World Bank President Robert Zoellick made a fascinating speech last month, in which he urged a sweeping new approach to development economics research. He outlined how the World Bank would change its research model to better tap into the experiences of developing countries.

The new initiative is called “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” and aims to make research data and analysis more easily accessible to development practitioners and policymakers.

Development Research

Referencing British philosopher David Hume, who said “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence”, Zoellick questioned whether the set of data and analytic tools now available is sufficient to answer the most pressing questions facing developing countries today:

Too often the positive outcomes of research for policymakers seem to be occasional by products of research rather than its objective from the outset.

Too often research economists seem not to start with the key knowledge gaps facing development practitioners, but rather search for questions they can answer with the industry’s currently favorite tools.

He acknowledged the need for evidence-based best practice – and hand-on experience – to guide the research agenda:

We need to know what works: we need a research agenda that focuses on results. To do so, we will need to gather more evidence and data to assess the effectiveness of development efforts, including aid…

I believe we need a more practical approach —- one that is firmly grounded in the key knowledge gaps for development policy. One that is geared to the needs of policymakers and practitioners — as a primary focus, not as an academic afterthought.One that throws open the doors to all those with hands-on experience.

To this end he suggests economists, policymakers and academics should re-examine the economies of developing countries through more accessible data and use of new technologies.

There is a new opportunity, and certainly a pressing need, for a dynamism in development economics. Software has brought new tools; the Internet has brought new communications; rising economies have brought new experiences.

Open Data, but censorship of conclusions?

The Wall Street Journal and others have highlighted the debate ignited as a result of the speech. Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence, said Zoellick’s comments were “generally not only in the right direction, but very useful”.

Harvard economist Dani Rodrik called the speech “forthright and courageous”:

The speech hits all the right notes: the need for economists to demonstrate humility, eschew blueprints, search for differentiated solutions suited to context, learn from the actual policies of successful emerging economies, focus on evaluation but not at the expense of the big questions.

AidInfo (a non-profit concerned with making aid more transparent) also welcomed the speech:

We warmly welcome both the attitude of the World Bank towards democratising data, and the steps they are taking towards it…

Talking to donors over the last year about releasing aid data, it is striking how often they want to know exactly who will use the information and for what purpose…

We are pressing the view that donors should not see themselves as the only, or even the main, providers of information to end users; they should make it possible for other organisations to access information and provide it to people who need it.

Others, however, were more skeptical about the speech. New York University economist William Easterly, formerly of the World Bank, described the comments as “amazingly presumptuous.” He says the current system of economic research, where ideas are picked apart by other economists, works well, but World Bank researchers often make no attempt to publicize their findings, thus hindering the options for debate.

He also notes how research can be subject to censorship, and questions whether this would change with “researchers’ participation in the ‘democraticized’ debate”.

The World Bank’s chief of research, Martin Ravallion, responded saying:

I have never been told what conclusions I should reach, and I doubt very much that anyone told Bill Easterly what conclusions he should reach in his many years working for the Bank’s research department.

Indeed, Ravallion is a prominent supporter of a new kind of research platform to make it easier for anyone to interrogate development data for their own purposes.

World Bank as a Platform

Tim O’ Reilly’s oft discussed Government as a Platform is the central theme of Zoellick’s “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions” initiative. In order to make research more relevant to developing countries, the tools to enable it should be “democratized”, allowing researchers to collaborate with professionals in developing countries.

No longer can the model solely be to research a specific issue and write a paper hoping someone will read it. The new model must be “wholesale” and networked. It must increasingly open information and knowledge to others by giving them the tools to do the economic research themselves.

Martin Ravallion recently blogged about this new “wholesaling model” under which the emphasis switches to producing the tools for others to do the research and providing open access to those tools. He explained three objectives for such an initiative:

1. Empowering Researchers – to do better research to inform development policy and development practice. This changes the focus of the traditional “capacity building” model from the task of “teaching the lessons from past research” to facilitating new learning in specific contexts.
2. Collaborative Retailing model – ensuring World Bank staff and academics in rich countries can work more closely with colleagues in developing countries as full peers.
3. More open and transparent policy analysis – The Bank can play an important role in reducing the costs of understanding even the most sophisticated policy analysis, given that technical capabilities have increased among key stakeholders.

This ‘wholesaling model’, however, is predicated upon the Bank making available online much more of the information it collects on countries to help local researchers and aid workers.

The “Open Data, Open Knowledge, Open Solutions,” initiative is intended to move this model further by providing a user-friendly data source, free and open to the public. Zoellick explained how this is a fundamental shift from today’s “elite retail” model of research:

This needs to be a fundamentally new way of searching for development solutions, in a networked development architecture, where none dominates and all can play a part

This new research ecosystem is intended to (my emphasis):

Open the treasure chest of the World Bank’s data and knowledge to every village health care worker, every researcher, everyone.

Today, the Bank remains the largest single source of development knowledge. But knowledge must be opened to all…

We need to democratize and demystify development economics, recognizing that we do not have a monopoly on the answers.

We need to throw open the doors, recognizing that others can find and create their own solutions. And this open research revolution is underway…

We need to recognize that development knowledge is no longer the sole province of the researcher, the scholar, or the ivory tower. It’s about the health-care worker in Chiapas recording her results; it’s about the local official posting the school budget on the classroom door so that parents can complain when their children are shortchanged; it’s about the Minister, the academician, the statistician, and the entrepreneur comparing notes on the impact of incentives.

