Posted by
Tracey P. Lauriault on
URL: http://civicaccess.416.s1.nabble.com/maybe-OT-values-of-CivicAccess-tp1420p1425.html
I have been thinking about this for a couple of days now. Sorry for
the long windedness, but I think it is a really important question, one
that has plagued my work as someone who works with data, maps, social
organizations and developing indicators for years.
The cult of efficiency (
http://www.philia.ca/cms_en/page1258.cfm)
combined with the imposition of the cult of accountability stemming
from a business/social entrepreneurship model being imposed on the
social sector, education, health and overseas development have had
disturbing effects. These are neoliberal shifts in our society that
started to appear in the days of cut backs (late 80s early 90s), where
people were made to believe that government should operate like a
business and social services started to get outsourced to the private
sector - reprivatization combined with foundations starting to think of
their donors as shareholders, financial scandals in the public service
making bureaucrats risk averse to fears of mis-spending, and Canadians
being made to believe that overseas development money was being
mis-spent have spawned the context of evaluation and accountability we
are currently living with. Remember the "common sense revolution" of
the Harris government! Social sector and advocacy organizations have
been suffering from this socially and fiscally conservative ideology
ever since, and organizations like the united way have become social
engineers picking up on the public social services the government
dropped! Think of the manufacturing of a health crisis by severe cut
backs, or our degrading public school system as money keeps being
siphoned out of it while "reporting outcomes" have increased. But I
digress!
Evaluation and accountability processes in and of themselves are
not bad things, however, with a lack of time and money, the easy,
identifiable, measurable, tangible ways of assessing if an organization
has been successful in doing what it said and was funded to do wins out
over a more subtle, way of understanding social change, culture and
well being. This is not the fault of data and positivism this is the
fault of our limited way of thinking about ensuring that organizations
are doing what they intended, having the impact they claimed they would
have in their funding proposals with the money they received and the
social & cultural contexts within which those same organizations
have to operate. This is a methodological failure of evaluation, since
qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate and measure are
complementary and necessary. But alas! People want the tangible and
obvious and find the subtle and intangible, which often is where the
richness of social change lies too whishy washy and also these are most
difficult and expensive processes to implement and try to understand. This demonstrates the
weakness of positivist methods absent from the qualitative, both however
yield data, data of a different kind, but data nonetheless.
What I have learned over that past few years and am still learning
is that indicators are rascally, none will ever tell you the story,
none are perfect and all are loaded with limitations, they need to be
wrapped in context, and no social factor can be determined by a single
measure or factor, they are complex and multifaceted. A thermometer
will tell you your temperature, this number remains only an indicator
that something may be off, it does not tell you what the illness is.
You need your intuition, knowledge of the child, training as a doctor,
etc. to tell you what the illness is. And in some cases more tests.
Intuition however comes from prior learning, knowledge, and
experience. I do not want intuited assessments in the absence of
learning, knowledge, and experience which in the medical field comes
from lots of research and lots of data. I do not want inexperienced
uninformed speculative guesses and speculation. Unfortunately in the
social sector our politicians have such a lack of knowledge or a
loathing for good social science that they will make decisions in the
social sector based on their ideologies in the absence of facts. Lets
think of the pope promoting abstinence as a form of birth control, how
aids research was thwarted because it was ideologically framed as a gay
mans disease and we still promote abstinence in Africa! Needle
exchange programs fall under the same debate in my neighbourhood right
now, the social science, the neighbours, health practitioners, social
workers and politicians are at odds.
The best data, for instance to understand the causes of
some types of
homelessness are mental health, addiction, spousal abuse but those data
are derived from self reporting surveys, are not collected, are kept in
private health organizations or in the hands of family shelter and
abused women's shelters who do not label those they serve as homeless,
are inconsistently captured, or are trapped in our statistical
agencies. In other cases the best data
for other types of homelessness, would be demographics and
stories from people who find themselves in these shelters, how did they
get there, how old are they, do they have children, racial and ethnic
profiles, where did they live before finding themselves in the shelter
etc. These data are barely collected and when they are the agency that
does capture these will not share them - HIFIS. So we are left with
guessing and political apathy on the issue. Recently I heard that new
Canadians when they first arrive are predominantly renters, but after
being in Canada for some time, are disproportionally higher relative to
the rest of the population of being home owners. However, whey they
are homeowners, they are often paying way over 50% of their income on a
mortgage again relative to the rest of the population. This is of
course only for some immigrants, as some come from cultures where
renting is the norm yet overall this was the picture that was painted
for me. So i ordered 3 data sets from Statistics Canada that would
allow me to assess the validity of that story. The cost of those
datasets was 60 000$. Our grant was 50 000$, with 5 000$ eaten up by
endless reporting to the funding agency on progress. Needless to say,
we did not acquire those data and wound up not telling that story at
all since the proxy indicators were not at all suitable and we would have speculated with numbers on a topic that can easily be mis-framed.
