tech-based transparency project that you think might lead to change in social behavior? Is your transparency initiative aimed at decreasing the perception of corruption, fraud or waste. Has it led to more investigations or better investigative journalism? Are you aware of an open data initiative that improves public service delivery or social policies? From environmental through educational and public safety to health outcomes, we're looking for examples — both on the local and national level — that look beyond the direct economic benefits of open data and illustrate how government openness produces social benefits.

We realize that the definitions we use here are a bit broad, but our goal is to encourage everyone working in this field to help us build a strong evidence base that we can further filter and analyze. So please help us and submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's making a change in our societies. Any supporting documents (theories of change, articles, impact stories) in both your local language or in English are welcome too.

Access to government information and decision-making processes is a fundamental democratic principle. Open data and digital transparency are one important way of achieving that access. Help us make our case even stronger!

--

Júlia Keserű

International Policy Manager

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036 

<a moz-do-not-send="true" href="tel:%281%29%20202-742-1520" value="[phone]" target="_blank">(1) 202-742-1520 *246

   

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To post to this group, send email to [hidden email].
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[Tracey P. Lauriault]

HI Gerry,

The FCM stuff got moved to here - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/

This is what they are measuring - http://www.municipaldata-donneesmunicipales.ca/Site/Monitoring/grid.php?lang=en

If we had these data in the same 24 cities across Canada, at the same resolution, with the same description, methods, and caveats, including the data from provinces and territories as well as the federal departments, in open data portals, we could construct a quality of life indicator system.

I went in to open data to not have to do all the crazy hagling and digging to put this indicator system together on an ongoing basis.  Sigh!  we have a long way to go still!

Cheers and sorry it took so long to get back to you.

t

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 2:56 AM, Gerry Tychon <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi Tracey ...

Just getting back to this older post for a second. You make a lot of good points. It would be good if indicator data collected was published as open data. Instead glossy brochures and publications with (many dreaded) pie charts are published. I have in some cases contacted organizations to get the actual data but usually there is resistance. I also wonder if there could be useful indicators that are non-traditional.

I did check the datalibre.ca site:

http://datalibre.ca/2008/06/04/this-is-civic-access-fcm-quality-of-life-reporting-system/

re "FCM Quality of Life Reporting System" but the links there no longer work. That is not surprising -- it has been some time since that material was posted.

As you suggest, perhaps we can all push for more quality of life indicators to be included in open data portals.

... gerry

On 27/01/2015 4:24 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault wrote:

Hi Julia;

One of the reasons I was inspired into working on 'access to' public & science & geomatics data which has since 2005+/- morphed into open data, was for the purpose of evidence based decision making in civil society organizations, such as social planning councils, homeless shelters, to support anti-poverty and social justice organizations, environmental groups and so on.  The 'access to' work has continues to move in that direction but in parallel to open data work, both are very different epistemic communities doing mutually complementary work in different domains, arenas and their incentive structures differ, open data having gained more power but not having necessarily brought about greater social good to the less fortunate in our communities.

Irrespective, with the proliferation of indices and benchmarks and valuation exercises combined with charters and the release of the 'most valued' datasets has meant a kind of distancing from evidence-based policy, data to empower the marginalized and deliberative democracy.

I did some work for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities on the development of their Quality of Life Indicator System where we tracked since 1991 - present, over 100 indicators consisting of 100+ variables collected from all jurisdictions (scales) in Canada from 50 or so institutions, including the production of a municipal data collection tool, to collect standardized data on issues related to the cost of recreational programs, homeless shelters, social registry waiting lists, cost of a bus in relation to income from social welfare and so on.  This means lots of negotiating, cold calls, agreements, cajoling, digging and so on, each time.

Unfortunately, with the data in contemporary open data portals in Canada, there is no way to construct that indicator system.  Of course that has much to do with the open data focus on innovation, commercialization and the interest, often but no always of app developers, CTOs and open data advocates who are not data users in the public policy sense.

I would suggest we begin re-evaluating the quality of our open data initiatives on whether or not we can construct basic quality of life indicators from them, and whether or not the data in them actually go on to improve the quality of life in any marginal way for citizens in those jurisdictions.  Knowing to the millisecond when the next bus is coming from an app on my smart phone with the use of real-time data hardly constitutes a significant improvement in my day to day, let alone does it inform transit policy, routing and affordability of the transit system to the economically strained members of our society, nor does it improve the environment.  Yet near real-time data are the most highly valued and sought after datasets.

I wonder if as a strategy, we picked jurisdictionally specific or a renowned trans-national quality of life/well being indicator systems and evaluated open data initiatives based on whether or not we could construct the indicators might not be a more meaningful approach to evaluation.

Cheers

Tracey

On Mon, Jan 26, 2015 at 2:44 PM, Julia Keserű <[hidden email]> wrote:

*** Sorry for the cross-post. ***

Hey everyone,

We need your help!

The Sunlight Foundation is looking for examples on the social impact of open data and digital transparency projects from around the world. This is a great opportunity to tell us what open data project you`re working on and how you think your initiative is making a change to our societies, beyond economic impact. Our new repository is part of a research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. (More info in the blog post below.)

Please submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's driving change.

Best and thanks,
Julia


http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2015/01/23/help-us-build-an-evidence-base-on-the-social-impact-of-open-data/

Help us build an evidence base on the social impact of open data!

by Júlia Keserű

• policy

JAN. 23, 2015, 8 A.M.

Photo by Flickr user Justin Grimes

Talking about the economic benefit of open data is one good way to describe open data’s impact, and provides a "great rationale" for the release of relevant data sets. However, open data’s impact does not lie solely in the economic sphere. Government openness may produce tremendous other benefits for our societies: increasing state or institutional responsiveness, reducing levels of corruption and clientelism, building new democratic spaces for citizens, empowering local and disadvantaged voices, or enhancing service delivery and effective service utilization.

But how effective open data and government transparency actually are at producing these social benefits is not yet at all evident. At a time when "fake government openness" and "open-washing" are increasingly seen as a risk to the transparency movement’s credibility, there is burning need for more evidence on how opening up government information helps us all use resources more “effectively, equitably and sustainably to meet people’s needs.” Developing indexes and comparative studies on a wide range of topics (e.g. budgets, thefreedom of the web, aid, perceived corruption, etc.) is a crucial first step, but in order to get more buy-in from our policy-makers and a critical mass of citizens, we need to look beyond those indexes and find other ways to analyze the effect of open data on societies.

Much of the existing literature seeking to measure the impact and effectiveness of transparency and open data accountability initiatives seem to face a common challenge: It is incredibly difficult to come up with definitive, evidence-based generalizations about how "x" type of initiatives produce "y" kinds of effects. The field has yet to coalesce around a theory of change, for one, and there are significant methodological challenges around comparability and unevenness of evidence.

At Sunlight, we would like to help change that. As a continuation of our work to provide examples of how opening up information makes a difference in communities across the U.S., we want to tackle some of these challenges through a new research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. Our goal is to build a strong evidence base that might empower further generalizations and to develop a few potential theories of change that capture the nuances, complexity and messiness of this broad agenda. With generous support from the Open Data for DevelopmentResearch Fund of the OGP Open Data Working Group, our research aims to identify the factors that increase the likelihood that open data initiatives will achieve their stated goals in a particular context. We also seek to understand why and how these factors lead to success or failure.

As a first step, we are asking you — the community of transparency and open government advocates, civic hackers, investigative journalists and policy makers — to provide us with illustrative examples of how open data and transparency projects are having impact on our societies.

Are you working on an open data project that improves the level of political participation and citizen engagement? Do you know any tech-based transparency project that you think might lead to change in social behavior? Is your transparency initiative aimed at decreasing the perception of corruption, fraud or waste. Has it led to more investigations or better investigative journalism? Are you aware of an open data initiative that improves public service delivery or social policies? From environmental through educational and public safety to health outcomes, we're looking for examples — both on the local and national level — that look beyond the direct economic benefits of open data and illustrate how government openness produces social benefits.

We realize that the definitions we use here are a bit broad, but our goal is to encourage everyone working in this field to help us build a strong evidence base that we can further filter and analyze. So please help us and submit your case story through this link, or send it to [hidden email] before the end of Feb. 4! All you need to do is give a very short description of your project and how you think it's making a change in our societies. Any supporting documents (theories of change, articles, impact stories) in both your local language or in English are welcome too.

Access to government information and decision-making processes is a fundamental democratic principle. Open data and digital transparency are one important way of achieving that access. Help us make our case even stronger!

--

Júlia Keserű

International Policy Manager

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036 

<a href="tel:%281%29%20202-742-1520" value="[phone]" target="_blank">(1) 202-742-1520 *246

   

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You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sunlight International" group.
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Tracey P. Lauriault

http://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/progcity/contributors/tracey-p-lauriault/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/
@TraceyLauriaut
Skype: Tracey.P.Lauriault

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http://lists.pwd.ca/mailman/listinfo/civicaccess-discuss

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CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
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