This release of data is already underway with the World Bank’s Open Data initiative. The initiative provides information on more than 2,000 financial, business, health, economic and human development indicators. It recently tripled the amount of data on the site and introduced new and improved mapping and visualisation features to improve “data-driven decision making”.

Ravallion explains how this new model should lead to greater transparency and collaboration in the analysis of development data:

This new model for how we do research will combine open access to data with open access to the analytic tools used to inform policy discussions using those data. Our vision is that data, the knowledge and the solutions to development problems will ultimately be generated collaboratively by those who have most to gain from the success of those solutions.

Transparency

Governments, civil society organizations, aid watchdogs have all demanded greater transparency from the World Bank. Government’s around the world have also faced demands for increased openness, and have responded accordingly with open data initiatives and directives. The World Bank has faced such demands and answered these with developments such as:

• Open Data Catalog – similar to the US data.gov and UK data.gov.uk
• New Access to Information Policy – based on the US and Indian Freedom of Information Acts
• Open Forum – running parallel to the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings it will allow a global audience to participate in the event via chat forums, live blogging, Twitter, etc. (similar to the Whitehouse Open For Questions model)

It is also launching an Apps for Development Competition to encourage and identify new, innovative tools and applications using World Bank data. Such app competitions have been run by many government authorities in recent years, and have served to highlight the potential of data for the development of citizen centric web/mobile applications.

The World Bank is following the open data lead set by many governments, and making available online much more of the information it collects on countries. Zoellick understands that researchers and other professionals in the field should be able to examine the data and assumptions behind World Bank reports, and interrogate this information to draw their own conclusions. What the Sunlight Foundation does with Government data, Aidinfo and others should be able to do with World Bank data.

With this speech Zoellick has been described as a Development 2.0 advocate. The overall theme of openness, transparency and collaboration represent a fascinating change in how the World Bank views development data, and its research methodologies on aid effectiveness. Now we just need to ensure the data is of high enough quality, to remove any suggestions the initiative is – like some Government data initiatives – ‘more style than substance’.

Related

• Open Data Helps Developing Countries
• Wholesaling Research for Development
• Full webcast of Zoellick’s speech

One of the most highly publicized Open Government initiatives of the last few years got a thundering wakeup call last week, when Ellen Miller – Executive Director of the Sunlight Foundation – addressed succinctly, and with hard facts, the Open Data ‘Elephant in the room’. That is, the problem of missing or wrong data, contained within Government issued data-sets.

In her Gov 2.0 Summit presentation, Miller presented an Open Government Scorecard, with some frank views on the status of the movement, and the administration’s efforts to-date.

Her central thesis is that “the drive for transparency appears stalled”. This is because of a few reasons, but most relate to the Consistency, Completeness and Timeliness of USASpending.gov, and other Obama Administration Open Government initiatives:

• On the Open Government Directive – Miller believes its objectives are teetering on the edge: ‘The plans that resulted were little more than aspirational. In the first of those plans, 12 out of 30 agencies didn’t identify any data for future publication and altogether only 75 new data sets were promised… That was hugely disappointing. Enforcement of these plans has always been ‘soft.’’
• On Data.gov - ‘It started with enormous promise…But it’s still a pretty mediocre data repository and the types of data available remains an enormous concern.
• On Recovery.gov – ‘It’s hard consider it more than a qualified success.’

Her primary focus, however, was on the federal spending website USASpending.gov – initiated by legislation from Barack Obama and Tom Coburn. Launched nearly three years ago, it was intend to provide the public with information about how the federal government spends tax dollars. Miller explains how it’s a visually impressive website, but believe the effort expanded on three extensive redesigns should have been used elsewhere. While applauding the usability of the site, her criticism centers on the substance:

Unfortunately, its data is almost completely useless…

To backup this claim ,she announced the launch of a new project called ClearSpending – which ‘tracks and illustrates just how broken the data [in USASpending] is’. The intention is that through making the problems with data quality transparent and easily identifiable, it will help improve accuracy within USASpending.gov. The problems, however, are huge:

What Sunlight has found, and Clearspending shows in great detail, is that more than $1.3 trillion in federal reporting data from 2009 is unreliable. The data inaccuracies we uncovered account for 70 percent of the total $1.9 trillion in government spending data reported in that year. Some of the numbers are too big, some are too small and some are missing completely, while other spending data entries don’t have the detail that’s required or were reported months later than the law demands.

In her concluding remarks, she says:

The data powering USASpending is broken. You can’t trust any aggregate numbers you get from the site — answers to questions about federal spending that rise above the micro level. When we say things just don’t add up, we mean it…

We are beginning to worry that the Administration is more interested in style than substance.

‘More interested in style than substance’

This insinuation, however, has caused some in the Open Government movement to hit back, and challenge the tone of the speech. The first to address this was Gunnar Hellekson (Chief Tech Strategist for Red Hat), who pronounced the speech as ‘poisonous’, and neglecting the fact that citizens now have more information available to them than ever before:

The keynote was a remarkable turn: the administration was completely eviscerated by one of its closest allies..The fact that the US government is even attempting this is amazing.

He goes on to explain that imperfection and risk should be tolerated, and that while some of the data is ‘ridiculous’, this is one of benefits of data transparency i.e. public scrutiny:

Sunlight’s $1.3 trillion discovery is an example of the process working, not a failure…You’re just seeing how hard it is for one of the largest, most complicated organizations on the planet to keep its records straight.

His thesis is that Transparency and Open Data does not reform make. Rather, it provides the impetus and evidence based reasoning for changes to occur:

Sunlight has, I think, dangerously conflated transparency for reform. You get transparency first, and that compels reform. That’s the whole point. You don’t ask for perfection right out of the gate, it’s unreasonable….The solution is a long, difficult, complicated, and unpleasant series of reforms that produce better quality data. That requires patience, diligence, perseverance.

In Sunlight’s response, they agree that while perfection is the enemy of the good, many of the totals are not even close. They highlight that ClearSpending reveals 70% of the totals analysed were flawed. As such, Sunlight’s Tom Kitt worries it has to potential to ‘mislead a lot of people’, and affect trust in the entire initiative. In the end, his primary concern relates to timescales and the lack of urgency from OMB and GSA in fixing the data systems powering USASpending.

Tough love in the Open Government movement

Nevertheless, Gunnar recognises that “Sunlight has done the right thing here by doing real and substantial work”, others believe they’ve gone too far in calling out the emperor’s clothes. Derek Willis believes that:

Sunlight hasn’t earned the right to say that the government is “more interested in style than substance”.

This is because “It’s about the process, the culture, an entirely new way of doing things”. So rather than believing in the data, what’s more important is the site, the initiative, and the changes/legislation/directives that have facilitated this analysis. To coin an equestrian analogy (as Nancy Scola does when she says Sunlight are “prodding the Obama administration in the direction that it want it to go, like you do with a horse”); it’s better to bet on the horse, than the race.

In the end, he and others recognise the objective of the initiative, but perhaps feel more recognition is needed as to the success in creating platforms where all this data can be critiqued:

I’m grateful that organizations like Sunlight are pushing for greater access to accurate public data…But just as government processes can seem alien and counterproductive at times, so can those of transparency advocates.

Data accuracy – a shared issue

One of the most interesting aspects of ClearSpending, is not that it calls out agencies on data quality (this has been highlighted many times before), but rather that such an in-depth analysis could be undertaken in the first place.

Sunlight evaluated the data quality based on a methodology that has been used by the Government Accounting Office , and checked data against the Federal Awards and Assistance Data System. This kind of reconciliation helped to create ClearSpending, and is useful when understanding how other datasets could be checked.

The quality of procurement data released by governments is not just a US issue. When the UK government released extracts of the Combined On-line Information System (COINS), containing expenditure by UK Government Departments over £25K for the years 2008-2010, the guidance document explained (my emphasis):

The data on COINS are quality-assured and complete at the level at which they are required for the following purposes: fiscal management; operational publications (e.g. Main and Supplementary Estimates); and statistical publications (e.g. Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, the joint ONS/Treasury Public Sector Finances statistical bulletin and the National Accounts).

Lower levels of data are not quality assured by the Treasury. Individual departments can to some extent choose the level of granularity that they use within pre-defined aggregates set by the Treasury. Lower level detailed data may therefore appear incomplete and be inconsistent across departments.

While, this did at least explain how some lower level data may-not be accurate, the guidance for local authority spending has no such caveats. This guidance, published on Friday, provides details for local government on how to comply with the Prime Minister’s call to publish each financial transaction over £500 from January 2011.

The guidance makes no remarks as to the quality of the data released. The principle stated is to ‘Publish raw data quickly’, rather than to try to make sure it’s accurate first. Indeed, Tim-Berners-Lee’s “Putting Government Data online” – to which the guidance refers – makes no mention of data quality either. It appears, that the emphasis is on publishing data – in any format (39% published their spending in PDF format only) – rather than checking its consistency or accuracy.

The remit of the recently initiated UK Public Data Transparency Board is to ensure tight deadlines are met for releasing key datasets, and that open data standards are adhered to. Their draft Public Data Principles make no mention of data accuracy or integrity. As such, it looks like this task – to ensure data accuracy – falls to the Gov 2.0 community. As Ellen Miller says:

For starters, we have to take on some of the responsibility for making this happen ourselves – I mean ‘us’ as in the community of Americans [read British] who are concerned about accountability…

Our job is to hold the Administration’s [read Coalition/Local Government's] feet to the fire – bureaucrats aren’t going to act just because someone asks nicely. Government isn’t going to change how and when it makes data available – even when a few good people on the inside want it to – because of a directive…

And finally, we need to admit that Gov2.0 isn’t happening until citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it.

For the promise of Gov 2.0 to be realised someone is going to have to undertake the less glamorous tasks of checking data accuracy and verifying it against available datasources. Achieving this should not be a case of carrots or sticks, but should be up to government themselves. They should want to achieve high data quality standards, because it helps them, and furthers the purpose of the Gov 2.0 mission. When this happens, we’ll know that the Gov 2.0 movement has achieved an important milestone. Getting there won’t happen, however, until as Miller says “citizens are truly actively engaged in helping to demand and co-create it”. Now where’s that Open Data Quality bandwagon?

Related:

• Is Open Government Closing? (includes full video of Miller’s speech and interview with O’Reilly’s Alex Howard)

(Photo credit: smcgee on Flickr)

Promoting innovation through prizes and challenges has steadily become an accepted policy throughout many US government departments and agencies over the past few years. Consequently, research into what does and does not work, in the development of such initiatives is increasing important in advancing best practice in this area.

Earlier this year, the Case Foundation together with the White House Domestic Policy Council and Office on Science and Technology Policy, hosted a Promoting Innovation Summit to gather lessons and strategies on the use of prizes, challenges and open grant-making.

Benefits to using prizes and challenges

In his opening remarks, Jeff Zients, the nation’s first Chief Performance Officer, pointed to the transformative power of prizes and challenges:

The productivity boom has transformed private sector performance over the past decade, but the federal government has missed out on this transformation and lags far behind in terms of efficiency and service quality. The American taxpayer deserves more bang for their buck.

Earlier this year, Zients’ office prepared a memo giving guidance to heads of executive departments and agencies on the use of challenges and prizes to promote open government. The memo outlines a number of benefits of such initiatives as tools for promoting open government, innovation, and other national priorities. These include:

• The ability to establish an important goal without having to choose the approach or the team that is most likely to succeed
• Enables sponsors to pay only for results
• Highlights excellence in a particular domain of human endeavor to motivate, inspire and guide others
• Increases the number and diversity of individuals, organizations and teams that are addressing a particular problem or challenge of national or international significance
• Improves the skills of the participants in the competition
• Stimulates private sector investment that is many times greater than the cash value of the prize
• Attracts more interest and attention to a defined program, activity or issue of concern
• Captures the public imagination and changes the public’s perception of what is possible

Challenge.gov

The memo also explained, how the federal government would make available a web-based platform for prizes and challenges. This would be used to support agencies in their execution of prizes:

This platform will provide a forum for agencies to post problems and invite communities of problem solvers to suggest, collaborate on, and deliver solutions. Over the longer term, the General Services Administration (GSA) will also provide government-wide services to share best practices and assist agencies in developing guidelines for issuing challenges. Additionally, GSA will develop, as expeditiously as possible, a contract vehicle to provide agency access to relevant products and services, including technical assistance in structuring and conducting contests to take maximum benefit of the marketplace as they identify and pursue contest initiatives to further the policy objectives of the Federal Government.

This platform – called Challenge.gov – recently went live to federal employees, and the General Services Administration (GSA) will open it to the public later this month. GSA explained the concept behind the site:

Challenge.gov is a new platform that allows federal agencies to post challenges, and at the same time, allows the public to find federal challenges. It’s now open to federal agencies to create challenges or showcase challenges from other platforms.

The platform behind Challenge.gov – ChallengePost – is already used by First Lady Michelle Obama’s Apps For Healthy Kids contest site. This has over 40,000 supporters and around 100 apps worth an estimated are worth over $5 million dollars. In exchange it is making $60k available in prizes.

Do’s and Don’ts

The Promoting Innovation report below is a summary of the lessons and shared learning discussed at the conference, and highlights some of the shining examples of the power and pitfalls of crowdsourcing ideas and innovation.

Whilst prizes and challenges can be powerful tools in driving change, the report highlights some definite Do’s and Don’ts. These include:

• Problems must be clearly defined with measurable outcomes and objective rules.
• Agencies must make sure authority and budgets are in place -  The Office of Management and Budget has recently issued guidance for agencies that are considering using prizes and challenges as a part of their fulfillment of the Open Government Directive.
• Challenges should be open and transparent – Agencies should not underestimate the effort it can take to ensure fairness amongst participants.
• Prizes don’t have to be money – The report notes how ‘a non-monetary prize that creates recognition can stimulate innovation – as can a contest that promises winning ideas will actually be used.’ As part of this, it highlights the President’s SAVE award in which the federal employee submitting the winning idea was given the opportunity to present the idea to President Obama in person, and have their idea included in the 2011 budget.
• Use the public for the right purpose – The are stories of inappropriate ideas rising to the surface of contests as the result of groups gaming a voting system or for other reasons. The UK’s Spending Challenge has been plagued by such issues, although it’s outcome is hailed a success by some.  The report suggests “voting systems often result in the most creative solutions being dismissed. It is not clear that making final evaluations is the right use of Web 2.0 tools when it comes to such contests”.

Challenges to implementation

The Promoting Innovation report, also highlights some of the key challenges agencies can face in introducing prizes and challenges. These include how to handle failure if the results are not what was expected, ensuring internal capacity and skills are available to administer such initiatives and managing the internal change associated with using prizes and awards to further policy goals.

While some of these concerns maybe mitigated through the use of Challenge.gov, McKinsey’s research on prizes highlights some of their limits and cautions against their use versus other philanthropic instruments. They explain that prizes are a good fit if there is a clear and achievable goal, and many solvers willing to absorb the risk of the effort:

Are there limits to the effective use of prizes? Of course! Good ones require clear objectives, a rich field of potential problem solvers, and competitors willing to take risks. Prizes work best when a field isn’t already flooded with funded research and the challenge is more to create a clever application of technology than a technology itself.

A rule of thumb holds that prizes are useful tools for solving problems for which the objective is clear, but the way to achieve it is not. By attracting diverse talent and a range of potential solutions, prizes draw out many possible solutions, many of them unexpected, and steer the effort in directions that established experts might not go but where the solution may nonetheless lie.

Along with this, Zients’ memo outlines many legal issues to be addressed by agencies in structuring prize competitions. These include compliance with Federal Advisory Committee Act legislation, Ethical issues and federal endorsement of products or services, Intellectual Property and many others.

Mindful of these concerns, Tom Kalil, Director White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained how agencies have the strong support of the President and OMB to use prizes and challenges as catalysts for innovation and policy formation:

I hope everyone who is here from the Federal Departments and Agencies will come away from this with a renewed sense that this is an important tool, that you will go back and talk to 5-10 of your colleagues to get them excited about this, and that if you run into people who say no you can’t do this, show them the OMB memo, show them that this is in the President’s Innovation Strategy, and know that you have not just permission to do this, but a strong affirmation from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, from the National Economic Council, [and] … from the OMB General Counsel’s Office.

Promoting Innovation Doc

Vivek Kundra on Prizes and Challenges

For more check:

• Summit keynote and panel videos, along with other interviews from the event.
• McKinsey report: And the winner is…Capturing the promise of philanthropic prizes
• Peter Corbett on How to create a civic innovation contest

This week’s launch of a new news information portal MerrionStreet.ie represents a new approach by the Irish Government to communicate with citizens.

The site – named after the Dublin street on which Government Buildings is located – is based on the WordPress Open Source software platform, and was built for the Government by Arekibo for a reported €40,000. The project took five months to pull together since the initial RFP was awarded earlier this year.

The new website provides the Government with a more dynamic web presence with the inclusion of news, photos, videos, Facebook and Twitter pages, as well as options for newsletters and web chats.

The Government describes the site as ‘providing a view of Government not seen before’. It explains:

In simple terms, MerrionStreet.ie will review the wide range of government activity and then report certain key events as news. All government press releases will be accessible from our website – either by way of RSS feed or by way of links to all government departments. But our central task will be to take a variety of events and report on them objectively, in the language of a news bulletin. We will also feature ‘Issues’ where useful thematic information, not tied to a particular date, is presented.

We use the latest audio-visual tools and Internet capabilities to hopefully bring these events to life. We have video, audio, photographs, text, links to other websites and much useful data which people can share. We are linked to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

The site explains how its objective is ‘not to create a competition with traditional media in terms of deadlines, scope or scoop’. Its hope is that it will be used by journalists and others as a reference point upon which to view the latest Government developments. Noticeable it says it will “not engage in political comment.”

Political comment

The site has already come in for criticism, however, with some describing it as a means for the Government to ‘present the most positive spin on its daily news’. In Ireland’s popular newspaper, the Irish Independent, Michael Brennan describes MerrionStreet as providing ‘an uninterrupted outlet for the Irish Prime Minister’s musings’:

Modelled on a news agency, merrionstreet.ie allows the Government’s highly paid spin doctors to “report” on the work of Taoiseach Brian Cowen and his ministers.

Fed up with being unable to control the bad news, which has been frequent, Mr Cowen now has an uninterrupted outlet for his musings, free from pesky analysis and less than gratifying comment.

Such sentiments have also been expressed on Twitter and in discussion forums with comments such as those below representative of a lack of trust in the objectivity of information being released:

@Paul_Duggan: So FF are are using the @merrionstreet as a PR tool rather than a state info service…

@john_mcguirk: Looking at this MerrionStreet.ie thing. Looks like taxpayer-subsidised propaganda to me.

@irish_eagle Wanna know what the Irish word for Pravda is? See http://www.MerrionStreet.ie #Ireland #ItNeverRainsHere

Anticipating this kind of criticism the site says:

MerrionStreet.ie is produced by a team in Government Buildings, involving the Government Information Service, Government Press and IT. Our objective is not to create a competition with traditional media in terms of deadlines, scope or scoop. Indeed we hope journalists find MerrionStreet.ie a useful reference point, and are free to report and use its elements.

Social media tools

The site utilises a number of Social Media tools including Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and YouTube. The team behind the site told Siliconrepublic they had seen what other nations, like the UK and France, had done in terms of embracing free social media tools and wanted to copy this approach. They cited Number10.gov.uk as a particular inspiration for MerrionStreet.

On announcing the new site, Government Minister Pat Carey tweeted:

New Government Comms. website launching tomorrow – merrionstreet.ie will mimic whitehouse.gov and Number10 websites. Will be a great tool.

The issue is that MerrionStreet does not embody many of the principles of these Government sites. The differences between the social media elements of Whitehouse.gov/Number10.gov.uk  and MerrionStreet are contrasted below.

@MerrionStreet

Follows 0 accounts, does not use hashtags or @replies and all tweets appear to be links to news articles. The current account is not utilising the platform in the manner in which it is intended i.e. as a two way communications medium.

@GSheehy: Right, enough is enough. Unfollowing @merrionstreet until format changes. No doubt someone will RT the interesting ‘exchanges’.

Nevertheless, SiliconRepublic reports that Taoiseach Brian Cowen will eventually be among the MerrionStreet tweeters and will include the initials “BC” in his tweets to indicate his authorship. We have yet to see any tweets of this nature, however. Instead, tweets have been confined to announcements of his press statements, rather than any personal messages.

@Whitehouse

Follows 107 accounts (mostly Government entities or administration personnel). It uses re-tweets, hashtags and has a real person tweeting from inside the Whitehouse. Many members of the administration have also started using individual accounts in an official capacity.

@Number10gov

Follows 474,600 accounts. It uses re-tweets, hashtags and has a real person tweeting on events from Number 10.

Along with this the strategy explains the value of hashtags, re-tweeting and adding value with exclusive content. If the @merrionstreet account remains a static platform to be used simply as an RSS feed for news stories, it will quickly loose followers, and its value and usefulness will be further questioned. Instead, it should follow the strategy outlined by the UK Government, and embrace medium as a means of engaging with nearly 500 followers.

The MerrionStreet.ie images page displays sets of photos from the site’s flickr account. The Number10.gov and Whitehouse.gov websites also have flickr accounts, however, their use of these accounts differs in one noticeable and important way – their Copyright policy.

MerrionStreet flickr:

All photos published on the MerrionStreet flickr account use a Copyright All Rights Reserved license. This indicates ‘that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law, such as distribution, performance, and creation of derivative works; that is, they have not waived any such right’.

For each photo there is a “Request to license MerrionStreet.ie’s photos via Getty Images” link, which forwards users to a Getty Images site to purchase the photos. Strangely even photos of Government buildings are licensed in this way.

Number10.gov flickr:

Publishes photos using the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license. This means that others are free to copy, distribute and display the photos on their sites, provided they give original credit to Number10.gov, do not use the photos for commercial purposes and do not alter or build upon the original works.

Whitehouse.gov flickr:

Publishes photos as United States Government Work. This means they are “not subject to copyright in the United States and there are no copyright restrictions on reproduction, derivative works, distribution, performance, or display of the work.”

The impact of setting such a restrictive license policy on Irish Government photos, is that any blogger or media outlet will need to either purchase the photos from Getty for use on their sites, or contact MerrionStreet directly. There appears to be a contradiction here as the site says: “We have video, audio, photographs, text, links to other websites and much useful data which people can share”. Unfortunately, this sharing does not extend to their photos.

Both the Whitehouse and Number 10 websites have their own video players through which they often broadcast live video, and which others can embedded on their sites. They also upload these videos to their respective YouTube channels, but YouTube does not represent the exclusive distribution mechanism for this media. Unfortunately, this is not the case with MerrionStreet.

MerrionStreet Video:

The site includes video footage of Ministerial speeches, Government announcements and a feature called “doorsteps” – where the Taoiseach or Minister answers a range of questions asked by a number of journalists. These videos are, however, all exclusively presented through YouTube. As such, the Irish Government appears to be explicitly endorsing this platform over and above the plethora of other video sharing platforms available.

The Irish government should avoid publicly endorsing one product or service over its competitors. Instead, it should ensure videos are available in different formats (e.g. .mp4) and on more than one video sharing platform. Also, they should ensure that when YouTube videos are embedded on MerrionStreet.ie they do not include the YouTube logo. This should apply to other areas of Government that create video content e.g. the House of the Oireachtas short films.

The MerrionStreet team could create its own branded, neutral video player that would allow anyone to embed the content. That would  be a more equitable way for the Government to spread its message, while still retaining a YouTube channel.

Number 10 Video:

Number 10 has its own platform neutral video player available called Number 10 TV. Videos on this player can be freely embedded in other websites and blogs. It also maintains a YouTube channel, however, it does not exclusively present its videos through this platform.

Whitehouse Video:

The Whitehouse has hundreds of videos available on its website, YouTube and Vimeo channels. It has been careful not to endorse any Video platform exclusively, and was required to create its own video player with captioning for Section 508 compliance.

The Whitehouse has also used YouTube.com to allow the public to pose questions to the President on a wide range of issues, and has recently been used by Press Secretary Gibbs to respond to questions regarding the recent oil spill.

There are longstanding policies against using advertising on federal websites or having sites endorse specific software or products. General Services Administration (GSA) guidelines prohibit .gov websites from commercially endorsing any product, commodity, or service.

GSA finalised an agreement with YouTube in February last year to resolve the legal concerns such as liability, endorsements, advertising, freedom of information and governing law. This allows for other government agencies to use YouTube without conducting their own formal assessment of its suitability and adherence to government laws.

MerrionStreet Facebook:

The MerrionStreet Facebook page has already garnered over 250 fans, but has seen very little by way of interaction or dialogue with these users. The current page appears to be merely an outlet on which news stories are posted, rather than a genuine attempt to start a conversation around particular news stories.

Number 10 Facebook:

The Number 10 website has developed a Facebook application in order to disseminate news and other information throughout the site. They’ve also recently announced a partnership with the Social networking site to support the Treasury’s Spending Challenge. The Democracy UK page will be used to stimulate debate regarding ideas proposed to cut public spending.

Whitehouse Facebook:

The Whitehouse has an extensive Facebook presence with more than 600,000 fans and thousands of ‘Likes’ and comments on news articles and videos. This provides a platform upon which the Whitehouse can share information including photos and videos, announce official government events and observances and gather feedback from constituents. This page enables users to publish their comments on Whitehouse news, something which is not possible on Whitehouse.gov.

Earlier this year, GSA signed a terms-of-service agreement with Facebook to make it:

easier for government agencies to create Facebook pages and use them to dramatically increase access to information, offer education on government services, and further empower citizens to interact with government.

This new agreement with Facebook resolves the legal concerns found in many standard terms and conditions that pose problems for federal agencies, such as liability, endorsements, advertising, freedom of information, and governing law. As part of this there is no advertising on the Whitehouse Facebook page, in contrast to the usual advertising that is included in the sidebar and header of users’ profiles and which appears on the MerrionStreet page.

Reaction

Reaction to the new site has been mixed. Many have commented on the cost involved in the creation of the website, when it uses freely available software. Some twitter reactions to the site include:

@gavinsblog: So Merrionstreet.ie is exactly what I expected – crap

@paulmwatson: When they said @merrionstreet.ie was inspired by number10.gov.uk they weren’t kidding. Expensive WordPress blog.

@ronnymitchel: In all fairness to @merrionstreet, although they paid waaaaay too much for the site, it does look nice for just @wordpress.

@micflan: 40k obviously doesn’t buy you a favicon, custom 404 pages or decent URL’s (index.php in every one). http://www.merrionstreet.ie/

This, however, misses the point and we should consider what the Government originally tendered for. The original RFP sought services including:

• Design of the website and associated accessible HTML templates
• Building the website according to the agreed design specifications
• Installation and commissioning of solution
• Provision of software maintenance and solution support including the associated templates,
• Provision of solution documentation
• Provision of solution training and handover to Department personnel

The RFP made no specific requirement for citizen engagement or dialogue through Twitter or Facebook. The only mention of social media in the RFP was:

The design must integrate seamlessly with various social networking sites ((e.g. YouTube, Facebook etc.) while maintaining a consistent look and feel wherever technically possible

Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that these elements remain relatively static.

Improvements

This is not to say that these elements shouldn’t be improved upon. The Government could attempt to create much more entertaining and informative YouTube videos – by taking inspiration from Whitehouse.gov’s West Wing Week and the Inside the White House series. MerrionStreet should be more aggressive and original in its efforts to communicate the Government’s message, over and above the creation of glossed up press releases.

As of now, their Facebook/Twitter pages merely republishes information posted on MerrionStreet. The team behind the site should consider posting more content that is original to Twitter/Facebook, giving users added incentive to visit these pages.

Finally, the Taoiseach’s office should try to expand MerrionStreet into a more sophisticated online operation that seeks to engage with citizens, rather than merely push information to them. Unfortunately, the initial scope of MerrionStreet was far too narrow. Its objective was simply to ‘Deliver a cohesive and whole of Government approach to the dissemination of Government information in a wide variety of formats’.

Improving the site to become a two-way medium with comments and citizen engagement is when it’ll really become interesting. At the moment, the site isn’t up to the standards of Whitehouse.gov or Number10.gov.uk. Getting to this point will require a change in focus from the ‘dissemination of information’, to – as Australia announced yesterday – a more:

open government based on a culture of engagement, built on better access to and use of government held information, and sustained by the innovative use of technology.

Hopefully, this will come with the next release.

Further reading:

• Irish Government’s MerrionStreet.ie goes live
• Ireland’s Government reveals its social media strategy
• Broke State shells out €40,000 on ‘spin’ website
• RPF for Provision for and Support of a Government News Website
• GovFresh Free Gov 2.0 theme
• Australia Gov 2.0 Taskforce report
• April 2010 – OMB Social Media Guidance
• June 2010 – OMB Guidance for Agency use of Third-Party Websites and Applications
• Six New Media Challenges – Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology
• PBS special segment on the White House new media team

The recently announced UK Government Spending Challenge, has this week, invited members of the public to send in their ideas on how to get value for public money.

The UK Spending Challenge was announced last month, but was initially only open to public servants. As Chancellor George Osbourne explained above, the response from public servants has been impressive. It has yielded over 60,000 ideas in just two weeks:

A couple of weeks ago, I asked people working in our public services for their ideas, and an amazing 56,000 people got in touch. It just shows how people respond when given a chance. We’re already putting into practice many of their ideas.

Now I’m asking the general public for their views. Tell us where’s the waste. What should we cut out. What can we improve. What’s working really well that we should be doing more of. You let us know. You can get in touch via the Spending Challenge website, or by going to the Democracy UK section of Facebook.

Your Government needs you. Please get in touch.

The 60,000 ideas will now be analysed by a central government team who will ensure the best ideas are taken forward as part of the Spending Review. The conclusions of the Spending Review will be published on 20 October 2010.

UK’s Spending Challenge versus US SAVE Award

The opening up of this Challenge to the public coincides with President Obama’s launch of the 2010 SAVE Award. The competition was announced on Thursday with the launch of a new Ideascale site where .gov workers can submit saving ideas and vote on other suggestions from Federal employees.

The site has already received 2,000 ideas, with the current most popular being an expansion of telecommuting, transportable security clearances and the donation of surplus government property to schools.

There’s quite an interesting contrast between the top ideas on the US SAVE Award site – which is currently restricted to Federal employees – and those available on the UK Spending Challenge website which is open to the public. There is however, noticeable similarities between the ideas submitted by UK Public servants and their US colleagues. For example, transferable security clearances are highlighted on the SAVE Award and were also suggested by public servants through the Spending Challenge site.

Some of the most commented upon public ideas, however, on the UK site relate to benefits, immigrants and membership of the European Union. These ideas relate to larger strategic policy areas, rather than the relatively nuanced ideas on improving government efficacy proposed on the SAVE Award site and by UK public servants.

One of the top public ideas on the Spending Challenge relates to the website itself and suggests it should itself be ‘shut down’ to save money. In this vein, it’s interesting to look at the government’s collaboration with Facebook and their involvement in the Spending Challenge.

Facebook: ‘public engagement for free’

On announcing the Facebook tie-up Prime Minster Cameron participated in a video chat with Facebook co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg. He said :

We are really excited about having Facebook involved in the Spending Challenge…

There’s enormous civic spirit in this country where people want to take control and do things in a different way. We are giving people an opportunity with Facebook and I am sure that they will take it.

He went on to echo some of the thoughts outlined by the idea that the Spending Challenge site itself should be ‘shut down’ to save money:

Normally if Government wants to engage with people we’d probably spend millions of pounds, even billions, on our own website, and with your help we’re basically getting this public engagement for free.

That’s quite a good start for saving money.