Alternatively, the Ontario Medical Health association did a Cost to
the Health Care System study of Poor Air Quality. A staggering study,
which still has us banning cigarettes but not improving public
transport, creating cleaner cars, changing our construction patterns,
or making sure those oil refineries have better smoke stacks, etc.
There is a case where the data support radically changing how we
consume and transport ourselves, but we decided to not listen to them.
Yesterday a young lady going to a community college came to talk to me
at GIS day, she lives in a rural area and wanted to do a demographic
trend analysis of youth leaving rural areas using GIS. Her community
college is not a member of the Data Liberation Initiative so she will
not have access to the data in her college to do this study. She can
however go to the US and chose a rural area there and conduct the same
study in well, in this case, not the right place - the data are a
public record and are free in the US. Our young minds who want to
learn are impeded by doing so! What is that cost in the long run? We
dunno cuz we do not collect that kind of data nor support studies to
figure that out. My hunch is ignorance is always expensive in more
ways than one.
So, when I talk about access to data, I am talking both
quantitative and qualitative, I am also talking about accurate,
authentic and reliable datasets captured using good methods. I am also
talking about, data to back up hunches and intuition or to confirm or
dismiss speculations. I also want public spending to be backed up with
data and information and not ideology as we have seen. These data
though can be from public consultations or the census depending on the
nature of the issue at hand. I am also talking about public education
about how to inform decisions and having the means to inform those
decisions. Further, I want to have a conversation with public
officials, the private sector, and some NGOs on a level playing field,
which is hard to do when they have a monopoly on the data and
information. I also, want a culture of secrecy, fear and risk adverseness to change to one of sharing, co-learning and dialogue.
That is why I love
civicaccess.ca because I think each in our own way using our different lenses are having that conversation
Cheers
t.
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 5:48 PM, Michael Lenczner
<[hidden email]> wrote:
Hey all,
Since we started CA, the question of common goals / values has been a
question. I'm don't think it needs to be 100% clear but I'm glad we
haven't assumed consensus on issues that haven't been explored, and
I'm glad that we don't assume that we all have the same values or
strategies for social change. I think everyone is pretty cool with
the idea that there's people from different places on the political
spectrum, and that we are well off coming together to work on this
specific goal of access to civic info and data.
I wanted to share my concern about another issue. I've been picking up
on a perceived idea that we're all equally excited about data-driven
decision making. I wonder how true that is. Personally I get
concerned by a lot of imagined practices I see around access to data.
There's a whole positivist / empiricist side to it that kinda freaks
me out.
I can imagine us often making better decisions with access to more
data, but I can also imagine us making worse decisions by relying too
much on that practice. The reason I'm here is that access to
information is a justice issue. I don't think it is just that we
don't have access to our own civic information, and I think that we
would have a more just society if access to these resources were
opened up. Redressing that injustice is a goal in itself for me and
secondarily I'm excited about issues of transparency in terms of the
relation between citizen and government. Data-driven decision making
(ie: better decision) is farther down as a priority for me. Down
further still is the goal of increased efficiency.
I don't necessarily respect the evaluation + management tools that are
currently being pushed on the non-profit sector and I would not be
comfortable with promoting more single-minded use of those tools by
our public bodies. There's too many difficulties around the
production of knowledge (data) and useful framing of it for me not to
be ambivalent about encouraging their use.
That being said, I respect that there are others that have a different
set of priorities for being here and I'm not trying to convince
anybody. I'm glad that we are here to work together on the question
of access and possibilities for disseminating and using that
info/data.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but Hugh posted a video by
the journalist behind the Wire that prompted my email. It points to
some difficulties of making decisions from a distanced, solely
quantitative knowledge of an issue.
via Hugh's blog
http://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/webcast_Simon.shtml
Hope that made sense.
Since I'm on the topic, I'm glad that we've developed a respectful
culture here. No flaming and there's a good dialogue between new
people, technical experts and policy experts. Congrats for us. :-)
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--
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault