German’s largest opposition party, the SPD, has finally decided who their candidate for Chancellor will be at the next elections – and already he is getting into problems due to paid speaking engagements during his time as a Member of Parliament.

Peer Steinbrück stands accused of neglecting his job as an MP and of potential bias in favour of banks that paid him for speaking engagements. He has responded by denying the allegations and promising to publish details of how much he received from whom, and what topic he spoke on, and calling for more transparency around German MPs’ earnings gained from second jobs. Having said that, he asserts that “transparency only exists in dictatorships.”

Abgeordnetenwatch, a German website similar to TheyWorkForYou.com operated from Hamburg, has weighed in on the argument. Their founder, Gregor Hackmack, called Steinbrück “a black sheep” amongst MPs: “There is a small number of MPs – Peer Steinbrück, Michael Glos or Heinz Riesenhuber – who have earned a particularly high amount alongside their work as an MP and are neglecting their duties,” presumably calling upon figures gathered through Abgeordnetenwatch. This episode could be a boost for the transparency agenda in a similar way to the MPs expense affair in Britain.

Abgeordnetenwatch was also in the headlines over the weekend because the Hamburg Transparency Law entered into force. Along with other campaigners (Mehr Demokratie e.V., Chaos Computer Club, Transparency International) who successfully forced it through, Abgeordnetenwatch celebrated the entering into force of the Hamburg Transparency Law on Saturday. As I wrote previously, the law was suddenly and surprisingly adopted back in June and requires a greater level of transparency by default, including the creation of an information register.

At the event on Saturday, held at Kultwerk West, the portal “Frag Den Staat” was made available to users in Hamburg to coincide with the transparency law. Similar to the UK’s “what do they know”, the website allows citizens to make freedom of information requests in public and post the responses to the website. Ideas for information requests were collected from the audience and some requests were made in order to demonstrate to the audience how the website works.

In the name of transparency, I suppose I should mention that I’m an unpaid team member at Kultwerk West, where the event was hosted.

Daniel Lentfer presents the Transparency Law at the PEP-NET Summit 2012

Campaigners for a local transparency law, the so-called Transparenzgesetz, can look forward to a  summer watching the football with a cool bottle of Astra and a Bratwurst. Expecting stiff resistance from the local authority, they had planned to spend the next few months preparing for the next round of a local citizen’s initiative, which would have required them to collect thousands of signatures in order to force a referendum. But to many people’s surprise, an adapted version of the law was passed last week.

Following negotiations with all parliamentary party groups and the campaign’s initiatiors (Mehr Demokratie, Transparency International and Chaos Computer Club), a text was agreed upon and passed on 12th June. By introducing an inventory of publicly held information, including data, and obliging public servants to open information by default, the law will go a long way to increasing transparency in the local authority. The types of information that are included in the duty to publish are, amongst others, contracts for public services, official statistics, geodata and spatial development plans. Where there are compelling reasons, such as data protection or the protection of sensitive business information, the duty does not apply.

This law supersedes the Freedom of Information Law, passed in 2009. Hamburg’s wide range of instruments for involving citizens extend from citizens’ initiatives on a local level to livestreaming parliamentary proceedings, via the online spatial planning consultation system that TuTech developed with the city. The Transparency Campaign and the Parliament are in agreement that Hamburg is set to become Germany’s most transparent state, its transparency capital. As far as I know, this is the best example of open data and transparency being pushed through by a civil society campaign.

Hamburg already publishes some data online and is planning to release more, according to the Senate’s (Hamburg’s Cabinet’s) answer to an enquiry from Hansjörg Schmidt, the SPD parliamentary group’s representative on media and online policy.

Schools performance data, information on cancer patients, air quality and water quality are all available online and in many cases downloadable in Excel format. I had a quick look through these websites and it does appear that information in Excel format is relatively easy to get at, although it is questionable whether this is really raw data since it is presented in a non-standard format and appears in some cases (for example the schools data) to have been pre-crunched. In the case of water data, making this data open is a technical challenge — at the moment, only a description of the data is available due to its size.

The city will  also release geographic data at some point, including the location of play areas and police stations. There appears to be no promise that this will coincide with the launch of the portal and no cast-iron guarantees about exactly what data will be made available.

The Senate’s response does not make a clear commitment to launch a portal, but NDR reports that the City has officially announced its intention to do so by the end of the year.

Alongside talk of an open data portal, the campaign for a Transparency Law is making much greater demands. The backers of the law want to go much further and are pushing for a law that will oblige the local government to open all of its data unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. A comment on Hansjörg Schmidt’s blog suggest that some backers of the Transparency Law may see this as an attempt to diffuse their campaign by opening some data. I am sure this will be a hot topic at the next Open Government Stammtisch on 9th May and the PEP-NET Summit on 14th May.

The proposed transparency law was drafted using a wiki, which was open for anyone who wanted to to participate. It calls for a central information register, listing all of the city’s official publications; a duty to publish, which includes public data; and the extension of the right to information to voluntary organisations, especially campaigning organisations and not merely private individuals.

The campaign argues that such a law would reduce corruption, reduce wasting of taxpayers’ money, increase trust in politicians and the local authority, simplify administrative procedures and make participation easier.

Mehr Demokratie e.V. successfully collected the 10,000 valid signatures required for a local Citizens’ Initiative and the state parliament’s judicial affairs committee will decide whether to accept the law on 28th February. Mehr Demokratie is preparing for it to be rejected, in which case they will have to collect a total of 62,000 valid signatures within three weeks to force a local referendum.

In this PeP-NET post we would like to share a tool we have developed, “The matrix of civic implication”, whose main aim is to support the development of conceptual clarity when analyzing participatory venues and participatory initiatives. If used wisely, we think the matrix is a powerful “tool”, that goes beyond alternative models (like OECD, IAP2 or Fung’s), and should allow researchers, practitioners and the ‘man in the street’ to better understand the core dimensions of participatory activities.

 The Matrix of Civic Implication

Since Sherry Arnstein presented her “Ladder of Citizen Participation” in 1969, tens of models have been proposed with the aim to describe “participation”.

The problem with these models is that they tend to be either too basic -and thus they add less value- or they are too complex and specialized, and in this case they are too cumbersome to be applied.

For this reason… a lot of confusion exist in this field.

Our matrix tries to find a pragmatic balance between usefulness and complexity, and provide a tool that is at the same time powerful, practical and easy to use. It allows practitioners and theorists to compare in a matter of minutes different Participatory experiences. The model was developed to be applied to “municipal participation” initiatives, but it can be applied to other kind of participatory experiences.

The Matrix identifies four fundamental dimensions of participatory initiatives, which be informally “visualized”, and thus make this model especially suitable for comparing initiatives:

1. INTENSITY OF COLLABORATION:

This level is based on the original ladder, and describes the level of collaboration exercised. It goes from Manipulation, Information and Consultation levels up to the levels of Collaboration, Delegated Power and Delegated control. We have slightly renamed some of Arnstein’s rungs and added some fundamental extra rungs, like the ones corresponding to “Conflict” and the “transparency” rung, which is considered as a pre-requisite for any real “Collaborative Participation”. More details on the meaning of the different levels are provided below.

2. ACTORS involved in the participatory exercise:

This dimension allows differentiating the actors, grouping them under the categories of “affected”, “participants”, “promoters” and “decision makers”. It also classifies them as political actors, corporate actors, civil society actors, or others. More categories and actors can be considered. The ones shown in the picture are just an example. The actors’ names displayed in the attached matrix have just and illustrative character: more categories and actors could be considered, in case they were needed to analyze the participatory exercises. Thanks to the inclusion of this dimension, the model can be applied to analyze both “administrative, top-down participation” (sponsored and organized by governments) and “autonomous participation”, which could be really bottom-up (initiated by citizens) or initiated by some other Civil or Corporate actors. More details below.

3. INSTITUTIONALIZATION LEVEL:

This essential dimension has often been neglected in most participation models. The institutionalization levels range from the lowest “Sporadic” and “Episodic”, through “Periodic” and “Continuous” levels of institutionalization, to the highest “Functional Institutionalization” and “Organic Institutionalization”.

Functional Institutionalization refers to cases where laws have been approved that enact legal procedures and channels, which allow citizens to initiate some kind of participatory interaction. For example: citizens’ initiatives, right of petition, mandatory hearings in urban planning, participation in city council, etc.

Organic Institutionalization, finally, refers to the cases where participatory organs have been constituted with a permanent or semi-permanent character, with representation of different actors involved. These organs generally have a decision-making or a controlling mandate, and allow interested citizens and/or citizen groups to become involved in the policy areas covered by the participatory institution.

4. DELIBERATIVENESS:

This dimension allows to, informally, specify the kind and intensity of deliberation that the participatory experience motivates. Deliberation is a particular form of reasoning and dialogue, in which the costs and consequences of various policy options are carefully weighed, taking into account the views of all concerned.

The Matrix of Civic Implication is a tool that helps project managers, practitioners and researchers to describe what they are doing or what they are planning to do, taking into account the most fundamental participatory dimensions, and making it possible to compare between different options or approaches.

This conceptual model is intended to remain open and flexible: additions or changes are welcomed in the case the analyzed participatory experiences require them.

For example, it could be interesting to consider the moment within the “policy making cycle” (from Agenda Setting to Evaluation) where the participation happens. Another possible addition could consider the technological tools or the participatory methodologies used. But these extra dimensions are normally not essential to understand the core of the participatory experience, and are thus not part of the base model.

In many cases a participatory initiative is composed of different participatory activities, each of them with different aims and different stakeholders involved in them. The matrix could also be used to depict individually each of these activities, to get a deeper understanding of the whole experience.

The aim of the model is NOT prescriptive, but descriptive. It does NOT claim that higher intensity of collaboration, or a dense deliberativeness, or an extreme institutionalization level is always better. This actually depends of the environment and the objectives that are pursued with the initiative. The model thus explicitly recognizes that different situations require different approaches. It is the quality of participation that matters more, not the amount, nor necessarily the level at which it, suppossedly, happens.

The model is explained in these videos, which are part of the teaching materials we prepared for a course on “Citizen Participation and Digital Technologies”, that we imparted in collaboration with the Inter-American Organization for Higher Education. The course materials are in Spanish, but these videos include English subtitles:

YOUTUBE: 10.a. The Advent of Civic Implication. Part 1

YOUTUBE: 10.b. The Advent of Civic Implication. Part 2

More detailed descriptions of the “Intensity of collaboration” levels

Let’s have a more detailed look at the meaning of the “Intensity of collaboration” levels, starting with the lowest.

The rung “Manipulation”, that is part of the “Non-Participation” category is characterized by the attempts to manipulate: to keep people quiet, satisfied, with the impression that they are being heard… but actually there is no real intention to listen to them.

With different levels of sofistication, participatory venues are designed by decision-makers so they can exert control of it, and use it just to ratify decission that have already been taken, or to comply with legal requirements, etc.

All this was linked by Arnstein with the idea of “therapy”. And sadly enough… much of the political participation that is carried out nowadays is of this type.

Under the “Non-participation” level we have included the “Conflict” category.

This happens when citizens realise that the existing participatory venues are not satisfactory, and decide to show their dissatisfaction.

The firs rung, “Legitimate coercion”, is when the means used are “pacific”, civic protest, civil disobedience. We are speaking here of things like the Spanish “Indignados”, the #occupywallstreet movement, or the #realdemocracynow.

People’s capacity to connect one with another is increasing, and the current global crisis is evidencing that our current representative democracies are very “low-quality”. It is clear that this ‘Legitimate coercion’ will continue growing. Without losing its “pacific” character, this kind of action could win more and more disrupting capacity: coordinated demonstrations and strikes, boycotts, delays in paying taxes, etc. This coordinated actions can increasingly get directed at punishing political actors by means of voting, and thus “biting where it hurts” to them.

The rung of “Illegal Duress” refers to even stronger conflicts, and includes harder responses: sabotage, property destruction and robbery, terrorism… all this kind of actions can be understood, in many cases, as a way of expression when the “existing” mechanisms are considered as “non-working”.

With regards to the upper rungs: “Information, Consultation, Advisement”, they reflect the traditional levels in which a decision-maker can engage with people to improve the decisions.

The most basic rung -“Information”- means the case where some (or even much) information about what is being done, or planned to be done, is provided. That’s already a difference, with respect to “Manipulation”.

“Consultation” means that some channels (like polling, or focus groups, or… whatever you can imagine) are created that allow some kind of feedback from the citizens to be heard by the decision maker.

“Advisement” rung goes a little bit further, and allows that the citizens, their associations… are providing elaborate advice to the decision maker, as part of a conversation.

The most important aspect with regards to this category, called “Consultative Participation”, is that the decision maker is finally taking the decision that he prefers. She is just asking for opinions, argumentations, views… but retains the capacity to judge them and act in any way that suits her understanding and convenience. How much consideration receive the views expressed through the engagement mechanisms… depends entirely on the will of the decision maker. This is why Arnstein termed it “Tokenism”.

Let’s now go to the top.

Above the “Consultative Participation” category that we have just reviewd, the category for “Collaborative Participation” comes. This is the category where the “Intensity of Collaboration” is stronger. This is a type of participation where “real collaboration” is expected, in its various levels.

At the very top is the “Delegated Control” rung. It means that the control of some decision-making area is delegated to the participatory institution or organism. Usually the decision maker could reclaim the control in case of emergency… but by default he would be willing to accept the results of the participatory collaboration (normally, the decision maker will also be member of the participatory mechanism, and thus able to defend his interests).

The next rung, “Delegated Power” is a more conservative approach, that just delegates some partial, limited “power”, to the participatory institution. This way, more safeguards could be in place (veto, etc.).

The next level is “Collaboration”. In it, even if no power is explicitly delegated, the decision making capacity is implicitly or explicitly shared through the principles of “honest collaboration”, understanding that participants are partnering together to find good solutions. Thus what is recognized and agreed by means of this cooperation should necessarily influence, in a sensible way, the final decision, as well as the actions of all participants.

Thus, we come to the “Transparency” rung, which is the most radical change with respect to Arnstein model.
First of all: it is important to recognise that the nature of this rung is a little different than the others. It is more a “pre-requisite” for the collaborative participation than a way of collaboration on its own.

Why a pre-requisite? Well, because if you want to really collaborate, in a trustful way… all participants should have access to all relevant information available.

Transparency means open data and open government: a compromise to proactively share all relevant data, so all partners can inspect and work on it, both pro-actively (to ellaborate proposals, for example), or after some issue has happened (to discover ineficiencies or corruption, for example).

Transparency has a tremendous effect on the incentives of any administrative body. If you know that all your actions are visible, that they can be inspected… the ‘margin for corruption’ is strongly reduced.

Hidden agendas are also more difficult to keep: decision making can thus become more fact-based and deliberative, and all participants will be more motivated to find real “best solutions” and win-win arrangements.

For this reason, the “transparency” rung, and its “Pre-participation” category, are placed above the “Consultative Participation”. Consultative participation can actually happen under a dictatorial structure. Transparency is necessarily linked to collaborative and democratic settings.

One final remark: All this levels are, in first place, considered with relation to public authorities and government. But in general they can be applied to any institution with capacity to make decisions, and share this capacity with other stakeholders. In particular: corporations will increasingly be subject to demands to increase their “transparency”, as a requisite to collaborative participation of the people (which, should not be forgotten: are also customers, and able to harm companies in weeks, just by slightly coordinating their buying behavior).

Increasingly, if there is not enough transparency, or if the ethical behaviours of the companies are not satisfactory, people will go for “CONFLICT”, meaning boycotts or even stronger measures (imagine a coordinated action to retire funds from “un-ethical” banks: no public money will be able to save a bank whera a big share of their customers coordinately decide to claim their money back).

So… everybody should pay more attention to the developments in this field.

There is a strong demand for powerful collaboration tools. Internet is about to impact democracy, when the use of these tools gets critical mass. We should all try to make sure this happens in a constructive way.

How to handle top-down and bottom-up participation in the matrix

The Matrix intend to cover not only “top-down” public participation, but also the “bottom-up”. And even a new form of civic engagement we invented (partly, as a joke), called “from-the-middle-and-around”. Both the “top-down” and the “bottom-up” perspectives are too simple conceptualizations… that are not able to comprehend the nuances of such a complex phenomenom as civic engagement.

In fact, we consider more interesting the bottom-up or mixed engagement models, as the pure “top-down”/ administrative participation has proven to be quite limited in its transformative effect during the whole 20th century. All this is related to the “administrative” and “autonomous” forms of participation that we previously referred to (see image).

Actually, it is because of this willingness to embrace autonomous “engagement” that we chose not to name the model the “Matrix of Citizen Participation” (following Arnstein) but the “Matrix of Civic Implication”.

Citizen Participation somehow suggest that “citizens” (no immigrants? no kids?) slightly “participate”, collaborate… with an initiative whose ownership lies somewhere else. “Civic implication”, on the other hand, aims to suggest an “engagement”, a “personal implication” with something that is recognized as “own” by person, by the neighbor.

How would the “top-down / bottom-up” character of the participation be reflected in the model?

Well, especially through the recognition and configuration of the “Actors” involved, at the top of the matrix, which by default is used to displays different possible administrative, corporate and civil society actors, as a way to facilitate the comparison of initiatives (see, for example, this comparation of “Mayor talks with neighbors” and the “Participatory Budgeting of Fortaleza (BR)”.

Let’s imagine a case of bottom-up participation. For example, the case where the “participants”, “promoters” and “affected” are just the citizens of a neighborhood, which autonomously organize themselves (maybe with the support of a NGO) to propose the mayor (decision-maker) some kind of action… we would have this kind of autonomous participation in action.

If there is no request to be presented to the Mayor, but just a process of community self-organization… this would be reflected by not including any “decision-maker” or considering the “decision-maker” to be the own community.
And for sure, depending of the kind activities carried out (running a poll in the neighborhood, or deliberatively elaborate the proposal, or even voting at the end on the open points…) you would have different levels of involvement, or “intensities of collaboration”.
It is, anyway, just a tool -like, for example, scissors- whose real value is shown when it is put to work. In the same way that you would use slightly different scissors to clean a fish, to cut your fiancee’s hair, or to allow your daughter to handicraft… the matrix might need to be modified, extended, complemented with other analysis or… whatever, to suit the need of the user. It all depends on what is desired to illuminate with its help. The Matrix “humble aim” is to provide a clear base-line for analysis and communication. On top of that, all additions are welcomed, if they make sense.

Another example: in case there was interest in analyzing, or making more visible, the “power” relations in a concrete participatory initiative, you could decide to display only the actors that are participating, and perform some kind of “stakeholders analysis” to asses each actors’  power, urgency and legitimacy toward the issue, and thus determine the kind of role they can play (Dominant, Dormant, Dependent,  Demanding, Definitive, etc.). [see https://www.jstor.org/pss/259247 ]. Thus, you could use different intensities of colors to reflect the power, etc.

That’s all, sorry for such a long entry. We thought it was worth sharing. We are waiting for your comments!

Birmingham Civic Dashboard screenshot

In its recent consultation document ‘Making Open Data Real’, the UK Government expresses high hopes for open data, heralding it as possibly “the most powerful lever of 21st century public policy”. Following several years of open data advocacy, activism and hack days, in the UK open data is moving towards the mainstream thanks to unanimous backing from the coalition government and the opposition.

The latest move in open data comes from Birmingham City Council, which today launched its ‘Civic Dashboard’. This is a web site publishing raw customer services data along with a slick visualisation, which was made possible by a grant that Digital Birmingham received as a result of winning a competition run by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA).

The Civic Dashboard draws its data from the customer service centre set up as part of the Council’s Business Transformation programme. An extract of data about all customer enquiries, whether by telephone, internet or email, is recorded by the customer relationship management system and fed into the Civic Dashboard in an aggregated (anonymised) form once per day. Where the data is geocoded, it can be presented on a map to show how many contacts originate from a particular ward or constituency. You can even see which channels the enquiries come through, which shows that the Council receives far more enquiries by telephone than through other channels.

This is an important step towards bridging the gap between eGovernment and ‘weGovernment’. Coming from the Council that was heavily criticised for spending £2.8m on its website as part of its eGovernment transformation, especially by Birmingham’s vocal social media users, opening up the data that is produced in the background shows what the new infrastructure can do beyond serving up static content. Doubtless there are many more datasets that exist as a result of the transformation programme, and if these are released in the future, perhaps Brummies will feel they got a better deal out of transformation than they first thought.

This itself is quite a paradox: such a handover of control to the citizen wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the huge transformation programme because IT is absolutely necessary for the collection of data in a reusable form.

Another important aspect is the fact that the raw data comes with a ready-made visualisation tool, which is presumably what most people will interact with. On the one hand, some would argue that it should be left to non-state entities to interpret the data. Although this will probably be the case in future, Birmingham (together with NESTA) engaged Mudlark, a local service provider, to develop the website on their behalf. This model – of commissioning the data visualisation, not developing it in-house – addresses the issue of risk sharing: especially in the early days of open data, small companies may not be able to afford to risk creating applications based on data that there may not be a market for, and that – for all they know – may not be collected for ever, at least in the current format.

Even where an authority doesn’t publish its own visualisation of the data, in my opinion there will still be a role for them to intervene in some cases. For instance, if someone were to notice that there are far more requests from Hodge Hill than Sutton Coldfield (a more affluent area), and claim that resources are unfairly distributed, a Council official might intervene using social media to draw attention to the fact that far more council housing tenants are located in that area, and are most likely making enquiries to the Council as their landlord. This assumes that the necessary data (on distribution of council housing) is available; if not, it could lead to calls for more data to be opened. Thus, opening some data can lead to calls for more.

There is much more to be said about this example of open data in practice, which is possibly the first time a large public authority has bridged the gap between between e-government and ‘we-government’ using open data. I’m sure it will be said on this blog and elsewhere for a good while to come!

Many thanks to Simon Whitehouse, of Digital Birmingham (part of Birmingham City Council), for explaining the Civic Dashboard to me.

e.gov conference, Belfast

At the “Open.gov & e-participation” conference in Belfast on 22nd September I said a few off-the-cuff words about open data in Germany before presenting DEMOS-Plan, the spatial planning consultation software that we have developed together with the local authority in Hamburg.

I think it’s fair to say that the open data debate is not quite as far ahead in Germany as it is in the UK. Although there are good examples (MOGDy, Apps4Berlin, Berlin’s new open data portal, the Bremen open data recommendation) here of local authorities and third parties opening their data and demonstrating what they can do, the UK government’s commitment to opening data as demonstrated by data.gov.uk and its recent consultation on ‘Making Open Data Real‘ show that the debate has moved on from ‘whether’ to ‘how’.

However, I argued, based on experience of eParticipation more generally, when Germany does catch up it will commit to well thought-out solutions that are implemented sustainably. The examples I used were Hamburg’s social media guidelines — which I have previously mentioned on PEP-NET and which describe in detail how Hamburg handles social media — and our own DEMOS-Plan, which is fully integrated into Hamburg’s infrastructure, is ‘business as usual’ because it will from now on be used for all local plan consultations in Hamburg, and is backed up by a procedure that gives citizens and stakeholder organisations a legal right to participate in urban planning, both online and offline.

If things happen in a similar way, I think open data will take off in Germany and many of the same issues that the UK is wrestling with will apply: so it will be necessary to think about the costs of opening datasets and to decide on which ones have priority. How do you decide which datasets are worth the investment? Do you assume that businesses will be built on the data public bodies publish, or do you prescribe a specific purpose that data should be used for? The UK government is quite clear in its white paper that enabling service users to make a more informed choice about which providers they use is an important motivation.

One issue that I think will be get more attention in Germany than in the UK is data protection. You get a good idea of how jealously Germans guard their privacy if you have a look around a residential area with Google Street View — in some cases, so many houses are blurred out that it is pretty much useless. Or see the Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein’s (Data-protection Commission for the State of Schleswig-Holstein’s) decision that Facebook pages and ‘like’ buttons on third-party websites contravene data protection law and should be stopped with immediate effect. In this context, I find it difficult to foresee Germany adopting an ‘open by default’ policy with regards to data. The risk that personal data could slip through the net could be too high.

So I think the German public sector is working on these issues and when the strategy is nailed down, it will be embedded for the long term. In short, open data will at some point be business as usual, even if it Germany doesn’t do ‘open by default’.

The purpose of this tender is the purchase of services:

- to develop and administer a web portal to act as single point of access to data sets produced and held by European Commission services (and by extension to data sets produced and held by other European Institutions/bodies and other public bodies);

- to assist the Commission with the definition and implementation of a data set publication process;

- to assist the Commission with the preparation of data sets for publication via the portal;

- to assist the Commission in supporting for engaging the stakeholders’ community interested in re-using the published data sets.

Deadline: September 19th. For detailed information see : https://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/psi/open_data/call_tenders/index_en.htm

I just stumbled across the UK Government’s Open Public Services white paper from July, which outlines the Government’s plans for reforming public services to make them more efficient and bring them closer to citizens.

A short section is dedicated to the role of open data in public services  (page 19, or page 21 of the PDF). Under the heading “Using data to support choice”, the primary role for open data in this paper is allowing people to compare services and enable them to make a choice on which of them to use.

On top of that, the paper mentions a “right to data”, but this appears to be limited to existing datasets that already exist in electronic form — “… when useable datasets about public service performance and funding are not being published …”. This is reinforced by the phrasing of the commitment “… we will ensure that the datasets government collects are open and accessible …”

There will be some movement on the datasets that are collected, which the paper argues should reflect the wishes of service users, i.e. the kind of information that they would wish to base their decisions on. As the paper rightly flags up, there is an issue about whether to require public sector organisations to collect standardised information, which would mean less influence for individuals but greater comparability, or allow more account to be taken of local needs.

Reading (this part of) the paper, it becomes clear that the devil is in the detail of open data: how to decide which datasets to invest money in collecting? How to respect user choice whilst maintaining comparability? And how to avoid making the whole thing hugely bureaucratic? With all the talk of more choice, meaning different service providers for the same service, and the necessity to collect data for each of these service providers to enable comparisons, there is actually another layer of granularity that the regime of National Indicators for measuring local areas’ performance didn’t require.

OpenAid is a small association based in Germany and our background is evaluation of development projects. Traditionally, funding organisations, like the German ministry for economic development and cooperation (BMZ) commissions experts to visit projects, e.g. in Africa and assess these projects based on predefined criteria. While this type of project evaluation a very dominant feature of the development business, it has only limited value. In an evaluation, for example of a water project in Southern Cameroon, only the questions that are most interesting to the donors in Germany and to the project managers get asked. Concerns that people living in the project areas may have will not be addressed, if the project management is not aware of them or does not want to address them.

In addition, most citizens in a project area are not able to talk to the evaluators, due to the tight time schedule of evaluations, distances in the project area and language barriers. Providing feedback about a project on a regular basis is close to impossible.

We at OpenAid are convinced, that this lack of feedback in aid projects is a big problem, and we think that advances in technology and social media can help to fix the feedback loop. This is where we why we are interested in experiences about e-participation in Europe. What are the lessons learnt in Western Countries about the conditions for successful e-participation? And which of these lessons are applicable to development cooperation?

We call our e-participation project public online monitoring of development aid. In our thinking there are several elements to public online monitoring:

1) General information about aid projects: The more information and the more open the information, the better. This strand of our work links us to the open data movement. International development cooperation has been very slow to provide information in accessible format to a wider public. But currently the aid transparency debate and open data initiatives in development cooperation are gaining momentum. OpenAid has been promoting aid transparency, and particularly the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) since 2009. We are currently organising a major open aid data event in Berlin for September 2011.

2) Mobile Technology and Connectivity: Costs for providing and distributing information to a large audience have plummeted due to the advances of technology in recent years. Of course, in many rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America, good internet connections are not self-evident. But mobile services can substitute regular internet connections to a certain degree. This is why we are very interested in the creative use of SMS and other mobile applications. For the time being it is also possible to experiment with public online monitoring in urban areas e.g. in Africa that have good internet access. We are convinced that access to the internet in rural areas will continue spread in the coming years.

3) Online communities: Where should people go to provide feedback about a water project, about a health clinic or about a school feeding programme? Where is the virtual comments box for aid projects? One option would be for large aid projects to set up their own online community. But it will probably be difficult to generate enough among citizens living in the project area and other concerned people to bring such a community to life. This is why we propose to use existing social networks, where people already connect, to monitor projects that interest them. Traditionally these social networks were community meetings e.g. in churches and mosques. Today, social media networks can complement offline communities. So, we have in mind to “project groups” on social media networks like Facebook. On the one hand Facebook has a fast growing number of users in e.g. development countries. On the other hand, however, the criticism about Facebook is increasing and other social media networks may be more appropriate.

In our advocacy work on aid transparency we have seen, that migrants from Africa, Asia and Latin America tend to have a strong distrust of the aid system and strong feelings about misuse of funds in development cooperation. Therefore we are currently exploring possibilities to cooperate with migrant communities in Germany to build online communities around individual projects or around development cooperation going to geographically limited areas.

Other possible drivers of online communities are donors themselves. The example of AKVO in the Netherlands demonstrates, that even governmental aid agencies are recognising the value of collecting public feedback on projects via the internet. We are hoping that other donors will follow the same path.

4) Choice of projects: Finally, we are convinced that not all aid projects are amenable to public online monitoring. Projects targeted at young, urban, educated people are probably more suitable then projects targeted at elderly, rural, illiterate citizens. Projects delivering direct services like health programmes or water projects will probably attract more interest then projects focused on administrative reforms in ministries or projects targeted small minorities in the population.

Until now, OpenAid has been active on the precondition of public online monitoring: access to open data on aid activities. We are just taking the first steps to make public online monitoring a reality. We hope that successes and failures of e-participation in Europe will help us make good choices in this process and hope to be able to share our experiences with member of PEPNET in the future. If you have any comments on our concept so far or if your organisation is interested in collaborating on this project, please contact me under claudia.schwegmann@openaid.de!