The Spending Challenge site is based on an Open Source theme and Delib’s Plone-based Dialogue App platform. While this emphasises the government’s reuse of Open source code, the site is not without its criticisms and failings.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes has described the collaboration as “the largest public engagement project ever launched by the British Government”. As part of this the social networking site will ask its 23 million members in the UK to submit and vote on ideas for where cuts can be made.

The Downing Street press release is vague on Facebook’s specific involvement, however, except to say:

The social networking site will support the Treasury’s Spending Challenge by providing a dedicated space for Facebook users to come up with ideas on how to make savings in public spending.

Along with this the government says Facebook will be its “primary channel” for communicating with the public about spending cuts. Interestingly, the reference to WikiLeaks on the Spending Challenge site (highlighted in a previous blog) is no longer active. The entire paragraph where it says it will “monitor a range of blogs, social networks, forums”, has been removed from the site suggesting perhaps that Facebook will be the only platform upon which the debate over spending cuts will be monitored.

The primary question regarding the tie-up with Facebook is whether it provides an appropriate platform for informed debate on government spending and how to improve its efficacy.

Facebook comments

Many commentators have pointed out that the tie-up with Facebook is rather nebulous and currently very limited. In a blog post on techPresident, Nancy Scola notes how their current involvement appears simply to be a link to a government website: “Somewhat confusing matters: Facebook’s involvement in the Treasury Spending Challenge seems limited to, at this point, linking from its Democracy UK page to, yes, a custom-made official British government website.”

Andrea Di Maio, a Gov 2.0 analyst at Gartner, suggests that adding a Facebook channel will not broaden the debate:

So at the end of the day Facebook will be no more than a channel to point to the Chancellor’s Spending Challenge site. Whoever believes that the sheer presence on Facebook will broaden and rebalance participation of UK citizens in this contest is wrong.

People who have an interest (and often a vested interest) in participating in the Spending Challenge will do so with or without the Facebook page.

The quality of the comments and debate on Facebook regarding the Spending Challenge launch does not instill confidence in its use as a debating platform. The Register notes the number of “bewildering” comments and “spam posts” the page has already received.

Reading through the 491 comments this has already received, highlights the difficultly the coalition will have in stimulating constructive debate on such sensitive issues as spending cuts.

Difference in Ideas

There is a clear and noticeable difference in the ideas on the SAVE Award site, in comparison to those on the Spending Challenge site.

The SAVE Award site is only open to Federal employees and consequently has a strong focus on operation efficiency within agencies. As Jeffrey Zients, OMB deputy director noted:

The basic premise here is that many of the best ideas exist on the front line. Those doing the work on the front lines have the best ideas on how to make changes.

George Osborne published a sample of ideas put forward by public sector workers in the first phase of consultation. These ideas represent many good suggestions for improving back-office services for public sector organisations. They include merging back-office services for public sector organisations, switching off office computers over the weekend and better mobile phone contracts (an idea President Obama highlights in his SAVE Award video and expected to save the Government $10m).

In opening up the idea platform to the public, however, the UK government has shifted the focus away from those ‘working on the front lines’ of government services. Thus, the ideas posted by the public have primarily focused on major public policy questions e.g. reform of the welfare state or immigration policy. These are not ideas for which governments will change course because of an online debate. Rather they represent principles upon which political parties are elected. There is a danger, therefore, that public involvement in the Spending Challenge will morph into a policy debate, rather than the operational efficiency debate for which I believe it was intended.

Generating great ideas in the Public Sector

As part of the doing what works program, the Center for American Progress (CAP) recently released a report called Capital Ideas: How to Generate Innovation in the Public Sector. It analysed 24 ways in which Governments and Organisations are generating great ideas in the Public Sector. These were arranged under five themes:

1. Unleash the creative talents of government employees
2. Setup dedicated teams responsible for promoting innovation
3. Divert a small proportion of your budget to harnessing innovation
4. Collaborate with outsiders to help solve problems
5. Look at an issue from different perspectives to notice things your wouldn’t otherwise

The Spending Challenge was initially focused on unleashing the creative talents of government employees to suggest ideas to cut spending. However, its current focus on collaborating with outsiders risks diluting the initiative from producing concrete frontline ideas that could reasonably be implemented, to a policy discussion the outcome of which may-be too nebulous to result in any government action. This has the potential to increase public cynicism in such endeavors if no specific ideas are acted upon.

The essential difference between the Spending Challenge and the outside collaboration examples CAP highlights, is the absence of any specific problem for the public to solve. The challenge of how to ‘re-think government to deliver more for less’ is far too broad and can result in a paradox of choice with the effect that ideas representing the lowest common denominator rise to the top.

The Capital Ideas report highlighted Innocentive, DC’s Apps for Democracy, and Social Innovation Camp as successful examples of collaboration with outsiders. All these focused on specific challenges, for which an experienced minority could focus on.

The real opportunity to collaborate with outsiders and transform the way that the public sector does things, requires posing concrete problems requiring specific outcomes. These can be affected through either product or service innovation, but where possible should be substantiated by evidence-based reasoning. The worry is that opening up the Spending Challenge initiative to the public without reference to clear problems, degenerates it into an idea free-for-all with all the associated online comments we’ve come to expect from such initiatives.

For more check:

• Spending Challenge
• From Small Innovations to Social Transformations (CAP event)
• The £105m website
• Another week, another major consultation
• Facebook and the deficit: Can crowdslicing work?